Voters Threaten District Closures : Schools Suffer as Slump Stirs Oregon Tax Revolt

Three times this year, the Sandy School Board asked its residents for the money needed to run the town’s four schools through the end of the year. Three times, the voters--loggers, merchants, mountain dwellers and young Portland executives who live in the Cascade backcountry--said no.

Then the school board got down to business. It trimmed $114,000 from the budget, cutting back on athletics and eliminating most instructional equipment. It told the voters that if the $2.2-million property tax--a $14 increase for the average homeowner--wasn’t approved in the Nov. 4 election, the schools would have to close.

The levy failed by 35 votes. The schools closed three days later, and Sandy became a community engaged, in the words of its district superintendent, in “open warfare” with its schools.

Sandy is not alone. Stung by a recession that left the state’s timber and fishing industries in disarray long after the rest of the nation was recovering, Oregon voters have launched a California-style tax revolt in which the schools have become the only available hostages.

Crucial Tax Votes

The two school districts in nearby Gresham will close next month if similar tax votes fail on Tuesday , the same day on which Sandy will try for the fourth time to get voters to approve higher taxes. In Port Orford on the south coast, schools were closed for nine days this fall, and another eight districts with a total of 28,200 students could be closed before spring.

“It’s a travesty,” said Verne Duncan, Oregon’s superintendent of schools. But after almost a decade of dealing with schools in financial chaos, Duncan says he has run out of “salable” ideas.

Under a system established in 1916, school districts that have not received voter authority for permanent property tax bases must go to the polls each year--several times in many cases--for approval of annual levies.

Because property taxes are the source of well over half of most school districts’ revenues, the voters in many communities each year have virtual veto power over the operation of the schools.

“In the past, you’d go to the public and tell them how much you needed. You’d put it on the ballot, and people voted for it. People didn’t vote against schools. You could always say, if you don’t vote for the levy, we’re going to close the schools, and who could imagine that?” Duncan said, referring to the years before recession pushed the unemployment rate in Oregon to its current 12.5%.

Low-Income Taxpayers

Now, tough economic times have made the annual property tax bill--taxes average $811 a year on a $60,000 home for the support of schools alone--an unwelcome fall visitor. Most unhappy are the estimated three-fourths of the voters who no longer have children in school, and parents who are disgruntled about the performance of their schools.

“You’re mad at the teacher, you vote no on the levy. You drive by and see kids smoking out front, you vote no,” Duncan said.

The state Legislature has tried to help, by floating various proposals over the years that would have guaranteed all school districts annual tax levies or set up a program of much heavier financial support from the state. All of them died at the polls. The most recent proposal of a 5% sales tax that would have provided both property tax relief and money for schools was killed in September with a 78% no vote.

The Legislature has “thrown up its hands,” House Speaker Vera Katz told an association of school administrators recently. School districts, she said, will simply have to help themselves.

In Sandy, a community of 3,900 several miles east of Portland, things began to turn sour several years ago, when four of the town’s six lumber mills shut down. Family farms disappeared. Most employees of Sandy’s restaurants and grocery stores took pay cuts, said Mayor Dean Wesselink.

Resent Teachers’ Raise

Many residents, he said, eyed the 3.5% cost-of-living raise Sandy teachers got this year with more than a little resentment.

“The teachers go to school at 8; the kids get out at 2:30--that’s not a day’s work,” said Wesselink, who said he voted for the school levy “reluctantly.”

Many voters rejected the tax because they simply couldn’t afford it, Wesselink said. “If you have to decide between going to school and having two or three meals a day, which way would you go? That’s really what it comes down to for a lot of these people.”

“Look at it this way,” the mayor said. “If you owned a $60,000 house that was in a fire district and you were taxed to the point where you couldn’t afford any more, and the fire district comes to you and says, ‘we need to buy a new engine or your house is going to burn down’ if the tax burden is going to be such that you’re going to have to give up the house, you don’t really care if it burns down.”

Many Sandy parents say the annual tax vote is their only way of exercising control over the schools.

“When parents object to what is going on in the classroom, the only way they can say anything is by voting the levy down,” said Marianne Taylor, who is tutoring her eighth-grade daughter at home while the schools are closed.

Complaints About Schools

Taylor and other parents say that school administrators have refused to listen when they complain that their children are being taught about drugs, sex and “values clarification,” areas they consider the parents’ responsibility. For example, Taylor said, her daughter wrote an entry in her journal for English class about an unresolved conflict with her mother.

“The teacher wrote, ‘Good for you, Kim. Do your own thing!’ I was ready to go down and take the school apart, except it was closed,” Taylor said.

“It’s like there’s a secret organization going on, and you go and talk to them and they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about,” said businessman John King of his conversations with school administrators. “Even more, like you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Some parents complained that teachers were lobbying for the tax issue during school hours and making students feel that their parents were “stupid” if they voted against the levy.

“The kids are going to ask questions about what’s going on, and a good teacher will have to answer their questions,” said Miriam Mann, president of the 88-member Sandy Elementary Teachers Assn.

Disturbing to Children

“I saw a lot of upset kids,” Mann added. “At first, a lot of kids, being kids, said, ‘Oh, a neat vacation!’ But the younger kids, especially, were real upset. There were some very emotional kids that last day of school--you know, crying. I’d be upset, too. It’s hard to comprehend it as an adult. How do you expect children to understand?”

In Albany, midway between Eugene and Salem, 100 high school students rallied last weekend to protest the potential closing of their schools if a tax request on Tuesday--the fourth try this year--fails and 7,600 students go home early for Christmas.

“I kind of take it personally,” said rally squad member Cindy Blain, a junior at West Albany High School. “Just talking to people, I hear them say how we’re wasting all their money. I get upset and I try to tell them that’s not true.”

Perhaps harder to gauge is the impact of a school closure on a community. Officials of the northern coastal community of Newport in Lincoln County say they’ve had trouble attracting new business since the schools were closed for nine days in 1983.

Sandy is only beginning to feel the loss of the school district’s $250,000-a-month payroll. If the emergency vote Tuesday fails to reopen the schools, town leaders expect to see economic uncertainty and depressed property values, which already have fallen 10% from last year.

Lack of Direction

“It’s a real bad situation,” said Mayor Wesselink. “I think people are going to be hesitant until we get established in a direction. Right now, we’re not going in any direction. We’re confused.”

Some families are talking about moving. LaLonnie O’Meara says she will have to send her 9-year-old son to live with her husband’s parents 100 miles away if the levy fails. “I can’t give him what he needs here at home,” O’Meara said, adding that the only neighboring school district that would accept him would charge $22 a day tuition.

James and Marla Zupancic recently moved to Sandy from Sacramento, in part because of what they saw as a better atmosphere for raising children. They say they have talked about leaving if the levy fails.

But Zupancic, who was general counsel to the California Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee, said they would rather fight to protect the schools. One of Sandy’s main attractions was its school system, with its strong elementary music and arts programs, hot lunches and computer learning aids, he said.

“What has come to an apex now in Oregon is people’s opportunity to voice frustration, and the end result is that the schools take it on the chin,” Zupancic said. “But they’re destroying the thing they say they not only want to uphold, but to make better. To me, there’s a great deal of inconsistency in that logic.”

Schools’ Good Reputation

Clark Lund, superintendent of the Sandy Elementary District, said Sandy’s schools have long had a reputation in Oregon as a leader in developing new curricula. Their extra-curricular activities have been wide-ranging and creative and class sizes have been kept small. Yet the district is spending an average of only $3,019 on each of its 1,400 pupils, several hundred dollars less than schools elsewhere in Oregon and the rest of the nation.

Thus, the school board voted not to make any further reductions when it called for the emergency election Tuesday, he said. The tax request submitted to the voters then will be precisely the one they rejected in November. They can approve it and reopen the schools the next day, or reject it and risk keeping them closed for the rest of the year.

“When they closed the schools, our board, essentially, declared themselves at an impasse with the community,” he said.

Wesselink said the board may be out of tune with what the community really wants, however.

“We’re going to have to take a look at excellent teaching, what is acceptable teaching, and what we can afford, and balance the three,” he said.

“We cannot afford what they perceive as excellence. We have to accept what we can afford.”