Local Elections : Low-Key Campaign Woos School Bond Votes

Vista Unified School District, the second-fastest-growing school district in the state, can expect 2,000 new students every year for at least the next six years.

So district leaders have hired some professionals--Price Research Consultants--to do what the locals could not manage to do a year ago: pass a bond issue that will enable the district to build new schools and repair old ones.

And the experts have embarked on a decidedly understated campaign.

No Day-Glo signs urging YES for KIDS. No full-page ads in the local newspaper carrying the endorsements of the city’s elite for Proposition C. The game plan is to alert the affirmative voters without arousing the negative crowd.

Last November, a presidential election year, about 75% of Vista’s registered voters voted. Among other things, they turned down a $63-million school bond issue after a hard-sell campaign.

So this year school officials have taken a less direct path to their goal by recruiting schoolchildren in a voter registration drive of their parents in hopes of coaxing the “yes” votes past the 66.6% margin necessary for victory.

In coming days, local volunteers will begin telephone marathons aimed at both reminding known supporters and at rounding up the strays. Selective mailings to parents and other potential school bond supporters are scheduled as the days dwindle down to the Nov. 7 election.

“We are within striking distance of victory,” Kent Price, head of the consultant firm, asserted Monday.

Price based his prediction on the quiet strengthening of pro-school voter rolls and a recent telephone survey taken by the firm that showed only a percentage point or two separating the district from its needed two-thirds majority.

In the next two weeks, Price said, telephone, mail and door-to-door persuasion will be used in an attempt to swing the vote to the win column.

There are no vocal opponents to the bond issue, but there are many who question why residents who have paid school taxes over the years must subsidize the newcomers’ schools.

Vista Mayor Gloria McClellan can answer that question without pausing for thought.

“Vista’s schools, like its streets and roads, are old and inadequate” she explained. “Despite what many people think, we can’t charge developers anything we want in school fees. There is a limit, and that limit just about pays for providing portables for the new students.”

With the average Vista school more than 30 years old, and, until recent months, no new schools built in 15 years, the district faces the major cost of bringing the old buildings up to standard and building new ones, she said.

The bond issue will cost the owner of a home assessed at $100,000 an average of $45.83 in yearly property taxes over the 20-year life of the bond issue, Manual Robles, communications coordinator for the school district, said.

The first year’s taxes on that $100,000 home would amount to about $110 for the bonds, but would go down each year to a low of $12.72 on the 20th year of the issue, Robles explained. School officials say they will use $27.6 million of the bond issue to build six schools, probably elementary schools, to accommodate the expected flood of youngsters from the new subdivisions in eastern Oceanside, which lie within the Vista Unified School District boundaries.

Another $9.5 million is earmarked for renovation of existing schools, including the 51-year-old Lincoln Middle School, which is limping along with an ancient boiler, flaking walls and leaky roof. A $1.5 million portion is set aside for classroom safety improvements, including rewiring, and $280,000 for library upgrading.

The funds won’t last as long as the bond payments, Robles acknowledges. With luck, he said, they will meet the district’s most pressing needs for five to eight years.