Shortsighted Voters Victimize the Students : Schools Decay Under Bond Issues’ Two-Thirds Rule

We’d like to point out that American employees work in an increasingly interconnected global economy. They are engaged in a fiercely competitive world marketplace that has seen companies such as IBM shed one-third of its U.S. workers in just the past three years. Just how well-prepared are we for this? Not very well at all.

In January, the Public Broadcasting System aired a four-part, two-evening series entitled “Challenge to America.” Among other things, the programs pointed out the disturbing fact that Japanese and German students were substantially better prepared than their American counterparts for the modern workplace.

It should have been required viewing in places such as Burbank and Glendale. And the related remarks of educators such as Cal State Northridge President Blenda Wilson deserved wide circulation there as well. “The support base for public education is eroding at precisely the time when a strong education system is necessary to our economic recovery in California and across the country,” Wilson has said.

Most recently, folks in Burbank and Glendale have set a woeful example in this regard. So too have residents in many other California communities. Too many of them have taken the most shortsighted and miserly approach possible. Too many of them have done nothing to inspire public school students in their cities to strive for the knowledge needed for the new global marketplace.

Times’ reporter Jill Bettner’s tour through 72-year-old Burbank High School, for example, showed dangerously dark classrooms. It was difficult to read in the dim, yellow haze of 40-year-old fluorescent lighting fixtures. Electric power failures are common there, as are clogged toilets and shower drains. When the weather is cold, students wear their coats throughout the day. Or it can be hot. “I’m confident there are days when the temperature in some of these rooms hits 115 or 120 degrees,” says David Gott, the school’s director of facilities planning. There are enough boarded windows to make the place resemble a barely occupied housing project.

It is a shameful state of affairs that is hardly conducive to serious study, and Burbank’s Burroughs High School is in similar disrepair.

The voters in this city could have changed all that if the required two-thirds majority had favored a school bond issue earlier this month. The measure would have provided funding for the replacement of one of the high schools and renovated the other. But voters failed to rise to the occasion. The issue failed in a sparsely attended, 5,766-5,061 vote--or 53% to 47%.

The margin persuaded Glendale Unified School District officials to not even try to place a similar bond issue before the voters before 1995. Well, that was awfully courageous of them. Most of Glendale’s schools were built in the 1920s, and some of their classrooms have just one electrical outlet. So much for the accouterments of cutting-edge educational technology.

We have long agreed that a two-thirds majority vote should not be required to pay for new and improved schools. We agree that the 53% vote in favor of the Burbank bond issue should have been sufficient. But two-thirds is the current requirement, and it can be reached.

Burbank school officials should seek another bond issue in November. Glendale school officials ought to find the backbone to launch an attempt, period. Along with the town meetings that have been scheduled to drum up support for such a measure in Burbank, school officials there should offer tours of their schools. It might be harder for the voters to say no once they see that conditions in these schools are comparable to those in some of the nation’s most impoverished inner cities.