Polls Indicate Support for School Bonds

Parents are so anxious to get their children into Santa Ana’s MacArthur Fundamental Intermediate School that earlier this year they began lining up five days in advance.

But with 1,200 students--nearly twice as many as the school was built for--Principal Jane Russo had to tell 175 parents that their children would be added to the school’s already-lengthy waiting list.

The annual queuing ritual at MacArthur would be eliminated, however, if voters pass Proposition 203, the state’s $3-billion education bond issue, when they go to the polls March 26.

Santa Ana would get about $40 million of the bond proceeds, the largest share of any Orange County school district, and would use it for projects that include building a new campus that embraces the same kind of academically challenging curriculum offered at MacArthur.

Statewide, bond supporters say, two-thirds of the money would go toward building and modernizing 17,500 classrooms to accommodate the 140,000 new students entering California public schools each year. The rest would go to the state’s three college systems and would pay for repairing and building classrooms, upgrading wiring to improve telecommunications, seismic strengthening and other construction projects.

A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted March 13 through 17 found 54% of voters favored the bond measure and 35% opposed, with the rest saying they did not know enough about it. But nearly seven in 10 of those polled were unaware of the proposition and survey takers had to tell them its purpose before they could decide.

That confirms the perception of bond backers that the vote on the bond issue will be tight. And Julie Horan White, a Sacramento political consultant who is managing the pro-Proposition 203 campaign, said she is urging supporters to work for every vote.

“If we lose any supporters, that could be detrimental to us, so we want to make sure everybody knows we need the votes,” Horan White said.

Proponents are concerned that an aggressive advertising campaign against three unrelated ballot propositions aimed at limiting lawsuits will confuse voters and could hurt the school bond measure. Those ads urge rejection of the “terrible 200s,” and some fear voters will mistakenly think Proposition 203 is part of that group.

“We desperately need that bond, but it’s always so difficult to have a campaign in favor of something,” said Maureen DiMarco, state Secretary of Child Development and Education. “Once people start voting ‘no’ on a ballot, they tend to just keep on voting ‘no.’ ”

Supporters, which include business, labor, teacher and farm groups as well as the public schools and colleges, had to overcome partisan politics just to get the measure on the ballot. It won legislative support at the last minute, relegating it to the bottom of the ballot. Arguments for and against it had to be published in a supplemental voters pamphlet.

The only organized opposition to Proposition 203 has come from the Libertarian Party, which argues that crowded schools could simply lease empty office space to conduct classes. And, detractors say, college and university students should be charged higher fees to pay for upgrading or adding facilities.

They also charge that the state’s economy is too weak to support the additional indebtedness. With interest, the bonds would cost about $5.1 billion over the next 25 years to repay.

In February, a major bond-rating service, Fitch Investors Service, raised its rating for California bonds from A to A-plus in light of the continuing economic recovery. That means the bonds can be sold at a lower rate and will cost taxpayers less in interest.

Pro-Proposition 203 forces say their research shows that voters are less worried about whether the state can afford to repay the bonds than they are about how their local areas would benefit. That is why the $1.3-million pro-bonds campaign is running 13 different television commercials, targeted by county.

Ads running in Los Angeles, for example, tout the $386 million the schools and colleges in the county would receive and say 1.2 million students would benefit.

Orange County would receive $100 million, San Diego County $215 million, Ventura $14 million and Riverside $251 million.

The Riverside Unified School District is guaranteed one of the largest shares of any school district in the state, nearly $80 million. The money would be spent to build a new high school and modernize 23 elementary schools.

Long Beach would get at least $16.5 million, the most of any school district in Los Angeles County. About $9 million of that would be spent on a new roof, heating, plumbing, wiring and lighting improvements at Wilson High School, which is 70 years old.

Even though the Los Angeles Unified School District is by far the state’s largest, enrolling one in every eight students, it is slated to receive only $10 million worth of bond money because it has only a few state-approved projects.

The amount is comparatively low because Los Angeles has not heavily invested in school construction plans, which would have put it in line for more money. Los Angeles officials decided not to gamble on money from the state after voters in 1994 refused to pass the last school construction bond.

Los Angeles officials said that if the bond measure passes they will ask the state for $70 million for modernization projects, $100 million for land purchases and $75 million for the Belmont Learning Complex construction project.

But it would take a total of $3 billion, officials said, to upgrade its schools for classroom computers and carry out all the needed modernization, repair and expansion projects.

“We’re in support of 203 because whatever we get will be helpful,” said Bill Rivera, a spokesman for the district.

UCLA would get about $40 million from the bond to pay for 10 seismic-strengthening projects, including a major renovation of Haines Hall, a brick classroom building from the 1920s that is one of the oldest on campus.

Two of the largest construction projects in the California State University system are a $28-million addition to the science building at Cal Poly Pomona and a $25-million renovation of the engineering and technology building at Cal State Los Angeles.

The roof on Cal State L.A.’s 30-year-old engineering building leaks so badly that computers in some of its classrooms have to be covered with plastic and cannot be used when it rains. The state already has invested $2 million planning the renovation but the project stalled when voters rejected the last higher-education bond in 1994.

“This thing is piling up,” said Raymond Landis, the dean of the school of engineering and technology at Cal State L.A., of the facility problems on campus. “If we don’t get this [bond passed], I don’t know what in the world is going to come down the road.”