Educators Are Heartened by Decisive Prop. 203 Win

Educators on Wednesday interpreted the surprisingly decisive victory of Proposition 203, the $3-billion school and college construction bond, as heartening evidence of taxpayers’ willingness to invest in public education.

Similarly, observers said the passage of that measure, the largest bond issue in state history, and Proposition 192, which authorized $2 billion for strengthening bridges and overpasses, reflected voters’ increased confidence in the state’s economy.

Proposition 203 passed by a margin of 62% to 38%, finding favor in conservative counties such as Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange as well as large urban counties such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Alameda. Proposition 192 won by a margin of 60% to 40%.

The Proposition 203 victory was hailed by school officials, many of whom were relying on the bond money to help fund projects to alleviate overcrowding.

“It’s very exciting to us,” said Audrey Yamagata-Noji, a trustee for the Santa Ana Unified School District, which will receive $41.2 million. “It doesn’t meet all of our needs, but it will allow us to build the innovative Space Saver Intermediate School [and] an elementary school and allow us to complete significant modernization at other school sites.

“If it hadn’t passed, we would be in dire straits.”

Santa Ana’s 1,300-student Space Saver campus will be the first public school in California to open in a shopping mall. The three-floor project, scheduled for construction at the back of Bristol Marketplace, was designed to help alleviate overcrowding in the district and serve as a model for other urban school systems needing to build facilities in limited space.

Santa Ana also plans to build a new 850-pupil elementary school at Alton Avenue and Greenville Street and expand Muir Fundamental Elementary School by replacing portable classrooms with permanent buildings.

Mike Vail, the district’s facilities manager, said that the district has grown by about 1,300 students per year since 1979.

Like Santa Ana, the Capistrano Unified School District had been depending on the passage of Proposition 203 to keep up with its rapid growth.

The 35,000-student Capistrano school district is expecting $18 million from the state to pay part of the cost of two new elementary schools and a middle school. It also will use part of the money to pay for a new school that will be built in 1999 or 2000, school officials said.

Although the district must wait until it gets formal word that the money is on its way, officials Wednesday began preparing.

“We are starting with the early stages of planning, and we expect to go to the board for approval the very minute we get word from the state that the money is in the coffers,” said Supt. James A. Fleming, who chaired a statewide pro-bond committee called Californians for Schools.

Bond issues involving education, particularly kindergarten through 12th-grade schools, performed well throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. A $900-million bond for public schools lost by only 35,000 votes in 1994, when the state was facing a huge budget deficit.

“This is another indication that the economy is doing better, because people are more comfortable with their ability to pay taxes and feel things are coming back,” said Joel Fox, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll showed that the percentage of voters saying they were concerned about taxes was little changed since statewide elections in 1992 and 1994.

About $2 billion of the bond issue will go to elementary and secondary schools. The State Allocation Board, an obscure but powerful panel that distributes all state funds for public school construction, has given the go-ahead to $1.2 billion worth of projects. But the approved list could change when the board makes final funding decisions in May or June.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has $5 million in approved projects but is hoping to persuade the allocation board to free $250 million of the bond money that has not been spoken for.

Audrey Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Office of Public School Construction, said the final decisions about which projects receive funds are up to the board. The Los Angeles district “is taking a real optimistic approach, and everything they are saying is possible, but I can’t say it will definitely happen,” she said.

State Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael), who sits on the allocation board and who sponsored the legislation that led to putting the bond to a vote, said projects could get going by the middle of summer. He said the outcome of the bond measure demonstrated that voters had faced a simple fact: “We have 140,000 new students every year and we have to house them,” he said.

But even the $2 billion for primary and secondary schools approved Tuesday will not match the demand. School districts already have submitted requests for $7 billion more in construction funds, and Greene said he may consider trying to put a new bond measure on November’s ballot.

“It would take spending $2.25 billion every year just to stand still,” he said.

Still, educators said they were overjoyed and eager to get busy building classrooms, replacing roofs, remodeling laboratories and installing computer networks and air conditioning systems.

“It’s the best of the best of days,” said Riverside schools Supt. Anthony Lardieri, whose district will receive $78 million, the most in the state, for 31 renovation and construction projects. “That money will touch almost every kid in this district.”

About $1 billion of the bond proceeds will go to higher education, to be split equally among community colleges, California State University and the University of California.

“We’re just absolutely delighted that the voters passed it and by such an overwhelming margin,” said Colleen Bentley-Adler, a spokeswoman for Cal State. “This is a real indication that the voters think that something can be done about improving schools.”

UCLA will use the lion’s share of its bond money this year for a $15-million project to make Haines Hall, a vintage brick classroom building, seismically safe. UC Irvine stands to receive $50 million for classrooms and laboratories.

Stu Mollrich, a Newport Beach political consultant who has worked for antitax causes, cautioned the Legislature against interpreting passage of the two bond measures on this ballot as a signal that voters are in the mood to spend willy-nilly.

“If the Legislature takes this as a sign that the floodgates are open and puts 20 bond measures on the November ballot, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of them lose,” he said. “People are still . . . reluctant to give money to the government, and when they do, they want it to be for a very well-defined purpose that they agree with.”

Research conducted by the pro-bond campaign before the election found that public schools enjoyed broad support among voters. But the electorate was cynical about whether a bond measure would actually be used to build schools or would be eaten up by administrative costs.

To counter that opposition, the campaign spent $900,000 on television ads that included little else but specific figures for how much money the schools and colleges in a particular county would get, how many students would benefit and how many classrooms would be built. Those ads were run mainly on cable television systems serving areas where statewide school bonds in 1992 and 1994 had either drawn weak support or been defeated.

This time around those counties backed the bonds.

“We worked very hard getting the message out,” said Orange County schools Supt. John Dean. “Every district is jammed, and people have come to realize that we can’t keep stuffing students into classrooms. We’ve reached the point that it literally cannot happen anymore.”

Times staff writers John Chandler, Cathleen Decker and Diane Seo contributed to this story.