Voting Today Decides Fate of School Bond

Voters in one of the county’s largest and most crowded elementary school districts are being asked in a special election today to approve a $48-million bond issue to finance school construction and repairs.

If Measure Y passes, the proposal--authored by Anaheim City School District parents--would be the first school bond measure to be approved in fiscally conservative Orange County in eight years.

While the grass-roots campaign to pass the bond measure has drawn hundreds of volunteers, the proposal is opposed by local Republican leaders wary of tax increases, and it has failed to garner support among Anaheim’s business and political leaders. Such measures have seldom been successful without heavy lobbying and widespread support.

The measure, dubbed “Yes for the Children” by the hundreds of parents who have been stuffing envelopes and staffing phone banks to drum up support, would raise taxes in the strapped school district by $22 a year for each $100,000 of assessed property valuation. A two-thirds majority is required for passage.

The bonds would finance construction of three new schools and repairs to plumbing, electrical and emergency communication systems at the 22 schools in the 20,000-student district. The facilities are more than 30 years old. Enrollment in the district has grown by more than 1,000 students a year for the last decade, a 6% annual rate that is more than double the state average.

“What is at stake, really, is a good-quality education for the children of Anaheim,” said Jacinth Cisneros, a parent leading the campaign for the bond measure.

“The fact is, if we’re not able to build new schools for our children, then we’re looking at cramming them into facilities that are not adequate to hold them.”

Opponents of the measure are wary of new taxes and say they are suspicious of how school district bureaucracies spend their money. Many oppose the district’s policy of offering bilingual education to the 61% of its students who speak little or no English.

“I’m for appropriate tax increases, and if I believed that the dollars being put into the district would result in better education for the children, then I probably wouldn’t be fighting this as hard as I am,” said Harald G. Martin, president of the Anaheim Union High School District board and a former trustee of the elementary district.

“But if we’re gonna put money into something, I want to see a return, and in this case it’s a better education. Quite frankly, with what [district officials are] doing, we’re not getting our money’s worth as taxpayers. And I don’t want to see more money being poured down basically the same rat hole.”

Martin and about a dozen other opponents of the bond measure have been walking door to door, handing out a flier that urges voters: “Don’t spend money to prop up failure.”

With substandard school facilities a pressing issue both statewide and across the nation, bond measures have increasingly been seen by hard-pressed districts as a possible solution.

Officials of the state Department of Education say there is a $6-billion backlog in requests for school construction money in California, and President Clinton is pushing federal legislation to spend $5 billion over the next five years to help states and cities nationwide rebuild schools.

Seven districts in Los Angeles County also have school bond measures on the ballot today, asking for almost $400 million in bonds to modernize and expand cramped, aging campuses, or to build new schools.

Last June, voters approved five of eight local bond measures on ballots in Los Angeles County. The three that failed each garnered more than simple majorities but could not muster the required two-thirds majority.

But in Orange County, opposition to new taxes has sunk every school bond measure in recent years. The last time school bond proponents won such a campaign in the county was in Los Alamitos in 1990.

The Anaheim Chamber of Commerce and the City Council have refused to support the measure. So has Disneyland, which sits in the middle of a district that stretches from the Santa Ana to the Orange freeways.

Hundreds of the amusement park’s employees, many immigrants in low-level service jobs, have children in the district. But Disneyland, the largest property owner in the district, with holdings valued at more than $150 million, would shoulder much of the property tax burden if the measure passes.

Other Anaheim businesses would be similarly affected and have taken the position that the district’s problems are best solved by someone else.

Cisneros and the roughly 400 other volunteers working to get the measure passed say the district has nowhere else to turn to for funds.

Every one of the district’s schools runs on a year-round schedule, and most campuses already are crowded with portable classrooms. Starting July 1, students at 19 schools will split times in the same classrooms, with some attending in the morning and the rest in the afternoon.

“We are at a very critical crisis stage, definitely.” Cisneros said.

Polls are open today from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Only the 50,131 registered voters who live in the school district are eligible to vote.