School Bond Victory Offers a Lesson in Unity

In selling a new school tax to white voters in a heavily Latino district, what’s the difference between telling them that (A) classrooms are overcrowded and (B) classrooms need repair?

The difference is victory.

“Overcrowding was a message that scared them, because it told them that [Latinos] were moving in, they’re taking over,” said Larry Remer, consultant to the victorious campaign for Santa Ana Unified School District’s $145-million school bond.

“In polling, repair was a better message.”

That message registered solidly with Santa Ana’s electorate, which approved the school bond by nearly 70% on Nov. 2. The win was considered crucial for a district that is desperately overcrowded--sorry, there’s that word again.

Santa Ana’s success partly reflects a general trend among all voters to be more generous with money for schools. But in Santa Ana--where school enrollment is 91% Latino but registered voters are still predominantly white--the victory meant much more.

It meant achieving unity in a city of stark ethnic divisions. It meant reaching agreement among its perpetually split leadership. It meant finding common ground in a place delineated by demographic turf.

The message of this school vote was healing.

“I just can’t think of anything else in this city, in the 10 years I’ve worked here, where there’s been consensus from so many different people with so many different perspectives,” said Mike Vail, the school district’s point man for construction and maintenance of facilities.

Remember, Santa Ana is the city where not long ago powerful people rallied against building a new intermediate school at 17th and Bristol, sharing scarce land with an existing shopping mall. The opposition to the so-called “space-saver” school was intense and was split along racial lines.

Many white residents of the tree-lined neighborhoods north of 17th fought the new school so intensely you’d have thought it was a proposed prison. Former City Councilwoman Lisa Mills, now OCTA chief, even led a delegation to Sacramento to plead with legislators to kill the school at that location.

The opponents feared the students, obviously Latinos, would turn their mall into a hangout and vandalize their storybook homes. They also complained about the high cost, though the state kept saying Santa Ana would lose the funds if it didn’t build the special school at that site with the approved space-saver design, clever enough to avoid tearing down homes and businesses in dense urban areas.

The new Mendez Intermediate School, named after Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, pioneers of school desegregation in Orange County, is scheduled to open early next year. And the memory of that horribly divisive battle over its construction has faded.

Michele Morissey, an activist in her Floral Park neighborhood, was one of the school’s most vigorous adversaries. At the time, she was single and, like many other space-saver opponents, had no children attending schools in Santa Ana.

In this year’s school bond campaign, Morissey emerged as proponent of the push to build many more new schools in her city. She’s now married, has a 2-year-old son and plans to run for the City Council.

In talking with white residents, Morissey said she occasionally heard anti-immigrant sentiments: Why should taxpayers build new schools for Mexicans, especially if they’re here illegally?

Why? Because education is good for the whole community, she would answer. Good schools attract new businesses and a prosperous city makes for higher property values.

Morissey said the bond won support even from people who would never even consider sending their children to public schools.

“I think everybody got it,” she said.

Well, not everybody. Ron Heike, an outspoken critic of unrestricted immigration, said he voted against the recent school bond measure. Latino parents, he contends, don’t deserve new schools until they take a greater interest in the ones they already have.

“In our society today, we’ve got too much given to us,” said Heike, a fish salesman.

Heike doesn’t go so far as to say we shouldn’t educate undocumented immigrants, now that they’re here. But they don’t need new classrooms to get a better education. They need more “affirmation at home” from their parents.

Hispanic parents, Heike claims, don’t grasp the importance of requiring their children to set aside at least an hour each night for school: “Homework? They probably don’t know what that means.”

Heike admits, however, he has no evidence for that statement. He couldn’t cite a single study to back his argument or identify a single family with uninvolved parents.

“But Agustin, come on, get with it!” Heike urged. “A lot of these people are mountain people.”

During the campaign, responding to such racially loaded statements was strictly prohibited. “The opposition tried to engage us racially,” said Remer, the San Diego-based consultant. “We imposed discipline to not respond on racial issues.”

At least not publicly. In court papers, however, the school bond proponents filed suit to block the opposition’s campaign statement, considered racially inflammatory by the plaintiffs. The original, disallowed statement targeted school board member Nativo Lopez, a magnet for anti-immigrant critics since he first ran for the school board in 1996 and faced groundless accusations of voter fraud.

Bond supporters feared race-baiting tactics would rile up the anti-immigration forces that enjoyed such a big success at the polls with Proposition 187 in 1994. But they did more than defuse racially charged attacks.

To avoid giving the other side a target, they kept all Latinos under wraps. Campaign managers did not want any Latino leaders to sign the ballot argument in favor of the bond; only white supporters signed it instead. And Latino leaders, such as school board President John Palacio, were discouraged from speaking publicly for the campaign.

“I got mad at John for talking to the press,” said Remer. “Nativo didn’t. He knew better.”

Remer says he also prevented Palacio, a former Latino activist, from putting his name on the ballot.

At first, Palacio acknowledged, he believed he should “be out front” on the issue.

“No, no,” Remer says he told the board president. “We need to win this thing.”

The campaign did not need to appeal to Palacio’s constituency, Latinos likely to be favorable to the cause already. “Latino [voters] were in the bag,” said Remer. “The job of the campaign was to win white votes.”

This unusual stealth strategy also called for keeping the pro-bond message out of the mass media in general. Proponents kept a deliberately low profile during the campaign, and were always reminding each other not to talk about the bond measure in front of reporters.

In the end, fewer than 12,000 voters decided this issue for more than 300,000 residents. About two-thirds of the ballots cast were mailed in absentee, a very high percentage.

That was part of the proponents’ plan: targeting the most likely supporters and making it easy for them to vote by putting ballots in their hands at home.

Santa Ana leaders are still talking about the campaign’s remarkable coalition of business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and old leftists, advocates for immigrant rights and advocates for immigration control.

“They all came to the same conclusion,” said Palacio. “It was much more important to invest in our children than to allow ourselves to remain divided politically.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.