A Plan to Ease Passage of School Bonds

Junior high physical education teacher Gwen Pryor calls her program “virtual P.E.” because she runs it without a gym, lockers or showers, without an office, phone or even a mailbox.

Roving special education teacher Jim Crandall does speech therapy in a van. Elementary school principal Carl Sousa seats the first lunch group near the cafeteria exit, the better to make way for three more lunch shifts.

All are coping with a space squeeze in the Santa Maria-Bonita School District north of Santa Barbara, which they hope can be fixed with Proposition 26 on the March 7 ballot. The initiative would reduce the vote needed for a local school bond from a two-thirds majority to 50% plus one.

In Santa Maria, which has 11,100 students, and other districts that have a tough time clearing the higher bar, the proposed change could make all the difference.

Four times in the last seven years, the school board here has gone to voters for relief in the form of a $30-million school bond to deal with a student body that has grown by a third in the last decade, and nearly half of whose classrooms are temporary additions.

Each time, the voters said no.

“The hard part,” said school board President Mary Jane Diaz, “is knowing that you’re going to have to go back and house those children.”

In Santa Maria, as in many of the areas where bond passage has proved toughest, there is a wide demographic gap between schoolchildren’s parents--many of whom are poor and Latino and don’t vote--and voters, who tend to be white, middle-class and often empty-nesters.

Yet all but one of Santa Maria’s four failed bond campaigns would have passed if they needed only a simple majority.

Some Districts Lose Votes Repeatedly

Critics of Proposition 26 argue that most California school districts that try, try again ultimately succeed. But that means little in Santa Maria and the 51 other places that have lost and lost again.

The initiative’s sponsors are the California Teachers Assn., joined by wealthy charter school proponent Reed Hastings. They say the lower requirement would allow districts like Santa Maria to focus on their real job: educating children.

Fighting the measure are members of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., who consider it an erosion of the protections of Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax freeze initiative. (An unrelated Proposition 13 covering water bonds will appear on the March 7 ballot.)

The two-thirds vote requirement was set more than a century ago, long before Proposition 13. But Proposition 13 drastically reduced property taxes as a ready source of school funding and bond repayment. In 1986, the state passed a law allowing school districts to raise taxes to pay off bonds, which overnight made bonds the target of Proposition 13 crusaders.

A similar initiative to ease bond passage, Proposition 170, was defeated by voters in 1993, and two recent statewide polls found that taxation fears still resonate with voters. Their support for Proposition 26 flagged once they learned that local bonds must be paid off with local property taxes.

The California Field Poll saw support drop from 59% in October to 43% in December. The Public Policy Institute of California reported a decline to 44% in mid-January, down 20 points from a month earlier.

Much of the campaign has been mired in bickering over accuracy. The taxpayers association says proponents are trying to fool voters by creating a committee called the Taxpayers Alliance. The teachers union says the taxpayers association’s claim that property taxes could double is dramatically inflated.

Since 1986, 57 districts have passed $16.6 billion in bonds, according to statistics supplied by the education data firm EdSource. For a few, including San Francisco and Tahoe, going to the ballot has been as sure as going to the bank.

The rate of passage dipped during the economic recession, from 1990 to 1995, then began to rise. Last year, about a third of bond attempts failed, bolstering Proposition 26 opponents’ stance that it is unnecessary.

Though failures have touched districts of all types, urban systems tend to do better than rural ones. A study by the nonpartisan California Budget Project found the poorer a school district, the less likely that its voters will pass a bond.

In rural Santa Maria, for instance--a district that operates on a $63-million general fund--nine in 10 students qualify for subsidized lunches. They are mostly the children of field workers, whose population in Santa Barbara County has kept pace with the spread of labor-intensive crops such as wine grapes. Many of the parents are not U.S. citizens and are not eligible to vote.

Zaida Rodriguez is among them. Her husband drives an agricultural truck during the day and she works in a strawberry freezing plant at night. Rodriguez is a legal resident, but her English is not good enough for her to become a citizen.

Her daughter is in second grade and already complains of crowded playgrounds and being rushed through lunch. Rodriguez campaigned hard for the bond, then could not vote for it.

“It was very frustrating,” she said.

Only a third of Santa Maria’s population is registered to vote, and those people tend to be white, middle-class, conservative and older.

An additional hurdle for the district has been the fancy new school administration building, irreverently dubbed “Tissier’s Towers” for the former superintendent who approved it.

“It was needed, but unfortunately there was also at that time a need for additional schools,” said Joe Olivera, president of the Santa Barbara Taxpayers’ Assn. and a longtime Santa Maria resident. “It just didn’t set well.”

Such symbols of excess or poor judgment exist in every district around the state. Proposition 26 supporters have tried to ward off the impact of such poor spending decisions with a requirement that local bond campaigns itemize planned projects and do two annual audits.

The initiative has nonetheless met heavy resistance in Los Angeles County, where only 39% favored it in a Public Policy Institute survey. Poll director Mark Baldassare suspects that even in liberal-leaning Los Angeles, voters remain angry about the $200-million Belmont Learning Complex, the doomed downtown high school built on a contaminated site, although that was not paid for with bond money.

“People are looking for information that would help them be comfortable with loosening the strings and that situation doesn’t help them,” Baldassare said.

State Matching Funds at Stake

Pressure on California’s school districts to raise money increased after voters passed Proposition 1A in 1998. That $9.2-billion initiative provided $6.7 billion in state school bonds, but to qualify for a share districts had to match the funds.

For those that have tried for bonds and lost, the state bond offers $1 billion in hardship funds, of which about a third has been awarded.

Santa Maria is among those still waiting to hear how much hardship help it will get. But even if the district gets its full allotment, that would take care of last year’s needs, not the 484 additional students who showed up this year or the 500 more expected next fall.

“If we continue to grow by 500 more kids a year, we’d need to build a new school every 18 months,” said Cynthia L. Clark, the district’s assistant superintendent for business services. Clark paused, her eyes widening. “That’s a scary thought,” she said.

Last year, in Santa Maria’s latest effort to pass a bond, the vote was frustratingly close.

Volunteers from each school canvassed their own neighborhoods. There were precinct walks most weekends and neon-pink fliers to hand out at public events.

“If we’re asking people for money, we have to ask them face to face,” said campaign chairman David Riloquio, a Santa Maria native and father of two elementary school children.

Then it was June 8, and the votes came rolling in. Riloquio was at the county registrar’s office, watching the tally. Shortly before 9 p.m., he relayed the final word via cell phone to campaign headquarters: The bond had gained 64.3% of the vote, 151 votes short of passing.

“Just 100 more homes!” he laments today.

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School Bond Success

Here are success rates for school issues in California from 1986-99

Students in district

Type of district

*Source: EdSource, January 2000