News-Ledger Editorial
It wasn't enough to soft-pedal K-8
Nov. 14, 2007
Copright News-Ledger 2007
West Sacramento voters last week [on Nov. 5, 2007] had their say on “Measure S,” a $59 million bond measure to upgrade school facilities and pay for the expansion of local elementary schools to include middle school grades. There wasn’t much else on the ballot for voters in this area.
The only comparable ballot measures in Yolo County were in Davis. One of those measures was a proposal to extend and increase a parcel tax for schools, costing $200 per parcel over the next four years. Interestingly, the parcel tax was not meant to fund facilities – like “Measure S” was – but was earmarked to pay for educational programs. Money from the tax will go to reading and math programs, class size reduction (extra teachers) and the like. That ballot measure needed a two-thirds vote. It passed, with 73 percent approval.
The other Davis measure asked voters to increase another parcel tax – this one for libraries. The measure proposed raising parcel taxes from $42 per year to $88 per year to pay for more library services. This measure, too, required a two-thirds vote. It passed, with 73 percent approval.
Here in West Sacramento, the school bond measure asked voters to pay about $33 per year for every hundred thousand dollars of assessed property value. The owner of a home assessed at $300,000, for example, would be taxed at about $100 per year. The measure only needed 55 percent approval. Supporters backed it with a campaign funded by more than $100,000. Opponents spent little. But the measure only attracted a little more than 50 percent voter approval.
You can call that a “spanking.”
There should be and will be a lot of discussion about why Measure S failed. But for the moment, consider one thing:
A main reason Measure S was created was to pay for the conversion of local elementary schools from “kindergarten through sixth grade” to “kindergarten through eighth grade,” or “K-8,” schools. But if you look at both the campaign material you received from “Yes on Measure S” and the supporting material you got from the school district, you will be hard-pressed to figure that out.
The “K-8” issue is played down. A glossy brochure from the campaign sidesteps the issue of expanding the elementary school campuses and focuses on eliminating the middle school, promising the ballot measure would “(allow kids) to attend smaller schools that are closer to their homes.”
A quasi-campaign piece from the district, dressed as an application to join the new bond’s oversight committee, likewise doesn’t mention K-8 schools. That brochure only mentions the proposed “conversion of schools to safe, neighborhood schools that have enhanced technology and classroom space to provide a powerful learning environment where students, parents and teachers will develop longer-term positive relationships.”
Why be so coy about K-8s?
The reason is that Washington Unified School District and the pro-bond campaign learned early on – through market research – that local voters wouldn’t approve a school bond to pay for a large K-8 conversion plan. So they soft-pedaled the idea in their campaign material.
The K-8 question is a very important consideration as WUSD regroups and tries to come up with a new problem. West Sacramento is traditionally reluctant to approve a school bond; local voters said “no” to two different bonds to build a new high school before they finally approved one for a smaller amount of cash. On top of that, local voters evidently don’t want to pay extra taxes to change elementary schools district-wide from K-6 to K-8 campuses. That’s something they told market researchers many weeks ago – before driving the point home even more firmly last Tuesday.