Return to the September 1996 Table of ContentsBy Kevin Bushweller
Kevin Bushweller is associate editor of Electronic School.
In Austin, Texas, voters pass a $369 million school bond--the largest in district history--and a sizable chunk of it is earmarked for technology improvements. After five consecutive education bond losses at the polls, Monroe County (Wash.) school activists engineer a sophisticated bond campaign that yields $500,000 for technology upgrades. In Cobb County, Ga., school supporters counter aggressive opposition to pass a bond issue that includes $32 million for new technology.
Even in California, where passing a bond referendum requires a super-majority of two-thirds of the voters, districts are passing bonds, and many of the successful measures include millions of dollars in technology upgrades. The lesson: Even in the face of seemingly insurmountable electoral odds, voters can be persuaded to support school technology.
That's not to say that winning bond elections is getting any easier. In many places, in fact, anti-tax activists and cash-strapped voters have crushed school bond efforts and discouraged other districts from even putting bond issues on the ballot. Even so, it is possible to pass bonds to help upgrade your district's technology. So if you're considering this technology funding option, take a lesson from districts that have succeeded.
To begin with, consultants and school activists generally say money for technology should be included as part of a larger bond package. In more traditional communities, where many people appear to doubt the effectiveness of technology, asking voters to approve a technology-only bond is a recipe for failure, consultants say. But technology can be used as a sales feature in a progressive, pro-technology community. Including technology funding as part of a larger package helps bring other much-needed improvements to schools, such as additional classrooms or new sports facilities.
With that in mind, Austin school officials broke this year's historic bond issue into three separate proposals: Proposition 1 provided $121 million for renovation of existing schools, proposition 2 asked for $177 million for new schools and additions to current schools, and proposition 3 provided $72 million for security and technology upgrades. (About $26 million was for technology.) Voters cast ballots for or against each of the separate proposals. All three were passed by voters.
"We have the advantage of having one of the most [technologically] networked communities in the state," says Elizabeth Christian, former cochair of Austinites for Our Schools, a political action committee that was formed to win the bond. "Austin is a very high-tech community."
By separating the three proposals, Christian says, bond supporters had three selling features to bring people to the polls. City residents who were coming to vote primarily for the technology features of the bond, supporters figured, would also support the other two proposals. Equally important was that more than half the money in proposition 3 was for school security, an issue of deep concern to parents in an urban area like Austin. Many parents, Christian says, probably voted for proposition 3 for that reason alone.
The bond package was designed after exhaustive research into what the schools needed, and what the voting community would support. Once it was all put together, it was time to sell it to the public.
The first step in a successful bond campaign--whether the funds are for technology or new schools or both--is to identify two people who know a lot of voters in the community and ask them to head the bond campaign committee, says Christian, who runs her own public relations consulting business and has a daughter and son in the Austin schools.
As cochair of the committee herself, Christian spearheaded a fund-raising campaign, soliciting donations from individuals, corporations, neighborhood groups, men's and women's clubs, and PTAs. The PAC raised about $300,000 and spent $100,000 of it on television advertisements, she says.
The PAC wanted to reach as many nonparents as possible, Christian says, to hammer home the message again and again that improving the schools would raise property values. The answer was television advertising and aggressive door-to-door campaigning. Inevitably, though, it was the aggressive pursuit of parents that probably won the election, she says. (Political consultants say parents, particularly mothers, are usually strong supporters of bonds that include technology.)
Christian describes voter turnout for the election (12 percent) as "pathetic," but in the same breath she admits that the low turnout might have worked in the bond's favor. In Texas, polling sites are open for voters to cast their ballots three weeks before the official date of the election. The committee hustled to make sure early voting sites were set up at all of the county's 96 schools. It also helped that PTAs were hosting open houses at schools and teachers were holding parent-teacher conferences during that three-week period.
"The typical bond voter in Austin is well over 50 years old, with no kids in school, and conservative, so we needed to find a way to get parents to vote," Christian says. "Parents came to the school for other reasons, but when they got there they said, 'What the heck, we're here, let's go ahead and vote.'" Of the 38,368 people who voted, 17,912 voted early, and the early voters ran 3-1 in favor of the bond.
"Technology is a scary thing to put on a bond," says Linda Nelson, president of the Plano, Texas, school board.
She should know. Three years ago, the district asked voters to approve a $135 million bond that had technology as a major feature. "That bond failed, and we were devastated," she recalls. "We went back to voters in 1994 . . . and totally left out the technology part, and the bond passed."
This year, Nelson says she wasn't sure what to expect when the board went back to voters yet again--this time with the largest school bond in district history, a total of $175 million, which included $44 million for new computers and software. Despite her worries, the bond passed.
What was the difference between the 1993 loss and this year's win?
"[The voters] could see technology wasn't some abstract idea anymore; the climate was right," Nelson says. "In '93 , the technology program was just starting, and [voters] couldn't see the vision of the program or anything tangible about it. This time, we were specific about what we wanted to enhance. We were able to say, 'If you vote for this, we will improve programs by doing so and so.'"
School activists in Monroe County, Wash., also bounced back this year--after suffering five consecutive defeats in school bond elections. One campaign lost by only eight votes; another time, bond supporters were handily defeated because the election followed a teacher strike.
Supporters were determined to change that bad-luck history this year. And to do so, they realized, would require a sophisticated analysis of what the community would support. To take the pulse of the community, supporters hired Voice Poll Communications of Everett, Wash., a company that uses telephone-polling technology to collect and analyze voter opinions.
"That was essential," says Julie Cavassa, cochair of Citizens for Monroe Public Schools, which lobbied for passage of the bond. "We had a preconceived notion that the most important thing to voters was cost. We learned they were really most concerned about what the money would be spent for."
The voice-poll service identified people who had voted in four of the last five elections and those who had just registered to vote. Using a prerecorded survey to which people could respond by pushing buttons on the telephone, the service asked both groups 16 questions, with each subsequent question adding more details about the bond proposal. The computer compiled the responses and produced a report showing what voters would support. The analysis divided the voters into parents and nonparents and contrasted the different levels of support in the two distinct communities--Monroe County and Maltby--that make up the school district.
Among the findings was that most voters generally supported putting more technology in the schools. So, although technology accounted for only a fraction of the $24 million bond, supporters emphasized its inclusion in the bond as much as possible, Cavassa says.
But "what works in one community might not work in another," warns Larry Tramutola, a California-based political consultant who works with school communities to win bond campaigns in a state that requires two-thirds of the voters to pass a bond. "Generally, technology is not the thing that is highest on the list in California," he says. "I don't know of any school district where their needs are so minimal" that they could propose a bond that includes only technology.
Proposals for upgrading science laboratories, on the other hand, are almost surefire winners, he observes. And for that reason, he says, school districts should broaden their definition of technology to include a broad spectrum of equipment, not simply computers and computer-related items.
In Cobb County, Ga., school activists sold the community on the idea that the district needed $221 million to improve its facilities and upgrade technology. But convincing voters they should support a school bond five times larger than the last one, approved five years earlier, was no easy task.
For one thing, four months before the election, economists in the state were saying it would be tough to pass the bond because interest rates were rising and voters were in a stingy mood. For another, opposition to the bond was strong and well organized. One opponent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, filed a complaint with state officials stating that then-superintendent Grace Calhoun instructed principals to lobby for passage of the bond.
(Georgia law, like that of most states, restricts public school employees from lobbying for or against bond referendums. Calhoun told the Atlanta newspaper she had not been aware of that law; following the complaint, the newspaper reported, Calhoun sent a memo instructing principals and administrators to give only unbiased information about the bond.)
Bond supporters immediately went on the offensive to counter the opposition.
"One of the most important things you have to do is make sure every community has something to gain from the bond," says Vivian Baldwin, former cochair of Kids Can't Wait, a political action committee that raised $40,000 to pass the Cobb County bond. "We came out with an outline of what each individual school--all 88 schools--was going to get. I highly recommend doing that."
Baldwin says a number of people in the community believed school technology was a waste of money. The committee countered those arguments, she says, by bringing back college students who had graduated from the Cobb County schools to talk about the need for more technology in the schools. These young men and women said they struggled when they first entered college because they didn't have a strong foundation in the use of technology.
Baldwin's daughter, for example, now a student at Vanderbilt University, took mostly advanced placement courses in high school, but she never set foot near a computer, her mother says. When her daughter first got to Vanderbilt, Baldwin says, she struggled in some classes because she hadn't been exposed to technology in public school.
"The message was that we were doing our community a disservice by not having the technology we needed," Baldwin says.
Early on, committee members were assigned to get in touch with former students at different colleges. Appropriately, they reached many of the college students by e-mail. As a consequence, she says, "we did very well with absentee ballots" and won a close election.
"The technology portion of the bond definitely helped it pass, because it was for all schools, to help them all get on-line," says Baldwin. "It was something everyone was going to get. That was key."
Go to the top of this document
Read the sidebar: "What Works" Return to the September 1996 Table of Contents
Return to the Electronic School home page