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Illinois School Board Journal
November-December 2000

'It takes a whole village' ... to pass a referendum

by Pete Ellertsen

Pete Ellertsen is a freelance writer in Springfield. He teaches at Springfield College in Illinois.

This is the first in a two-part series on the successful use of communication to achieve passage of a school referendum.  In part two, the author will provide more case studies, and the Journal will question winners and losers in November contests to determine what they perceive as the keys in their election outcome.

It's a typical moment at the Joint Annual Conference. In a downtown Chicago hotel, a panel of citizens and board members is finishing its presentation on how their school district passed a finance referendum. They've shown their transparencies, handed out samples of their campaign literature and explained how their citizens committee got its message out on election day (along with their "yes" voters). Now, they call for questions. Toward the back of the meeting room someone gets up, looking distinctly unhappy.

"We did everything you told us to do, and we still lost," says the questioner. "What do we do now?"

Good question. Over the years, there has grown up a common fund of wisdom on how to carry school referendums. Work through a community-based citizen committee, involve citizens in strategic planning and facility needs studies, avoid "side issues," identify your "yes" voters and get them to the polls. Keep the school board and administration well in the background during the campaign. Start campaigning two to three months ahead of time, says the received wisdom, and peak on election day. (See "The Common Wisdom"  for a summary.)

Even so, carefully planned and well executed referendum campaigns can fail. Often it takes two or three tries to pass a referendum.

In Illinois' consolidated local elections on March 21, 2000, an unusually high number of referendums was approved by the voters. Across the state, 47 out of 66 school bond referendum questions carried, or 71.2 percent. And of 27 operating fund tax proposals, 18, or two-thirds, carried. Overall, 86 school districts went to the voters with 93 referendum questions. And 65, or 69.9 percent of them, carried. Several of them won in school districts that had recently voted down similar school finance proposals. So we decided it was a good time to ask why.

What we found was that the common fund of received wisdom on winning referendums, in one form or another, served as a basic framework for victory in all the districts we contacted. The common wisdom, clearly, is based on common sense. Some districts with bond proposals were helped by the Illinois School Construction Law of 1997, which set up state grants administered by the Illinois State Board of Education and the Capital Development Board to help local schools pay for brick-and-mortar projects. Other districts, with operating levy increases on the ballot, were not affected at all. Side issues were defused in some districts, tactfully ignored in others. In the districts that won in March 2000, a crucial component of victory was an ongoing pattern of close, two-way communication.

Successful referendum committees, in March as in other elections over the past 10 years or more, were those that worked together well and that had a high level of communication among their members, school officials, board members and the public.

Sometimes that communication grew out of ongoing public relations or civic engagement programs. In other cases, it reflected a politics of inclusion, a conscious political strategy of reaching out to opponents in past referenda and including them in the school planning process. In Illinois there's a time-honored saying that "good government is good politics," and it is safe to say that winning referendums in 2000 and beyond is still about good politics, good government and an ongoing process of communication ensuring that the school district's strategic plans and policies reflect commonly perceived values and demonstrated needs of the community.

According to Jacob Broncato, superintendent in Elmood Park CUSD 401, carrying an education fund levy referendum on the second try boiled down to showing "demonstrated need." The school district demonstrated its need for the increased funding and the community's need for better-funded schools. The committee also reached out for political allies.

"The parents were much more involved this time, and it had broad-based political support within the community," Broncato said. "Our campaign slogan was, 'It Takes a Whole Village.' And we are a village, the village of Elmwood Park, so that had a ring to it. We're a unit district, and we only serve Elmwood Park, so we had that sense of taking care of our own."

Elmwood Park is an older suburb of 23,206 in the panhandle of Cook County, with a lot of young families and growing school enrollments. But population is down from its peak in the 1970s, and a tax increase is not an easy sell. Diana Paluch, a member of the citizens' committee, framed the school district's message in terms to which the entire community -- the whole village -- would relate.

"There were no new ideas here," Paluch said. "We clearly identified the community's interests. Even though school referendums are not popular, they are really a way to secure the long-term value of your property. Without good, solid schools, neighborhoods do suffer."

Paluch is a public affairs consultant whose firm, Mandate, has worked in school referendums in other jurisdictions. She is also an Elmwood Park resident, and her approach to the campaign was part politics, part neighborliness.

"She's involved in those kinds of issues, so she sat down and met with our committee," Broncato said. "She in fact gave our committee a lot of dos and don'ts -- keep your message simple, and keep bringing it home. A lot of it is old-fashioned politics, walking the precincts and getting out the vote."

Paluch said there's nothing wrong with politics, as long as it is grounded in the demonstrated needs of the community. She also prefers the kind of grass-roots political campaigning that marked the Elmwood Park referendum campaign.

"It's old-fashioned, shoe-leather politics," she said. "It's neighbor talking to neighbor, friend talking to friend. We talked with parents and business people, the soccer coaches. We wanted to make sure everybody was included. That's what I think community is about, neighbors working with neighbors to make a commitment to the community."

If the "dos and don'ts" Paluch shared with the citizens' committee in Elmwood Park sound a lot like the commonly received wisdom -- keep on message, organize down to the precinct level, work with the community and so on -- it's because the common wisdom works. There's another important part of it, and it has to do with persistence.

When Broncato was asked what advice he would have for a school board member who just lost a referendum, he said: "I'd tell them to take heart, and broaden their constituency base in the community. Don't give up, because if it's worth doing the first time, it's worth doing the second time."

Beating the odds in a rural community

In the Panhandle school district south of Springfield, it took more than two tries to pass a referendum asking for an education fund increase. In fact, the 749-student rural community unit district hadn't passed a school tax referendum since 1974. Panhandle CUSD 2 serves northern Montgomery County and adjacent portions of Macoupin and Christian counties. School closings over the decades have left the district with a high school and a junior high school in Raymond (population 820), elementary schools in Raymond and Farmersville (population 698) and a pre-kindergarten facility in Waggoner (221), all in Montgomery County.

Among farmers and in communities that lost their schools, a tax rate increase was a tough sell. That showed in the returns on March 21. In Montgomery County, the referendum carried 563-527. In Christian, it tied 13-13. And in Macoupin, it lost 1-14. Districtwide, the vote was 577-554.

Nancy Weitekamp, of the campaign committee Citizens for Panhandle Education, said it took persistence and a lot of quiet one-on-one conversations with skeptical voters to carry the day.

"We just put the message out in general -- if we don't have good schools, what would the value of our farmland be?" she said. "We tried to make it a kid issue, not a school issue and not a business issue."

Weitekamp recalled discussions with business owners in the towns who didn't want to get involved with a tax increase, even to the extent of allowing her to leave Citizens for Panhandle Education literature out on the counter for their customers to read. She'd keep talking with them, and they'd relent.

"A lot of the time, they just wanted you to listen to them," she said. "I'd listen to their complaints, and I'd say, 'I didn't have anything to do with that, but I'll pass it along.' Then they'd ask for the stuff, and say, 'I'll put it out.' I was shocked."

Panhandle's proposal was for a $1 increase in the education fund, to be used to balance the school district's budget and restructure its current bonded indebtedness of $540,000. A three-fold brochure paid for by the committee explained the restructuring and suggested it would help get the district off the State Board of Education's financial watch list.

"What were your favorite activities in school?" asked the brochure, printed on inexpensive orange paper matching the high school's colors. It listed, among others, Future Farmers of America, several clubs, the National Honor Society, vocational education, art, music, chorus and band, and asked, "Which are we willing to lose to balance the school district's budget?"

Another citizens' committee brochure made a virtue out of necessity and asked, "If you had to live on what you made in 1974, what would you do?" Groceries that cost $29 when a referendum last carried in Panhandle now add up to $100, the brochure continued on an inside fold, and a school bus that cost $14,500 then costs $44,134 now. "The district can't borrow itself out of debt!"

Since debt restructuring is not an easy concept to sell, Weitekamp's committee looked for human interest angles. They relied on letters to the editor in local newspapers, including one from a couple originally from northern Illinois who had missed out on school sports while their former district struggled to balance its budget.

Citizens for Panhandle Education, Weitekamp said, was a highly informal group of people who came together for a common purpose. Supporters included a professor of legal studies at the nearby University of Illinois in Springfield, a retired farmer, an advertising copy writer, a veteran of a 4-H Club referendum campaign, parents and, of course, school children.

School officials and board members, as in other successful referendum campaigns, stayed well in the background. The school district sent a purely informational piece home with elementary school children. But mostly the campaign was left to the committee, with a lot of one-on-one, person-to-person persuasion.

"When you start calling people on the telephone, you rally the opposition," Weitekamp said. "Instead, we'd just talk to people. For example, I had a retired farmer out talking at the coffee shops."

Along with the brochure, Panhandle's committee used yard signs, buttons and a radio spot. When yard signs were removed or defaced in the night, Weitekamp said, "We put them back out again."

By the time the votes were counted, Citizens for Panhandle Education had run up expenses totaling nearly $700. The most successful politicking, as in the Chicago suburb of Elmwood Park, tended to be neighbor-to-neighbor. And in the end, victory belonged to the community -- and the citizens' committee.

"It was not any one of us, it was all of us," Weitekamp said. "It was definitely a committee victory. I don't know how it happened, but we just had the right mix of people that got together on the referendum committee."

To be continued next issue ...