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Illinois School Board Journal
January-February 2001

'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 second in a two-part series on the successful use of communication to achieve voter approval of a school tax increase or bond issue.  Part one appeared in the November-December, 2000 issue of the Journal.

In this issue, we also include a related story on a referendum simulation activity offered by the Illinois Association of School Boards.

One thing that marks effective school referendum campaigners in the year 2000 is an ability to listen to the voters as well as to get the message out. Whether it takes place as retired farmers gather at a downstate cafe, or in a more structured setting like a focus group or school community relations program in the Chicago suburbs, effective communication is marked by two-way communication.

Here's how listening as well as talking about the upcoming referendum helped turn things around in a downstate county seat and in a large school district where the suburbs begin to thin out southwest of Chicago:

Aledo, with population of 3,681, is the county seat of Mercer County. It's a town with a lot of history, a hundred-year-old opera house that still shows first-run movies and a 1909-vintage jail that has been converted to a bed-and-breakfast. Some of the buildings maintained by Aledo CUSD 201 have seen their share of history, too. The junior high school on the north end of town, one of three buildings in the 1,248 -student district, dates from the 1920s with remodeling in 1970.

In April 1999, the district went to the voters with a junior high school bond referendum, hoping to leverage a grant under the state's $1.1 billion School Construction Law program enacted in 1997.

Unfortunately, the timing couldn't have been worse. Aledo, 25 miles south of the Quad City-metro area, has a fairly well diversified economy. But Mercer County is stock farming country, and in 1998 the bottom fell out of the hog market. By year's end, hogs were bringing as low as $10 to $15 per hundredweight. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which watches the Midwest farm economy closely, those were "the lowest prices ever" in all of U.S. agricultural history. Over the following months, prices rallied some, but not enough to inspire confidence in the future. The 1999 referendum was defeated.

Superintendent David Marshall, however, was convinced the proposal was a good one. He wanted to try again while the state's school construction program, administered by the Illinois State Board of Education and the Capital Development Board, was still active.

"With the state construction money, we knew it was the best deal we were ever going to get," Marshall said.

Besides, supporters of the junior high building project knew there were some things they could do differently a second time around. Marshall said they made a point of sounding out their opponents, "to see why they didn't support us," and incorporating the feedback into their revised plans. In the meantime, the district kept up an ongoing community relations campaign designed to keep citizens abreast of the district's long-range plans and goals.

"We sent out a district-wide newsletter to everyone, laying the groundwork for two or three years," Marshall said.

Soon, it looked like it was time to try again. By year's end, hog prices were hovering around $50. So the Aledo school board put the referendum on the March 21 ballot. On the second try, it won.

"The farm economy was a little better," Marshall said. "The first time we knew with hog prices where they were, we were in trouble. But the big thing (the second time) was that we tried to just talk one-on-one with people. "

Aledo's referendum steering committee was a good cross section of the community. Its chairman was a farmer, and it included bankers, retired people, PTA members and homemakers. Board members worked with the committee, and the school district prepared a detailed fact sheet on the junior high school building project and its proposed financing. But campaigning itself was left up to the steering committee, and it was strictly low-key in comparison to 1999.

"We chose not to do a phone (canvassing) campaign, which had gotten us some negatives the first time," Marshall said. "The year before we had workers making calls in various areas, primarily in our major precincts. But we found out that people didn't like being bothered by it in this age of telemarketing."

Some media were used, including yard signs left over from 1999, and a direct mail piece was targeted to parents. But Marshall said he believes what carried the day in 2000 was not so much any particular campaign technique but rather "word of mouth" and a two-way process of communication.

"The key was the open communication between people and constantly, but not too aggressively, making the case," he said. "We tried to answer all questions. That's what we always try to do."

In larger communities, more structured approaches may accomplish similar objectives. Dr. David Van Winkle, superintendent of the 13,915-student Valley View CUSD 365U, credits political support from the villages of Romeoville and Bolingbrook, along with an increase in Equalized Assessed Valuation, for passage in March of Valley View's operating fund referendum on the second try.

"We engaged with the local politicians," Van Winkle said. "Both mayors were very active in supporting the school tax referendum, and that doesn't always happen. They understood that to attract new residents, we have to have schools with the ability to deliver the curriculum they want for their children."

With the mayors came a level of political organization that made a difference on Election Day. "I think what it really comes down to is good old-fashioned politics, making sure you've got the votes, identifying your 'yes' voters and getting them out," Van Winkle said.

Yet there is more to what happened in that March referendum than election-day politicking. Unlike Aledo, or a unit district like Elmhurst Park that serves only one village, Valley View operates 14 schools in two municipalities straddling the Will-DuPage county line. Romeoville, with a population of 14,401, is one of Chicago's older suburbs. Once a resort on the old Illinois & Michigan canal, it was incorporated in 1895 and now has a diverse base of residential, commercial and industrial activity. The adjacent village of Bolingbrook came later and is more heavily residential. It was incorporated in 1965 and has a population of 51,595. In short, when Valley View CUSD was formed in 1971, it was not created to serve a previously existing community. It is important for the district to have a proactive community relations policy, whether there's a tax issue on the ballot or not.

"There has to be credibility for the schools, and that requires an ongoing effort," Van Winkle said.

In recent years, Van Winkle and the Valley View board have joined the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award competition, administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department. Named for a former Commerce Secretary who was an early and forceful advocate of total quality management (TQM), its educational award program offers school districts a chance to compete nationally by applying TQM criteria to the way they teach students and relate to the community, among other things. Van Winkle said Valley View hasn't fully implemented the criteria, and he can't be certain that it had a direct effect on the referendum outcome in March.

"We're still in the learning cycle," he said.

But as part of its effort to apply the management principles suggested by the Malcolm Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, the district works actively to improve school-community relations and marketing. And the TQM process, in education as in industry, envisions communication as a two-way street between an organization and its customers or clients.

"We're trying to identify each customer group out there and maintain our relationships with them," Van Winkle said. "We're at least listening to them and giving them feedback."

"We showed them it's not just fluff''

In the downstate industrial city of East Moline, persistence, candor and patient interaction with the community -- especially with taxpayers who opposed any kind of rate increase -- helped the city's elementary school district carry a referendum March 21 for an $11.5 million renovation and construction project. East Moline School District 37 Superintendent Gary Rudish modestly credits the state's School Construction Law grant program. "To be real honest, we weren't sure (why it passed), but I believe the only reason was the state," he said.

Essentially the same proposal was voted down twice in 1997. What was different in 2000 was a new financial structure for the project, in effect paying off old indebtedness and leveraging a hoped-for $3.5 million state grant to hold the district's tax rate constant. The new financial plan defused a "side issue," a long-standing controversy over tax assessment, and it won over enough opponents to carry the day.

"We went to the community for $7.5 million," Rudish said. "We had some in-house money we put into it, and we were able to assure the community that we wanted to reduce our bond interest rate. We were able to promote it to the community as a no-tax increase-proposal."

That took some doing. District 37 has a middle school and two elementary schools in East Moline, and an elementary school in Silvis. Both are older, industrial communities in the Quad Cities, a metropolitan area with a population of 357,000 along the Mississippi River. East Moline, population 20,147, got its start as a manufacturing center during the 1890s. Silvis, population 6,926, was developed in 1905 to house railroad shop workers.

With the rest of the area, both cities went through economic dislocation during the 1980s as the region's former reliance on the ag implement industry gave way to a more diversified economy oriented to the service sector, including riverboat gambling. East Moline and Silvis alike boast substantial blue-collar residential areas with older, owner-occupied homes. Property assessment, and real estate taxes in general, are controversial issues there.

In the spring of 1997, District 37 went to the voters with a $9.9 million building renovation and construction bond proposal, citing the need to modernize outdated facilities and catch up with needed maintenance on its older buildings. It was voted down. In the fall election, the district tried again with the same proposal. It was voted down again. Rudish said voters were sending a clear message.

"It was like, 'We told you no, and we're going to keep telling you no as long as you keep coming back to us,' " he said.

But, Rudish said, the message from the voters was not uniformly negative across the board. And it appeared that most people in East Moline agreed the elementary schools did need some work.

"This community is opposed to any kind of tax increase, because they believe they're taxed beyond reason already," he said. "Nobody opposed us on the need. It was the tax rate. ... Basically the message was, 'We're not opposed to helping you, but find a way to do it without costing us more money.' "

So District 37 started budgeting revenue into a fund set aside for the proposed renovation and building project. Two years later, a 25-member Citizen Facilities Review Committee looked at the district's needs. They found overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries, classes meeting in trailers and a cafeteria, and older buildings with multiple entrances no longer appropriate in an age that demands secure buildings in order to protect children. In the fall of 1999, the facilities committee strongly recommended that District 37 put another referendum on the ballot.

With the "in-house money" set aside since 1997 and the $3.5 million expected from the state's school construction program, District 37 was able to reduce the amount it was asking the voters to approve from $11.5 million to $7.5 million. At the same time, school officials met with taxpayer advocates and other opponents of the earlier bond proposal.

"We sat down with representatives of that group and showed them our needs," Rudish said. "We showed them the mandates we have to meet. We showed them it's not just fluff. We spent time with them, and showed them what we're confronted with. After we attended some meetings and took some irate questions, they became strong supporters."

In fact, one of the taxpayer advocates, a retired Deere & Co. executive named Dwayne Trautman, went on to become one of the March 2000 referendum committee's co-chairs. He told The Moline Dispatch he joined the campaign initially because he could see "where the money is going" that way. But he added, "It didn't take me long to be convinced that there truly is this need." The other co-chair was a bank officer. The referendum had the support not only of the local media but also of the business community. The campaign itself was a classic eight-week blitz that gathered momentum until Election Day, with the heavy lifting left entirely up to the citizens' committee.

"Our school board members were very active behind the scenes, but we wanted this to be a committee thing," Rudish said. "We wanted citizens of the community to be pushing this. The citizens' committee was the focal point."

In the end, on the third try, District 37's referendum carried. While Rudish credits the state's construction grant program, he also says it was crucial for school officials to meet with irate taxpayers, come to an understanding of their concerns and restructure their renovation project to answer those concerns. In a word, it added to District 37's credibility.

"It's a rare situation in this day and age to have a referendum accepted the first time out," Rudish said. "Each time, you win over a few people. ... It's almost a given. If you don't have an ongoing relationship with your constituents, you're not going to be successful."

Engaging the community

Now let's go back now to that conference room in Chicago where we began this discussion. You're slumped down in your chair, and the smiling people at the front table have just shown their slides, played their video and handed out copies of the school district's informational piece and a tri-fold citizens' committee brochure with "Vote Yes" superimposed over a cute little red schoolhouse on the front panel. Yes, you think, we did that. Facility needs review committee? Did that, too. Steering committee, yes, and volunteers, yes to that, too. Fliers, yes; buttons, yes. Direct mail piece to the parents, editorial board interview at the newspaper, yes. Identified our "yes" voters; yep, we did that. Got them out to vote, too. We still went down 3-to-5 in town and got swamped in the farm precincts. What do we do now?

It's still a good question, and a difficult question to answer. Politics is more of an art, as its most skillful practitioners will tell you, than a science. And what works in one community may not in another. What works in one election may not in another. Still, there are some common themes.

One is that the common fund of accepted wisdom, the techniques outlined from time to time in The Illinois School Board Journal and other literature for educators, is accepted because it has a proven track record and a strong basis in common sense. By and large, the districts that win referendums follow the common wisdom. Districts that lose also follow it, to be sure, but other factors may be at work. One of them is purely and simply persistence.

Results of referendums that took place on March 21, 2000, suggest another factor. It has long been accepted as a given that people feel best about the schools they know the most about. In the 1999 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, for example, only 24 percent of adult Americans gave a grade of "A" or "B" to the public schools "in the nation as a whole," but 49 percent gave an "A" or "B" to the schools in their own community.

Winning districts tend to have a strong sense of community, as in Elmwood Park or Aledo, or a vigorous community relations program in place, as in Valley View CUSD in suburban Will and DuPage counties. School officials in Aledo could easily hear from their neighbors that they didn't want to be hassled with political telephone calls. In a larger area like the Valley View district, a structured program like the Baldrige Awards competition can provide a level of two-way communication that would occur naturally in a smaller community. However they attain it, informally at a courthouse-square cafe or through a formal program of TQM or "public engagement," the winners have an ongoing process of two-way communication with the public.

School districts across the nation, including Decatur in central Illinois, have sought in recent years to structure communication channels through the public engagement program promoted by the Annenberg Institute of Brown University and others like it. While public engagement has become something of a buzzword and can take many forms, Jeffrey S. Kimpton and Jonathan W. Consodine suggest in the September 1999 issue of School Administrator that successful programs are marked by "inclusive, in-depth dialogue;" they are dedicated to "real improvement in the schools;" they are committed to finding common ground and "creating dynamic partnerships;" and they are based on "candor, mutual trust and shared information." Successful referendum campaigns often share these traits, whether or not they are based on the Annenberg Institute's recommended procedures.

William Banach of the Institute for Future Studies, who is also CEO of the Banach, Banach & Cassidy consulting firm, speaks of this kind of two-way communication in general terms as engaging the public. "By that," he says, "I mean we need to have some kind of process in mind whereby we can invite people in and work with them to come to some consensus on what education is in a given community-- or better yet, in a given school attendance area -- ought to look like." It sounds like the work of a good facility needs committee, but it goes beyond that.

Banach cites a public engagement project in San Juan Capistrano, California: "The role of the educa- tor here is to be a leader and show people what the possibilities are, and then facilitate something that comes in the direction of community agreement." In other words, citizens are involved deeply over a long period of time in developing plans and goals for the schools. This kind of effort, he said, goes beyond "trying to buy votes," but it can pay off at election time.

"What I'm trying to build is, if I can get people to come to some kind of consensus on what a school system ought to look like, then I have my support base built in, because now together we're working toward that," he said. "That's how you win a bond issue or a millage election, when people can see that you're pursuing something that fits into their scheme of things."