Most of the school levies on local ballots in Ohio passed on Tuesday, one of the highest rates of approval in several years.
Renewal levies had the most success, while voters chose not to give school districts new money. ML Schultze of member station WKSU in Kent reports.
Jerry Rampelt’s nonprofit Support Ohio Schools consults with school districts on levy campaigns. He’s crunched the numbers from this week’s results and finds the usual patterns hold. So does his chief piece of advice: prepare for more than one campaign.
“Asking the voters to provide more money for a school district is not easy. You’re asking people to pay higher taxes. So districts many times have to go back multiple times. They have to go out and talk to voters, have a campaign and each campaign they touch more voters and ultimately, they’re able to pass it.”
Rampelt says renewals of existing levies are usually a sure thing. Better than 96 percent pass because schools are “asking voters to keep the same level of taxes that they’re accustomed to.”
But there are exceptions. One this year was Coventry in Summit County. Rampelt says he can’t speak directly to Coventry, but when that happens, “Many times, it’s just something that’s unique to a school distridx, and what I find is that when they go back at a future date, they’re able to pass it.
“You know even though it’s generally less than 5 percent of renewals that fail, … the reality is if you take it too lightly sometimes, the voters just vote no. But I don’t know the specifics of Coventry. It might have been a local issue, It might have been the campaign. It might have been bad karma.”
But Rampelt says any levy campaign needs “a high quality campaign that reaches voters … a full- court press communications plan. There’s no substitute for that.
“You’re asking people to pay additional taxes. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes an awful lot of work ,going out and having conversations with voters about why that’s important, why it’s needed.”
And those cases need to be made each election.
“People look at each increase in taxes as a separate event. Yes, if you have a good campaign there is carryover from campaign to campaign. But you can’t rely on (winning) last year that you’re going to win two years from now.”
Rampelt says one unusual thing about this week’s election is how relatively few school issues were on the ballot.
There were 158 school tax issues on the ballot. “That is a significant decline over previous November elections in even years,” says Rampelt, who has checked back to 2000. He says there are likely several reasons.
“One of them is that school districts have cut their expenses significantly. That was triggered by the recession, the state cuts in revenue to school districts And as a result of those cuts, they cut a teacher five years ago. That teacher has stayed cut and they save that salary every single year.”
But Rampelt says schools – and increasingly communities – are coming to recognize that such pay freezes can’t extend into perpetuity—and that cuts in busing, activities and services have shifted those expenses to parents.
