As you may have noticed, in this blog I shy away from commentary on national and state politics — not that I don’t have strong opinions — it’s just that I want to focus attention on what directly affects San Carlos schools. So, in that spirit, I won’t comment on the presidential election and California state ballot inititiatives (except for one which does affect schools) — plenty of people are already doing that.
So, how did election night turn our for San Carlos Schools? Well, not so good. Mainly, it appears like Measure S is headed for defeat with only 65.6% of the vote. These are the “semi-official” results, which mean they do not include provisional ballots or last minute vote-by-mail ballots. Measure S failed to reach the 2/3 majority required by about 1%, or roughly 100 votes. As a point of reference, I checked back to last year’s election when I ran for School Board, and there were actually 1,700 more votes counted between the day after election day and the offficial “certification” of the election one month later. Of course, I have no idea how it will turn out this time, but I fear we may have lost this one.
This is extremely frustrating and disappointing to say the least. Notwithstanding all of the hard work by so many volunteers, we obviously did not get the message out to enough people. In contrast, the three other school measures in the county (Belmont, Millbrae, and Daly City) did pass easily, and I congratulate them on their success in supporting their schools. I am not yet prepared to give an analysis as to what went wrong, but in any case we must look forward. Our potential options include putting this measure, or a modified version of it, back on the ballot in the Spring or some other time. That will clearly be a topic for a future School Board meeting. In the absence of additional funds, we are facing some severe cuts in our School District — there is no pretty way to paint this picture.
On the good news side of the ledger, two other votes have the potential to help our schools, most likely in the longer-term. First, State Senator Joe Simitian, an unwavering supporter of public education, was re-elected to the State Senate by an impressive 75% majority. Also, Measure 11 — the State Proposition to change the way we draw state congressional districts — looks like it is about to pass. It is close, but it is leading with 50.5% of the vote. This should put an end to gerrymandering and hopefully push the State legislature to make true budget reforms which would provide a stable source of funding for education.
I will obviously keep everyone updated as we get final numbers on all of these races.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I heard from a couple of neighbors (who’s kids are no longer school age) – it’s just anecdotal but may help with future planning…
They were intending to vote no on Measure S primarily because the current school bond measure isn’t set to expire for another couple of years. They said they’d be much more open to a new measure that didn’t overlap with the existing one – especially in this economy coupled with the expectation that many other taxes are likely to increase in the next couple of years. I’m not sure how prevalent that line of reasoning was in its defeat, but food for thought anyway. I’m not sure if it was the same situation for Belmont, Millbrae, or Daly City but it would be interesting to find out.
Anyway – just my two cents. I’m very disappointed that it did not pass as my kids are 2 and 4 and could benefit greatly from additional funding. Hopefully we’ll get the result we want next time out.
Jayne,
Thanks for the feedback. To be clear, the new parcel tax measure wouldn’t have overlapped with the existing one, since it was replacing it. But I understand that folks may not have seen the urgency if they didn’t think something was “going away” if it didn’t pass. So, clearly we needed to do a better job at communicating that urgency. Again, we need to do a full analysis on this, but I do suspect one of our problems in this race was that there wasn’t that sense of immediate need for this parcel tax (and/or feeling of impending doom in its absence). Unfortunately, we may be looking at making cuts next year, and ironically that may promote a new sense of urgency and need.
Seth
Jayne,
I think your neighbors were being awfully shortsighted about this. That’s too bad. They don’t realize that this measure was going to replace the previous measure and b/c this measure did not pass, the San Carlos schools will have to make some tough decisions for next school year.
I am really frustrated that this measure did not pass. I did my best to talk to my neighbors and friends (w/o kids living in San Carlos.) Everyone I knew was voting “yes.” So naively I thought this measure would pass w/o a problem. If indeed some people were under this impression, Seth, I think people need to understand the direness of the situation for our schools in the next election cycle. I will be more active to support this measure in the next election.
Joely,
I agree with your comments. Although I can not speak for the rest of the Board, what I suspect will happen is that we will first go through the process of looking at next year’s budget — which could include some severe cuts. Then it may make sense to go out for another parcel tax measure, and that would make it crystal clear what the implications of failing again would be.
Seth