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About The Author:
- Joseph J. Graves, Jr., has spent a career, spanning several decades, in corporate investor relations and marketing communications with Fortune 500 companies, and has served many more years as communications counsel to smaller companies.
Mr. Graves has been twice awarded the coveted Silver Anvil Award by the Public Relations Society of America. One was for best investor relations program; the other for best marketing communications in the country.
His annual reports have been rated "Best of Industry" for several years by Financial World, and his advertising has won many industry awards. Mr. Graves also is the author of business books.
In community service, he has been active in numerous cornmunity activities, political campaigns, and fund raising efforts. He has been highly successful in both the promotion and defeat of referenda, so he is aware of the strategies and techniques on both sides.
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Forward
Several national and state education associations are ardently pushinging legislation at the federal and state levels in search of school fund most notably for school replacement and/or modernization of buildi Educators can cite several reasonable reasons for the impe categorized as follows for discussion:
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The aging of school buildings. Many districts throughout the country report facilities 60, 70 and 80 years old and older. While not a peril to children, the buildings are increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain in meeting life/safety codes in addition to normal maintenance.
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The changing patterns in education. The gap between the original design capacity of old buildings and current programmatic capacity continues to increase. Educators find it most difficult to fit modern educational methods, tools and techniques into buildings designed for the "rote" style education of the World War I era.
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The wave of technology. Computers are not the teaching tool of the future; they have been in use for decades. How ever, many schools are ill-prepared and underfinanced with inadequate wiring, let alone equipment.
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The changing patterns in funding, the most vital category. Unfunded mandates are the lesser of the problems. The most distressing and challenging is the shift away from federal and state funding to placing the tax burden on property owners.
Educators don't like it any more than the taxpayers do. First, it affects the progress and quality of education, especially in low income areas. Secondly, it places a greater onus on administrators to raise funds at the local level. They are trained principally in education, not fund raising.
Passage of a reasonable number of initiatives currently in Washington, DC, and our state capitols will ease, but not significantly alter, the need for funds to replace aging buildings. Often the initiatives mean zero dollars to many districts, as it did under a defeated $600 million funding reform plan in Illinois. This spells trouble for many local school districts with or without funding plans.
Unfortunately, many of the ills are the doing of local districts. Growing taxpayer resistance and the failure of more than two-thirds of referenda have left school districts in a state of wonderment. It is a state created by their failure to understand the changes occurring at the community level, changes which are forcing them to become active fund raisers, changes which are forcing them to adopt strategies and techniques to win the referendum battle.
There are still a few administrators and school board members who view a referendum as their sole responsibility to decide and promote. More and more are moving to a committee system of sorts, but they are totally unaware of or misunderstand the extent and the power of the committee system at its fullest, so the committee system is greatly misused and laced with failure.
Why should you, as an administrator or school board member, take on the burden of trying to decide on and win a referendum without support or rely solely on one committee to build your organization? Volunteers and "yes" votes abound -- if you know how to find them and make them work effectively.
This guide book is based on an actual case history of a school district placing a $28 million building referendum, the largest in its history, before the voters. Its chances were weak at best, based on the defeat of several educational and noneducational referenda in the community in previous years.
Covered are the strategies and techniques utilized by administration, the board of education and a group of volunteers in a 15-month referendum battle -- and the result of that battle. They may have significant meaning to you.
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