Proposition 30, raising statewide taxes to support education, was a nail biter, struggling to get a majority of voters behind it. But that wasn’t the case for most K-12 parcel taxes and school construction bonds on the ballot Tuesday. Voters passed 14 of 22 parcel taxes by margins of victory ranging from 67.1 percent – just above the requisite two-thirds majority – to an impressive 77.3 percent, in the Berryessa School District in San Jose (see chart below).
Even in five of the eight districts where they lost, parcel taxes drew at least 55 percent support. Superintendents and school board members in those districts at least can take solace in knowing that help may be on the way in Sacramento.
Now that Democrats in the Assembly and Senate are on the verge of gaining a supermajority, they may soon be in a position to put before voters a constitutional amendment lowering the threshold for parcel taxes to 55 percent, just as it is for school construction bonds.
For a decade, state Sen. Joe Simitian, a Palo Alto Democrat, tried, to no avail, to persuade the Legislature to put the question on the ballot. But he couldn’t persuade any Republican colleagues in the Senate to vote for it, so it died shy of the two-thirds needed for approval. Assemblymember Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat who authored a similar bill last year in the Assembly, didn’t
Campaign contributors should make matching donations to schools - by Carl Cohn and Louis Freedberg
The welcome passage of Proposition 30 by voters this week will help avert an immediate fiscal crisis in our schools. But it will not undo the damage of years of underinvestment in public education in the state. Help could come from contributions to any number of campaigns at a federal, state, and local level during the just-ended political season. While school districts struggle to provide basic...