Columbus Monthly / April 2012 / A community, divided

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A community, divided

Westerville endured a school ballot issue in March that pitted neighbor against neighbor. This battle epitomizes the struggle to fund public education in districts across Central Ohio.

It’s a chilly February night, and Wendy Holbert is nervous about standing in front of nearly 100 people gathered in the media center at Westerville South High School to support an upcoming levy. She summons the courage, even as she cries a little reading aloud an e-mail from her daughter, Dezeray, a Bowling Green State University sophomore and 2010 South graduate. Should Issue 10 fail the following month, Dezeray worries the academic program known as International Baccalaureate will disappear and the opportunities she had will be lost for her younger sister. Holbert, a single mother, moved out of Columbus and into the suburb for the best educational chances for her children, and she shares her daughter’s concerns deeply. “Once a Wildcat, always a Wildcat,” Holbert concludes to applause from the crowd.

A few days later, about 40 Westerville residents brave a blast of snow and cold for a question-and-answer session in a meeting room at the Westerville library hosted by organizations opposing the same levy. Among them is Hyla Skudder, who has her own emotional statement to make. She is a longtime supporter of the schools—a former volunteer at Robert Frost Elementary and Heritage Middle schools and the mother of two graduates with a third child, daughter Maggie, still in high school. She and her husband, Chris, moved to Westerville two decades ago, drawn by its small-town feel, and she always had supported levies. That is, until November, when she and thousands of other residents voted down the question known as Issue 20 by a resounding 61-39 margin. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, Skudder recalls. “I spent maybe 15 minutes in the voting booth, not pushing any buttons,” she says. But ultimately she made her decision. With her husband out of work and other friends struggling financially, the spending the district sought was, in her words, “not sustainable.”

School levy campaigns are as much a part of Ohio’s educational landscape as Friday night football and spring proms, and depending on the district, they seem to crop up at the ballot almost as often. The state’s school funding system means districts are almost perpetually behind financially, since taxes on property—in combination with state aid, the chief form of income for schools—are levied at a fixed amount and don’t rise year to year.

But schools’ costs do, whether in the price of gasoline, the cost of heating and cooling numerous buildings or teachers’ salaries—the bulk of all districts’ expenses. The result is a ritual plea to voters that sounds depressingly familiar from district to district.

On the one hand, supporters emphasize the need to maintain academic and extracurricular opportunities to give children the best possible education, arguing that cutbacks will jeopardize districts’ state ratings and could lead to lower property values if the perceived quality of the schools drops. On the other hand, opponents claim districts are stricken by wasteful spending, exorbitant administrators’ salaries and mislaid priorities: at what cost state-of-the-art football fields and paid faculty advisers for dozens of clubs? This exact battle played out in South-Western City Schools, for example, which eliminated fall sports in 2009 when an August levy failed, only to restore them that November after another attempt narrowly succeeded.

Like South-Western, a sprawling district that encompasses dozens of neighborhoods in and out of Grove City, Westerville schools face special challenges when it comes to levies. The district’s 15,000 students live in a 52-square-mile area that includes several Columbus neighborhoods, the city of Westerville itself and townships in Delaware County. It’s a diverse community with residents from all walks of financial life.

But at the heart of the debate over Westerville’s March 6 levy was the same problem all Ohio schools face: Funding isn’t keeping up with expenses. Issue 10 would raise $16.5 million annually and expire at the end of five years unless renewed. The levy would cost property owners an additional $205.49 per year for each $100,000 of the value of their home. Its passage still would require cuts, but, without it, busing, sports and music and arts programs would be eliminated.

At about 36,000 residents, Westerville is the second largest suburb in Franklin County after Dublin. It’s a mix of an older core city, anchored by shops and stores in the downtown area known as Uptown, and newer subdivisions such as Annehurst and Spring Grove. The city proper still is a mostly white community, and its per capita income of about $36,000 annually is much higher than the Ohio average. It long had a reputation as a conservative burg, thanks in part to the Anti-Saloon League’s decision in 1909 to locate its printing headquarters there, making Westerville the heart of the country’s temperance movement. (It remained dry until 2004.) Ask residents what makes the city special and they tick off tight-knit neighborhoods, the monthly Fourth Friday community block party in Uptown, the presence of Otterbein University and, above all, the quality of the schools. “It was important to me to pick a community that not only had a long history of supporting schools, but also a sense of pride in schools,” says Amy Raubenolt, a levy supporter with three young children in the district.

Debates over how to pay for schools are as old as Westerville itself. In 1865, when the district consisted of a one-room schoolhouse, four teachers, a teaching principal and a $700 annual budget, voters defeated a levy to build a new school
31-14. Fast forward a century, when voters rejected an operating levy in 1976 leading to a strike by nearly all of the district’s 480 teachers. School levies failed again in the early 1980s, eliminating field trips, reducing the number of coaches and club advisers and permitting emergency-only equipment repairs. These were “tough times” for the schools, historian Harold Hancock noted in his 1985 treatise on the district’s first 130 years. The district voted down a levy again in 2005, though funding was restored the following year.

There were early signs the Issue 10 campaign would be divisive. In fact, they involved the destruction of signs. For instance, a fire was spotted late last year in a parking lot on the east bank of Hoover Reservoir, where several levy signs were found beneath the burning debris: Opponents said they were all theirs. On Feb. 16, a bigger fire of “Vote No” signs was discovered. Overall, Westerville police said thefts of “No” signs far outnumbered missing “Yes” ones. Opponents of the levy got so tired of their placards disappearing that late in the campaign a Schrock Road resident bolted her sign to a tree. On Feb. 23, retired Westerville fire chief Pete Wilms offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone caught stealing signs on either side. Rick Bannister, co-chair of the pro-levy campaign Our Community, Our Schools, with five previous levy battles under his belt, spoke with opponents about the sign-stealing issue. “I don’t condone any of this,” says Bannister, a 1983 graduate of Westerville South, where he was class president. He and his wife, Diane, also a South graduate, have two daughters who graduated from South, a third in high school and a fourth in second grade. “We are neighbors—and will continue to see one another at church, on the soccer fields, in the grocery stores,” he says.

The 46-year-old Bannister was up early working on the levy most days and kept at it after his job at the Ohio State Bar Association, often not returning home until 9 pm. That schedule would have sounded familiar to Mary Medors, with the levy opposition group Taxpayers for Westerville Schools. For her, a typical day started at 6 am with checks of three e-mail addresses while the coffee brewed, and then drawing up a list for the distribution of yard signs, which she often delivered on her way home from her job as a district sales manager. “We’re for the kids. We want quality education,” says the 63-year-old Medors, who moved to Westerville 25 years ago. (Her son is a 1995 graduate of Westerville North.) “What we see is Westerville schools for many years had a spending problem.”

The campaign picked up steam through February, with yard sign parties held by both sides, as well as rallies, Q-and-A sessions and opinions flying in both directions through letters to the editor and competing Facebook pages. One posting on an anti-levy Facebook page on Feb. 14 read: “teachers in Westerville should get paid what Westerville can afford to pay them, not what Dublin can afford, or Upper Arlington.” The same day, someone posted on a pro-levy page, playing off the use of the campaign’s heart symbol for the word “love,” “I heart Westerville schools because of Hawthorne Elementary. It offers my child diversity and a quality and caring education by some of the most dedicated teachers in the district!”

Through February, civic groups lined up in support of the levy, including the plum Feb. 16 endorsement from the Westerville Chamber of Commerce. But it wasn’t a completely loving embrace. Efforts the district was making to cut costs, the chamber warned, “should not be viewed as a one-time event.” Three of the four district unions also agreed to concessions in the weeks leading up to the vote, beginning on Jan. 31 with a two-year contract extension with the Westerville Educational Support Staff Association that included wage freezes and a conditional increase to employee health benefit contributions.

On an unseasonably warm Feb. 27, the school board held its final regularly scheduled meeting before the vote. About 300 people filled the cafeteria at Westerville South shortly before 6 pm, or about 10 times the usual number of attendees. As the meeting got underway, the cries of girls practicing on the lacrosse field and the crack of bats hitting balls on the adjacent baseball diamond provided an unintended backdrop to the theme of the meeting.

More than 40 people signed up to speak, most of them on behalf of the levy. Two police officers stood quietly in the background. After a time, a few student-athletes, done with their workouts, watched from the rear. After the usual presentation of school awards and votes on day-to-day district matters, the speakers lined up, their comments limited to five minutes apiece, a digital clock ticking down as they spoke. First up was Pete Wilms, announcing he’d boosted his sign stealing award to $5,000. “I and the others are concerned about the negativity being displayed in this campaign and the damage it is doing to the psyche of the community,” he said. Pro-levy co-chair Jen Aultman followed, also lamenting the tenor of the campaign. “There’s too much anger, too much fear, too much name-calling, too much of a blame game,” she said. One of the biggest moments of the night came when Chris Williams, president of the district’s teachers’ union, the Westerville Education Association, announced the union would agree to concessions totaling $2.5 million in this summer’s contract negotiations.

By the time the final speaker approached the microphone, more than three hours had passed. The issue is bigger than Westerville, said Mike Collins, a former Westerville school board member and now member of the state school board, pointing to what he called Ohio’s broken school-funding system. “Pass this one, let’s get through this, then let’s join together to address the state funding issue,” he said.

Two and a half years ago, in 2009, the district won successful approval of an 11.4 mill levy that raised about $14 million a year. That worked out to $244 a year per $100,000 of property value, or about $1 per day for a home valued at $150,000, according to the district. That vote, known as Issue 48, passed 53 percent to 47 percent, a victory for the district despite coming at the height of the recession. And Issue 48 came with a big red footnote: It would provide funding to get Westerville through the fiscal 2012 school year, but more additional revenue would be needed. As a result, the schools went back to voters last November with Issue 20, a combined request that included both new property tax millage and a 0.5 percent income tax, the result of which would have earned the district $21.47 million a year. This time, voters rebelled, with nearly every part of the district flip-flopping from 2009. The defeat meant Westerville would have to cut $23 million before the beginning of the next school year.

The defeat of Issue 20 did not emerge from a vacuum. In 2009, a month before the passage of Issue 48, resident Robert Edwards founded levyfacts.com, and with others began pressing the district on its finances and spending priorities. “The status quo has been to use threats of cut services and programs to twist the arms of the district parents to vote for a levy,” he says, arguing the district won’t stand up to its employee unions. Edwards and fellow spending skeptics met with district administrators in the summer of 2010, urging them to hold the line on increases during contract negotiations with the district’s four unions. Opponents bristle at the suggestion by some on the school board that their position represents a “vocal minority.” If that were true, they say, why did Issue 20 fail so resoundingly?

One of the group’s chief rallying points was teacher pay, and, in particular, the salary and compensation provided superintendent Dan Good, who came to work for the district in the summer of 2008. Good’s $180,000 salary contained provisions that would subtract $25,000 a year if he didn’t meet certain performance benchmarks, such as raising the district’s academic ratings. He met his goals and retained the money within his base pay. Good received a new five-year contract in November 2010 with a base salary of $189,000, a cost-of-living provision, an annuity payment and other side compensation, such as monthly car allowances. Anti-levy advocate Jim Burgess, who has two children in the district, says community members are irritated by the salaries for administrators and teachers, which he says far exceed what the average Westerville resident earns. The district argues that it competes with schools around the state when it comes to teacher pay, and Good earned his money by raising the school’s academic ratings. “People often want to see performance-based compensation in education, and that’s exactly what this contract incorporated,” says district spokesman Greg Viebranz. Last June, as the district’s financial condition worsened, Good agreed to voluntarily reduce his 2012 compensation by $20,000.

The final week of the campaign was a blur of rallies, get-out-the-vote pushes and more rancor. A full-page newspaper ad on March 1 in support of the levy included the name of at least one business adamantly opposed to Issue 10, leading to a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission, though it was determined to be unfounded. On Sunday, a crowd of Our Community, Our Schools members gathered at Hanby Magnet School on South State Street for a rally. Taxpayers for Westerville Schools held their own rally at Hoff Woods Park where final handouts and yard signs were distributed. The night before the election, opponents with anti-levy signs gathered at the corner of Schrock Road and Cleveland Avenue during rush hour. About 30 minutes later, a dozen or so pro levy supporters showed up for their own rally.

Opponents gathered March 6 at Cardone’s Restaurant on Main Street beginning at 8 pm to watch the results. Supporters were at the district’s Early Learning Center on Eastwind Drive. The returns were a seesaw affair that left both sides holding their breath for hours. For much of the evening the issue was failing, barely, in Franklin County: As late as 10:45 pm, with 70 of 76 precincts counted, it was losing by 55 votes. At one point, with 20,000 votes counted, only eight separated the two sides.

 More than an hour passed while results from the final six Franklin County precincts were counted. A lull settled over the supporters, with yawns beginning to dominate as the hour grew late. A small crowd of guardedly optimistic opponents began to dwindle. But finally all votes were counted, including those from pro-levy neighborhoods in Delaware County, and shortly after midnight supporters declared victory amid cheers. But even they recognized that the overall margin of 585 votes—out of 29,861 cast—was hardly a landslide. Within days of Issue 10’s passage, the pro-levy side wrote to one of Westerville’s more prominent residents, Gov. John Kasich, asking that he do something to change how Ohio schools are funded. Anti-levy forces, meanwhile, say they’re already gearing up for this fall’s school board elections, with plans to unseat at least three members.

After her presentation at the pro-levy meeting in February, Wendy Holbert spent the campaign on the sidelines, urging family and friends to support the levy, but occupied mainly with the death of her stepfather late in the month. On March 6, she voted at her polling station at the Aladdin Shrine Center on Schrock Road, then watched the returns until she fell asleep, with Issue 10 still failing. Waking up for work at 4:30 am, she checked her phone and saw a text from Dezeray sent two hours earlier: “It passed!” Seeing that message felt “like spring,” Holbert recalls. “It was such a pleasant thing to wake up to.”

The results were bittersweet for Hyla Skudder, who faced what she felt was a “lose-lose” situation: The failure of the levy would doom her daughter, Maggie, to a skeleton of a senior year, while passage would be a financial burden she and her husband couldn’t afford. Her reluctant “no” vote reflected her economic circumstances. Like Holbert, she wasn’t involved in the campaign beyond her short speech at the library weeks before, given how conflicted she was and how many teachers she still knows. Already, she and her husband are making plans to fix up their house and move out of Westerville after their daughter graduates. “The bottom line is, we just can’t afford to live here anymore, and that’s really sad,” Skudder says the Friday after the election. “It’s hard to get taxed out of your house.”

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a legal affairs reporter for the Associated Press in Columbus.