Publication Date: Friday, February 04, 2005

Our Town: Rolling the tax dice, again

by Don Kazak

When I walked into 25 Churchill Ave. before the Palo Alto School Board meeting last week, David Cohen, a Paly teacher, was the first person I saw.

I had gotten to know him while visiting his class and meeting some of his students for a column I wrote earlier this year. We chatted, catching up.

I was at the meeting to hear the board's discussion about another parcel tax attempt.

Cohen was there to be honored, as one of a dozen or so district teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

They lined up in the uncomfortable way people do for the requisite photograph, clutching their bound certificates.

I was at Paly the next afternoon to interview another teacher and several of her students for a future column.

While waiting for the 3 p.m. bell signaling the end of the class day, I watched three students sitting under a big oak tree, joking and accusing each other of something or another, laughing, then wrestling with each other in the joy of youth.

It made me smile.

I know why David Cohen and other teachers are so dedicated to doing such a hard job. Life is bursting out all around them.

The school board seems to have heard a message given fairly clearly at its last two meetings by members of the public commenting on another parcel tax election.

One parent, from "the colonies" of Los Altos Hills, as he joked, told the board Jan. 11 that it was hard to fire up other parents to be volunteers in the Nov. 2 election because of a lack of specifics of what people were voting for.

"Derive the numbers," he said. "Motherhood just doesn't cut it. We tried motherhood once and it just didn't work. Give us the specific arguments and then we can get out the voters. With that, I think we have a chance."

The "motherhood" reference wasn't about district moms, of course, but to the "mom and apple pie" stance that the district seemed to take during the Nov. 2 election. The message was that the schools are great, the schools need money, so vote for Measure I.

Close, but it didn't work, falling 221 votes short out of more than 33,000 votes cast.

Many of us never knew exactly what we were voting for.

I wrote earlier that I would always vote for the school district, and a reader ripped into me in a private note, challenging me to make a more intelligent vote.

The district also made a tactical error in the Nov. 2 election when it decided to not respond directly to highly questionable arguments made a small group of dedicated opponents.

The school district let the opponents win the day by never dignifying their arguments with a response.

Where I come from, Chicago, politics is not a genteel parlor game.

The district's marketing consultant took a poll of 400 likely voters in January. The results were almost exactly the same as a poll taken before the Nov. 2 election -- 79 percent say the district is doing a good or excellent job, 79 percent feel the district needs more money, but only 68 percent say they would support a parcel tax at $493 a year, not much different than the $521 tax defeated in November.

When the district needs 66.67 percent of the vote to win, 68 percent polling support doesn't give the district much breathing room, to put it mildly.

The good news is that the district may fare better in a June special election when people have to want to take the time to vote. The Nov. 2 election had a huge turnout because of the presidential election and because of a hotly contested state Assembly seat.

The bad news for the district is the same small band of dedicated opponents is still there, and they're on a winning streak.

"We need to be specific and accountable," school board member Camille Townsend said at last week's meeting.

The more specific the better.

Weekly Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be emailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.