The Voters You Must Reach to Pass Your Bond Proposal

Nearly every school district holds meetings and presentations about their facilities as they work to prepare their bond proposal for facility improvements. While the entire community is invited to these meetings and presentations, nearly everyone in the room is the parent of children currently attending district schools.

The Missing 60%. While parents have plenty to contribute to the development of a bond proposal for facility improvements, parents make up less than half of the voters in your district. On average, just over 60% of voters do not have children currently attending district schools. If non-parents who do not participate in meetings and presentations are 60% of your voters, and the bond proposal is created based on the desires of parents with children attending district schools who are 40% of your voters, it is entirely possible to end up creating a bond proposal that will not pass.

Non-Parents Don’t Know. Our research has found two significant differences between parents with children currently attending district schools and non-parents. First, non-parents are less likely to have been in school buildings recently, compared to parents who are in the buildings on a regular basis. Second, because non-parents have not been in the buildings, they are unaware of facility needs and challenges the district may be facing.

Connecting with Non-Parents. Although your non-parents may not have first-hand knowledge or experience with district facilities, it is still absolutely essential to engage your non-parents when developing your bond proposal. In order to engage non-parents, you must reach out to them and ask them for their input on their terms. This is why we mail a postcard to every household in the district, asking voters to complete a survey about district facilities and facility improvement bond proposals as part of our Comprehensive Voter Approval Assessment. The postcard is their invitation to participate, and the survey can be taken online or a printed version, which allows non-parents to participate from wherever they wish, whenever they wish.

What You Need Non-Parents to Tell You. In order to develop a bond proposal that non-parents can support, you need to find out four things. First, do non-parents believe the district is fiscally accountable, because if they don’t think you are handling finances correctly you will need to address that concern before trying to convince them to support a facility improvement bond. Second, you need to know if non-parents believe district facilities need improved, for if they don’t, you will have to work extra hard to demonstrate need. Third, you need to tell non-parents what facility improvements you are considering doing and see if they agree that those facility improvements need to be done. Fourth, you need to find out if non-parents are willing to pay for the facility improvements you are considering doing.

Our Comprehensive Voter Approval Assessment not only gets input from your non-parents, but we also statistically process the data so that it represents the correct proportions of voters. Responses from non-parents are weighted to be 60% of the total, and parents with children attending district schools are 40% of the total, so the results are representative of your entire community.