Good morning. My name is John Sievert and I am the cochair of Stillwater Area Public Schools’ Vote Yes group known as Yes to Kids! I am a technology business owner, an electrical engineer and graduate of the University of Minnesota. I am the product of a public school education. I am a PTA president.

Most importantly, I am the parent of two children – 13 and 15 – who are currently in our public schools. I support public schools as THE single most important institution in our state.

I am here today to give you a “boots on the ground” context of what our system of levies mean for our schools. I am going to tell you what it is like to try and get a school levy passed in a district like ours. I am going to tell you about the divided communities with under-funded schools left behind. I am going to tell you about the impossibility of having a serious, reasonable and desperately needed policy discussion within the constraints of this system.

I think Stillwater is a special case worthy of your notice. We have our own rural small town community identity, but yet we are suburban. We are not a wealthy property value district, and just 30% of our households have children of school age. Stillwater schools have a legacy of top-notch academics, athletics, art and music programs along with strong fiscal management.

In other words, we are a microcosm of the state as a whole.
And we are at risk.

Our Campaign

This year, we tried to get 3 levy questions passed. The first question was a renewal of our longstanding levy that expires shortly.

Questions 2 and 3 were intended to reduce class sizes by an average of 2.3 students and update curriculum.

Question 1 passed and Question’s 2 and 3 failed.

These were modest requests and represented a cost to an average homeowner in our district of about $12 per month. The class size reductions promised by the passage of these levies would have only taken us half way back to the class sizes we had in 2002 – when our current, and now expiring, levy was passed.

Currently in our district, class sizes are large because of inflationary attrition over time and the failure of state funding to keep pace. For example, in my son’s 10th grade classes, every class is either 36 or 37 kids in classrooms designed for 25.

Our kids do well on any test you put in front of them, easily exceeding national and state averages. Our District has won awards for its financial management and reporting and has an excellent bond rating rarely achieved by others.

Yet, the kids graduating for the last several years have known nothing except cuts and a gradual but continuous decline in services, in class offerings and in educational opportunities.

If you live in the metro area, you most likely heard about the “contentious” Stillwater Area Public Schools Levy Campaign. We had an active Vote No group who used the time tested tactics of the Taxpayer’s League – anonymity, misrepresentations, and massive lit drops in the last 2 weeks of the campaign. The goal was to create doubt about our schools because if even a shred of mistrust is planted in the mind of the public, levies fail.

We made a decision early on to challenge the claims of the Vote No group without exception and to never give them an inch. No distortion or misrepresentation would go unanswered - hence, the campaign was “contentious.”

Our local Vote No group’s slogan was “Demand Accountability,” which for anyone somewhat knowledgeable about our District’s operations, is patently ridiculous – just look at the results this district turns in! Yet, a slogan like this does create just enough suspicion that money isn’t being spent wisely to cause many people to vote against the levies.

Their literature was full of mistruths and misrepresentations.

Our campaign was guided by 2 co-chairs and a steering committee of 15 people – all whom worked full time jobs on this campaign for several months at a time. These people were highly skilled professionals in sales, marketing, communications, and a variety of other disciplines.

We raised, and spent, about $55,000. – the largest ever in our district. In addition, we had many hundreds of people come forward to volunteer to work on special events and projects for this campaign.

We installed four times as many signs as any past campaign. We ran ads, mailed literature to thousands, and wrote numerous editorials every week for months. We sold T-shirts, marched in parades, called thousands on the phone and door knocked to hundreds more. After all this, we only passed one question – the question that allows us to continue to tread water.

The message could not be more clear, and we’ve heard it repetitively since the election – “Do no additional harm to our schools and get this mess fixed at the state level.”

Our community remains bitterly divided. Our schools are not trusted the way they should be because of continuous distortion from anti-tax Vote No efforts. Our Vote Yes people are weary and concerned because we know that all our work only put a band-aid on the problem. Our Vote No people are angry because anything passed at all.

In other words, no one is happy and we are certain our next levy campaign will be worse and much more contentious than this one.

Lessons Learned

What have we learned from all of this?

FIRST, school finance is insanely and needlessly complex. It is impossible to explain to voters in the course of a contentious levy campaign.

When a Vote No group twists statistics to make a district look bad, it is almost impossible in this sound-byte world to fight back with the truth – it is too complex.

By asking districts to put these levy questions to a vote, we are essentially asking voters to make operational decisions on highly complex and technical issues about how to run schools. Is this how we want our “best practices” determined? Why do we have administrators and school boards?

SECOND, levy campaigns often leave behind bitterly divided communities.

All that a Vote No group needs to do is sow the seeds of doubt for their campaign to be successful. They create a cloud of suspicion around the schools while hiding behind their anonymity. This angers the school supporters and they fight back.

Both sides end up angry at the end of these campaigns. Public schools used to bring communities together as a source of community pride. Now, they are often pulling them apart. There are no winners.

THIRD, School levies are the only chance that voters have to directly vote against taxes.

County and city taxes can go up, and citizens have no way to respond other than voting out the people who make the decisions. This is the way it should be. As legislators, would you be able to fund anything here in the legislature if you had to submit each and every funding bill to a referendum?

Why do school boards not have the same authority as cities and counties?

FOURTH, Levy campaigns are an enormous productivity sinkhole for communities.

A levy campaign takes people away from their jobs and families. Instead of working and earning more to pay more income tax and create more jobs, these volunteers are working on levy campaigns. I’d estimate that the incremental dollars our district will be getting next year from our levy—a little less than $1 million—is probably about equal to the volunteer time if we charged it out at an appropriate billable rate. In what parallel universe does that make sense?

FIFTH, It is relatively easy and inexpensive to sink school levies. The playing field is not level.

All voters need is one excuse, one nagging doubt, and they have their justification to vote down school levies. Vote No groups are becoming very skilled in giving them that perfect sound-byte reason.

You can expect that Paul Dorr clones will be popping up all over the place to sink school levies – it is a growth industry. In Stillwater, we were lucky that enough people were willing to sacrifice a normal life to work on this campaign full-time. It is shocking that we had to work so hard just to keep what we had.

What do we need you to do?

1. We want you to engage experts to determine what constitutes an adequate education that is relevant to our times, to determine what it costs, and to properly fund it in a simpler and more sustainable fashion. It must be an excellent education if this state is going to compete internationally and if we want to preserve our quality of life.
   
   
2. We want you to get the politics out of education. Education is just too important and these politics are simply too toxic. It is a shameful thing for us to be moving our schools toward mediocrity largely because of politics.
   
   
3. We need you to get this done quickly. The next round of levies is going to be even worse. We, as a State, and you as a legislature must not let that happen because we are wasting precious human capital.

Finally, in closing, I’d like you to consider what happens if we don’t fix this system. The political confrontation will escalate because schools are starved for cash and parent groups will advocate ever more aggressively for levy passage. Consequently, Vote No groups will become even more vociferous in their opposition. Neither of us has any choice because this is the only system that we have and the rules are clear. The divisions in communities will get deeper. The acrimony will get worse and the schools and kids will suffer directly. The cost to repair our state schools after this happens will be much greater than taking care of it in the first place – if it can be done at all.

If you have any questions for me, I would be happy to try and answer them at this time.

 Sievert Senate testimony.pdf