Pass
So your referendum passed—congratulations! But a successful vote is just the beginning. Now, it’s time to keep the positive momentum going.
Get started as soon as possible. Kansas’ Blue Valley Schools has a long history of passing bond elections, but their last two votes—held in 2020 and 2023—have been some of their most successful ever. “In 2020, our bond passed with nearly 74% support, and this time it was nearly 71%,” says Deputy Superintendent Kyle Hayden. “Quite honestly, that’s almost unheard of.” Why such incredible success? The Blue Valley team attributes it at least in part to their aggressive bond schedule. “When we passed a bond, many of the people voting for that bond had children in our schools,” explains Dr. Tonya Merrigan, Blue Valley’s superintendent. “We wanted them to be able to see what we were promising them while those kids were still in school.” Projects from the 2020 bond—including three new high school gyms, a high school performing arts space, heightened security measures in all schools, and flexible learning spaces throughout the district—are all wrapping up this summer, just three years after the vote. The most recent bond, passed just a few months ago, is no different. When we spoke in April, Blue Valley was already in the process of hiring their design and construction management teams, and they hope to have all projects—including a brand-new middle school—completed by the summer of 2026. Getting started as soon as possible shows your community that you meant what you promised them—and that you want them to reap the benefits of their investment. Seeing quick progress also makes stakeholders more likely to support your district in the future. “When people see results, they’re going to be positive when it comes to the next referendum,” Hayden says.
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/ SUMMER 2023
Make your website a hub for information. If you’ve dedicated a page on your site to information about the bond campaign, don’t neglect or delete it once the bond passes. Instead, make that page a hub for all future information about your bond. On Blue Valley’s “Bond 2023” page, you can find detailed information about upcoming projects, broken out by school. Branded PDFs for each campus explain the particular projects for specific schools, as well as those they feed into. This allows families to easily determine exactly how the bond will impact their own children over time. The bond page also offers links to board presentations about the bond, budgetary information, and more. “Being very transparent and making the information readily available—that makes a huge difference,” Hayden says.
“Keep the work that you’re doing front and center. You want the community to be as excited as you are—so talk about it all the time, in whatever ways you can.” But Blue Valley isn’t the only district keeping their bond info easy to find. California’s Long Beach Unified School District has passed three bonds since 2008, for a total of $4.4 billion. On the district’s bond page, you can view details about completed, in-progress, or scheduled projects at each of Long Beach Unified’s 84 schools—including photos or artist renderings, descriptions, construction start dates, and projected completion dates. You can also view upcoming projects by school year in a construction timeline stretching until 2029-30. With just a few clicks, any community member can easily find what the future holds for their campus. Creating or maintaining a page like this shouldn’t be too heavy a lift; after all, you likely had most if not all of this information publicly available already as you campaigned for “Yes” votes. The key now is to keep this page active, informative, and up-to-date. The more information you make available to your community throughout the bond process, the more you’ll build their trust. (For more on building an online presence for your bond campaign, turn to page 26.)
