“We had a stomachache for a couple of weeks,” says Superintendent Dr. David Haglund, “but I was confident it would end up passing—and it did.” Looking at the voting bloc, only 27% of voters had a child in the district, meaning Pleasanton USD’s success was truly a community effort. So how did they get so many people on board? They told a good story.
Good stories are honest.
Pleasanton Unified School District tells a story. When Pleasanton Unified School District in California went out for their 2022 bond, the stakes were high. Their last bond—which had come to a vote in March 2020—had failed in the wake of a mounting global pandemic. In fact, over the previous 25 years, the district had only passed one bond. When votes started coming in on Election Day, it looked like Pleasanton USD was set to continue its streak of failures. But over the next two weeks, as mail-in ballots were counted, the district pulled up from behind and clinched a victory.
“We showed them the rotting beams on the roofs, the cracks in the bricks, the ugly parts. That’s not easy to do, but if you don’t do it, you’ll never convince people of the need.” 42
/ SUMMER 2023
Schools are cornerstones of their communities, and as a school leader, it’s natural to want your stakeholders to take pride in their local district. It can be hard to admit when things aren’t exactly going perfectly—but sometimes it’s necessary. “The community here isn’t used to being told they’re not as good as the community down the road,” Haglund explains. “They’re used to thinking of themselves as the better place.” But in reality, Pleasanton USD’s facilities badly needed renovation. “The theater’s back corner was sinking. The basement was flooding,” Haglund tells us. “One of the high school gyms was 50 years old, and the other was 100 years old. They didn’t have heating or air conditioning.” So the district told the truth about their needs. Not only did Haglund and his team give tours of the campuses, but they also held town hall meetings inside the schools and did virtual walking tours for people who couldn’t visit in person. “I think once people actually started touring the facilities and realizing what was really there, some folks were kind of embarrassed,” he says. “We showed them the rotting beams on the roofs, the cracks in the bricks, the ugly parts. That’s not easy to do, but if you don’t do it, you’ll never convince people of the need.”
Good stories build into a broader legacy. Throughout the campaign, Haglund and his team found themselves coming back to the idea of building a legacy. “We constructed a lot of our narrative around that idea,” Haglund says. For example, Bill Butler, one of two parents who spearheaded the local advocacy group, is a former basketball coach. For him, leaving a legacy meant improving that 100-year-old gym. “When it’s 37 degrees outside, it’s 38 degrees in the gym,” explains Haglund. “They have jackets on trying to practice basketball, and that made Bill embarrassed. That wasn’t the image of the community that he wanted to raise his kids in. He knew he couldn’t just sit back. That’s the story he tells.”
