Teachers, parents, principals and others gather to phone from classrooms to remind parents that this sales tax increase will help school construction.
By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published March 1, 2004
If you get a phone call tonight from your daughter's school, don't raise your eyebrows or send her to her room.
It's probably just a pro-Penny for Pasco parent or teacher volunteer trying to get you to vote.
That's on March 9th, they'll say. Don't forget, they'll say
"We are calling every parent or every household," said Ray Gadd, the Pasco County School District's point man for the tax issue.
Teachers, parents, principals and other volunteers have been gathering in schools, sharing boxes of pizza and striking names off lists as they phone from classrooms to remind parents that this sales tax increase will help school construction.
"It is political patronage," said anti-tax spokeswoman Ann Bunting, who thinks the pro-Penny call from a public school building is far more offensive than a teacher's call about a bad grade. "I don't think they're giving parents all the information."
Bunting doesn't like that the pro-Penny phone script tells parents that, "None of the money from this tax, by law, can be used for salaries and administration - only construction and it all stays in Pasco County."
It leaves out, she said, that the district already has a construction budget.
And she's not sold on the fact that it tells people, "On March 9th voters will be asked to vote on a sales tax increase and a half-mill property tax reduction to be used to build new schools and renovate older schools in Pasco County."
That whole "half-mill property tax reduction" implies, she says, that taxes are going to go down.
"We developed a script that was simple and to the point," Gadd countered.
It has been lawyerized and edited, simplified and rewritten. The original phone script the district considered using instructed volunteer callers to cross off the names of people who responded negatively to the get-out-the-vote calls to prohibit "any future reminders to vote." District officials decided against doing that.
The first script, Gadd said, was modeled after ones used by other school districts.
"We just didn't like them - we felt they were too manipulative," he said.
The volunteer phone calls accompany the recent mass mailing of school district-generated flyers promoting the benefits of the 1-cent-on-the-dollar sales tax increase.
If approved by voters, Penny for Pasco would generate about $437-million over its 10-year life span, with the county and school district each getting 45 percent, and the municipalities splitting the rest.
The school district estimates its Penny revenues would come in at $196.8-million, money it hopes will help build nine new schools and allow maintenance and renovation at 10 others.
Those projects would be part of an $858.2-million, 10-year plan that includes building 20 new schools and maintenance and renovations at 59 facilities.
With 57,000 students, Pasco is the fifth-fastest growing school district in the state.
