Katy superintendent fights for bond issue

District chief eyes new tactics after last year's blow to bond proposal

By Lisa GrayMarch 8, 2014 Updated: July 23, 2014 4:41pm

Katy ISD Superintendent Alton Frailey greets Julianna Carr ahead of a roundtable discussion last month with parents from the district. Frailey is hoping parents will champion another bond issue. Photo: Mayra Beltran, Staff / © 2014 Houston Chronicle

Photo: Mayra Beltran, Staff

Image 1 of 2Katy ISD Superintendent Alton Frailey greets Julianna Carr ahead of a roundtable discussion last month with parents from the district. Frailey is hoping parents will champion another bond issue.

IMAGE 1 OF 2

Katy ISD Superintendent Alton Frailey greets Julianna Carr ahead of a roundtable discussion last month with parents from the district. Frailey is hoping parents will champion another bond issue.

"Good morning, good morning," rumbled Alton Frailey, superintendent of Katy ISD. He eyed the 40 or so women who'd shown up that weekday morning for the "parents' roundtable" - yet another constituency that he aimed to fire up.

Frailey walked into that meeting last month with a firm conviction that the district needed to build new schools. But he also believed that was a tall order. Caught in a wave of anti-tax, anti-Obama sentiment, school districts across the country are having trouble passing bonds. Could Katy, a suburb full of newcomers and corporate nomads, buck that trend? Could the district persuade shallow-rooted voters to build schools for children who hadn't even moved to the district yet?

Aides distributed neon-green handouts. Frailey said casually, "You are in Katy ISD, one of the fastest-growing school districts in the nation." He smiled. "You knew that, didn't you?"

The mothers laughed knowingly. In Katy, residents understand that the problem isn't how to stimulate economic growth. It's how to keep up with it.

EDUCATION

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The handouts put numbers to the district's history. They showed how, in the past, the district's skyrocketing enrollment - from 23,950 students in 1994 to 60,803 in 2010 - had been matched by the passage of school bonds. In that time, Katy had built 37 new schools, renovated older ones and added ninth-grade campuses, bus barns and gyms.

Frailey urged the women to find their kids' schools on that green list. "Were you even living in Katy when your school was built?" he asked. "For lots of you, the answer is no."

Now, he said, it is again time to issue more bonds to build more schools. With the aim of sending a bond proposal to voters in November, the district was recruiting people such as these parents to serve on an enormous bond committee. Its more than 200 members would make recommendations to the board - then help persuade the rest of Katy to vote for the proposal.

For the moment, Frailey is the chief cheerleader. But once the board votes to put a specific bond proposal on the ballot - something likely to happen late this summer - Texas law would forbid the superintendent from campaigning for it. He'd have to pass the torch.

For now, at least, he was free to say what he wanted. As he warmed to his message, the smiles and jokes fell away. His voice gave away his mental models: old Western movies and passages from the King James Bible. The more he talked, the more he sounded like a beleaguered sheriff, urging townsfolk to band together to protect their little piece of civilization. And the more he sounded like an old-school preacher, reminding members of the congregation that they'll reap what they sow, that it is up to them to build their community, up to them to prepare a place at the table for those yet to come.

"By this time next year," Frailey said with a note of urgency, "we'll have 70,000 students. We don't have enough empty desks. The only way to build new schools for those students is with a bond. If the voters had said no in 2002, how would we have built those schools?"

National issues

Frailey has good reason to worry. In November, voters turned down the district's previous bond proposal, a $99 million package that included a 14,000-seat stadium complex and other facilities, but no actual schools. As blogger George Scott notes drily, "Superintendents tend to lose their jobs if they lose two bond issues."

Houston ISD voters approved a record bond issue in 2012, but across the country, observers say, fewer school-bond issues are winning voter approval. And those that pass are squeaking by with ever slimmer margins. In January, District Administrator magazine ran an article whose breezy, hopeful title - "How to Win Your Next Bond Issue" - belied the hard slog involved in "building an ongoing, trusting relationship with local constituents." School districts, the article noted glumly, are "up against jaded public opinion, an offshoot of increasingly divisive politics at all levels of government."

During the stadium-bond election, a yard sign distributed by Katy LiberTea distilled that trend to its essence: "Obama/DC and Katy I$D," it proclaimed. "Tax & spend baby spend. Vote NO on KISD bonds!!!"

Of course, other factors also were at play. Some bond opponents argued that the new stadium would benefit football powerhouse Katy High more than the district's other high schools. Others disliked the proposed location, next to the district's existing stadium. Katy LiberTea opposed the very idea of issuing bonds, though it didn't explain how else the district might finance new schools.

Some assailed the substance of the proposal itself. Scott, whose GeorgeScottReports.com blog frequently criticizes Frailey, calls the plan to spend $66 million on a stadium complex "grossly outrageous" compared to the cost of other high school football stadiums. Scott even offered an alternative expansion plan, one that he said would handle the growing district's football needs for less than $35 million. Whether this year's proposal will include a stadium is undecided.

But more powerful than opposition to the details of last year's bond, Frailey believes, was the red-hot emotional appeal that connected the school district to Washington, D.C. "Unfortunately, our local issues have become national issues," he says. "People go from hatred of (President Barack) Obama to hatred of government to hatred of their school district. And that's not fair to our community. So much of the political noise has nothing to do with Katy."

Katy for Katy's sake

What, then, is Katy? And what is its relationship to its schools? Frailey aims to put those existential questions at the center of the next school-bond election. "We can't be consumed by the rhetoric of Washington, D.C.," he says. "What we do here is for Katy."

It's easy for Frailey to make a case that Katy is - and should be - proud of its public schools. Their quality is one of the suburb's prime selling points. Developers, the Chamber of Commerce and the Katy Economic Development Council are quick to trumpet the district's top scores in state ratings of academic achievement and fiscal responsibility. "People don't move here because of our glorious rolling hills," Frailey jokes.

It's also easy to make the case that the district needs new schools. Temporary buildings abound outside the schools in fast-developing parts of the district. King Elementary, for example, was built to accommodate 1,030 students. Its current enrollment is 1,369, and by 2018, demographers expect 2,569.

"It's not, 'If you build it, they will come,' " Frailey says. "The students will come anyway, whether we build or not. And they are here already."

Campaigning 101

But any political consultant will tell you that elections aren't about winning minds; they're about winning hearts. Petri Darby, vice president for marketing of the nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas, recently began giving basics-of-marketing presentations to school leaders - a group more likely to be trained in pedagogical methods than in brand management or campaign strategy.

"People do not make decisions based on rational facts and data," Darby likes to tell his audience. "People make choices based on emotion, then justify them using logic."

To win, Katy ISD will have to replace voters' revulsion at all forms of government spending with pride in their schools and in Katy itself. Frailey loves the ornate old courthouses that lie at the center of most Texas towns. Erected in the 1800s, they embodied the young towns' civic pride and community ambition. Frailey wants Katy's schools to do that.

But will that strategy work in Katy? It is, after all, not a tight-knit small town but a sprawling suburb full of newcomers and white-collar transients.

"There's a cul-de-sac mentality," says school board president Rebecca Fox. "You know people on your own little cul-de-sac, but you may never have been to a different subdivision."

The area's many newcomers haven't yet put down deep roots, and a fair number are corporate nomads, such as oil company executives who move from post to post every couple of years. In the 12 years before settling in Katy, Fox's family had lived in six countries.

Will Katy voters be willing to pay for schools that lie outside their own subdivisions, in subdivisions yet to be built? For people who haven't lived in Katy long, can a local issue trump national politics?

Scott, the blogger, believes that the next bond issue will pass, even if it includes the controversial stadium. "As long as they include more elementary schools, more middle schools, more high schools," he says, "it's a done deal."

'A place worth fighting for'

But Frailey and the school board are less sure. They talk about "engaging to engage." They plan "Community Conversations" and "Bonds and Bagels" events.

"Our challenge," says Fox, "is to help everyone understand their neighbors."

Frailey seems undaunted. He's unafraid of the district's astounding growth, unafraid of the problem of persuading newcomers, with only shallow roots in the community, to build the place, to commit their own tax dollars to building schools for children who hadn't even moved to Katy yet.

At the parents' meeting, talking about the bond while he still could, he tried to convey that attitude to people he hoped would take up his cause.

"This morning, across from my house," he said, "there were two moving trucks. You know what that means: More people moving in."

Frailey didn't see those newcomers as a threat to the district's already crowded schools. Instead, he saw their presence as a vote of confidence in Katy and Katy ISD.

"Our parents can live anywhere they want. They choose Katy. This is a place worth moving to.

"This," he said, "is a place worth fighting for."

Lisa Gray

6 Comments  [It's always fun to look at the comments later on--the people supporting the school district are most always wrong in retrospect. MM ]