Decent humans swamp A-hole vote, pass Colonial referendum
There is nothing like a school referendum (or a mid-term election) to bring out the greedy a-holes. Sadly, decent humans need to be practically dragged to the polls. If you want to know what kind of short-sighted, greedy nit wits were defeated in New Castle yesterday, simply read the Delaware online comments on the referendum story. 
There’s a New Castle Residents Facebook group to explore too if the Delaware Online comments don’t liquefy your brain sufficiently.
Oh shit… No thanks. That FB group is more toxic that an ebola infused radium and dioxin milkshake.
I’d would like to hear what turnout strategies supporters think worked this time. The NJ article suggest people woke up to the reality of the deep cuts, but I don’t think that is the whole story.
I was tangentially involved in Colonial’s first try in February and only involved in the early planning meetings of the 2nd try, but from my own experience with referenda:
State cuts likely motivated some of the turnout. Failure + State cuts would have destroyed Colonial and they weren’t exactly shy about sharing that information.
I think there was a major push to educate parents (yes really), even though you might assume parents would be tuned into and supportive of school referenda, that’s generally not the case. Parents and family members are the single biggest support for our schools but they’re often not as engaged as we want them to be (for a variety of reasons).
The challenge is rallying enough of that support base (whipping your votes in line, so to speak) to overcome the concurrent increase in No voters that will result from any campaign.
I’m sure someone more involved could elaborate, but those are my observations.
None of the commenters seem to know any details about the district’s budget. Inasmuch as the district offers to go over the budget line by line, these folks failed to avail themselves of the opportunity to KNOW school budget facts. Too bad, they might have learned something.
One of colonial’s biggest problems was the decade+ that meaney didn’t go out to referenda and cotinually cut to the bone. That led to some major issues both operationally and with capital infrastructure
One of the main points about this current referendum was that it was public enough. I heard that the ACLU is getting involved like it did in red clay.
The ONLY way we will go from 19 school districts to 3 is if these referendums start to fail on the second vote.