The VOTE Yes committee is gearing up to campaign for the Tahoma School District construction bond which will be on the November general election ballot.

The bond that the district will put before voters is for $195 million and includes money for a new Tahoma High School to be located on 35 acres in the Donut Hole in Maple Valley. It also includes what are called warm, safe, and dry projects as well as funding for work related to restructuring the district’s existing schools for different grade levels.

The committee, which is co-chaired by Barbara Kennedy and Erin Weaver, has met since May and will officially kick off the campaign at a meeting on Aug. 28. Vote Yes exists because state law prevents the district from campaigning for the bond measure.

“Our role really begins in earnest as soon as the district decides to run the bond and because our school board was working extremely diligently to get the best possible, most effective bond before the voters they just spent a lot of time deliberating on what exactly did Tahoma need and how can we get that for the least amount of dollars,” Weaver said.

The board voted Aug. 1 to put a bond on the November ballot.

In an interview Aug. 9 Weaver said the committee will focus on spreading factual information about the bond throughout the community and also on encouraging residents to register for, and then actually, vote.

“We have the framework for getting this to pass with that old-fashioned, feet on the ground, campaign,” Weaver said. “It just is getting people to understand that the time is now.”

Weaver said that she believes one of the biggest hurdles to getting the bond approved is getting eligible voters registered as well as mail in or drop off their ballots come election day.

“We have roughly 8,000 families in the Tahoma School District and anywhere between 1,500 to 2,000 of parents in those families aren’t registered to vote,” Weaver said. “And if we can’t get our own parents who are seeing first hand the effects of overcrowding, the older buildings, to take that step — to register to vote and to make an effective difference — I very much worry that we aren’t going to pass.”

Sean Stewart, who is also involved with the Vote Yes committee and participated in campaigning for the 2011 bond which did not pass, said the main thing he learned after that campaign it is vital to get community support.

“In order for it to pass at all the community really has to get involved because we don’t have huge amounts of money like other communities to hire a PR firm to run advertisements and mailers and radio ads or whatever they’re doing,” Stewart said. “This is an old style neighbor-to-neighbor campaign.”

Stewart also talked about the value of utilizing social media as a way to inform the community and also realizing that a campaign is more than the online component.

Weaver, Stewart, and fellow committee member Sarah Gilbert-Newall said that they think the sticker shock at the high price tag on the bond can be overcome when the details and extent of the district’s needs and the projects in the bond are laid out.

“If a person has kind of an immediate gut reaction to the sticker price of the bond, I think they also need to consider, we haven’t passed a bond in 16 years,” Stewart said. “That’s from 1997 to today, that’s the year the city of Maple Valley became a city, and that’s with less than half of the population then it does today. So for 16 years as the population has more than doubled we haven’t been building the facilities to accommodate the new population that we have. So for 16 years we’ve been accumulating need and more need and more need and not doing anything to address it. The bill has come due, and that’s what happens when you wait 16 years to address a growing need of more than doubling your population.”

Another hurdle to overcome will be reaching the community members who don’t have students in the schools or who live outside the city.

Gilbert-Newall said one way they hope to reach the wider community is by being in front of local businesses, like grocery stores, much in the way Maple Valley Fire and Life Safety did this spring when they were trying to raise support for a levy lid lift. Weaver said that standing in front of businesses would be a new tactic for the Vote Yes committee.

The three committee members also expressed the improving economy should help the bond’s chances.

“I think two years later the economy has picked up, things are better, things feel more settled for many people — hopefully for most people — and the bond is different this time as well, it’s a different set of projects,” Stewart said.

Weaver also pointed to the head counts of students in the schools which continued to rise. Specifically she cited the fact that the district has three of the largest elementary schools in the state, with Lake Wilderness Elementary being the largest.

“We really are reaching that perfect storm,” Weaver said. “We have a growing economy…who is coming out here? Young families. And we already have packed schools. So this nexus of where we are literally going to be forced into a different mode of education. In the next two to three years we are going to be at that point of not being able to do instruction in the way we’re used to now. The urgency is huge.”

Stewart spoke about how the school district helps the community by being a draw for people to move to Maple Valley and the surrounding area and how that has economic benefits, both for individual homeowners and the city as a whole. He went on to say that if the district has to change its format to year-round or double shifting it will have negative impacts on the wider community.

“This is a pivotal moment, not just for the Tahoma School District, but for our city,” Weaver said. “I’m convinced of that.”

Weaver, Stewart, and Gilbert-Newall said that they are encouraged about the chance of the bond passing based in part by what they are hearing in the community and the urgency with which people are talking about the bond and the improved economy.

“They have to make a decision what kind of school district do they want, and really, what kind of community do they want,” Stewart said. “If they want the vision that the school district is painting with this bond — and it’s more than just the high school — it’s the community as a whole, then they have to step up and get involved to make that happen.”