Other cities make commitments

When just more than half of Portland voters said “yes” to the Children’s Investment Fund in 2002, levies for children’s programs in San Francisco and Seattle already had been around for more than a decade.

Seattle

The city of Seattle’s Families and Education Levy first passed in 1990 with 57 percent of the vote, a seven-year $69.5 million levy directed at making kids healthy, safe and ready to learn. Then-Mayor Norm Rice had promised to make education a priority, said Sid Sidorowicz, strategic adviser for Seattle’s Office for Education. Voters renewed the levy in 1997, with 61 percent support, though some buying power was lost to inflation.

When planning began for the 2004 renewal campaign, an oversight committee decided to focus the measure more on student learning. Following a period of community outreach, a 45-member advisory committee came up with objectives focused on children entering kindergarten ready to learn, achieving the standards set for their grade and graduating from high school. The Education Office would measure attendance, changes in grade-point average and other indicators to ensure accountability, Sidorowicz said.

“Accountability is something we heard a lot about,” he said, explaining that voters felt they had invested for 14 years but kids were still dropping out and failing. “We took that to heart.”

The Education Office also planned to share data with the school district to determine which kids were using which programs and whether behavior patterns and performance were improving.

In 2004, a seven-year, $116 million levy was placed before voters, who passed it with 62 percent of the vote. All the money now flows into the city’s Education Office, which contracts for the services. No more than 5 percent of the funds raised can be used for levy operations. In addition, the levy won’t pay more than 10 percent of the administrative fees of a program it funds. The current levy rate is 13.8 cents per $1,000 of assessed value.

“If you don’t set a way of establishing priorities, the need is vast, and you can’t decide how to organize services so they build upon one another,” Sidorowicz said.

San Francisco

In 1991, some 54.5 percent of San Francisco voters approved amending the city charter to create the Children’s Fund. The action sets aside a portion of property taxes every year equivalent to 30 cents for every $1,000 of assessed value. Nine years later, voters renewed that fund with 74 percent of the vote, said Jill Fox, communications coordinator for the city’s Department of Children, Youth and their Families.

The first levy lasted 10 years; the new one will last until 2015. The levy works on three-year funding cycles. The first year, community outreach is conducted to determine what services are most needed. That information is compiled and discussed with the youth commission, the school district, and the city’s board of supervisors. The results become the program areas for the future and requests for proposals are distributed to nonprofits to meet those needs. This way, the fund is constantly addressing the needs residents feel are the most pressing, Fox said.

In 2007, 362 grants were awarded to 211 different agencies for a total of $73 million. The city has served 40,600 children and youth and 3,700 parents and caregivers. More than one-third of the city’s 112,000 children are being “directly touched” by the programs, Fox said, adding, “as wonderful as it is, we had about 700 proposals and funded about 350 of them.”

A diverse campaign promoted the levy, with the Teamsters Union making calls, ads placed in newspapers and bus shelters, and street theater performances.

“The green community declared kids to be the most important natural resource. The gay community got involved,” Fox said. “It was about getting all the diverse interests aware of the benefits of supporting children’s services.”