Brown: Will Trump decide B.G. school levy?

I spent some time this week looking at the numbers, and it appears to me like Donald Trump will decide Tuesday’s Battle Ground Public Schools maintenance and operations levy. He apparently decided the Feb. 11 outcome, too.

Now before you turn the page, hear me out. I’ll give you the background and then talk about how I reached my conclusion.

In the almost 40 years I’ve lived in Clark County (always in the Vancouver school district, by the way), Battle Ground school levies and bond issues have been fraught. It’s not unusual for them to pass by a narrow margin, or even to fail, while other districts win easily.

The Feb. 11 election was a classic case. Evergreen and Vancouver passed levies, but Battle Ground’s levy proposal failed by 60 votes, with 10,115 voting in favor and 10,175 against.  It’s on the ballot again Tuesday. As The Columbian’s Brianna Murschel reports, the four-year levy would replace the existing operations levy, raising about $166.3 million with an estimated tax rate of $1.95 per $1,000 of assessed property value each year ­— 27 cents more than the expiring levy. By comparison, on Feb. 11 Evergreen voters approved an operations levy estimated to cost more than $2 per $1,000.

Battle Ground’s spending doesn’t appear out of line. If anything, it’s less than its local peers. Per-student spending in Battle Ground was $17,716 last year, compared with $19,242 in Vancouver and $18,308 in Evergreen, according to the state. And a quick drive past the district’s two large high schools will show their facilities don’t compare favorably with Vancouver or Evergreen.

So why weren’t voters in favor of the levy? I looked at the Feb. 11 election results by precinct, which are available on the county elections webpage, clarkvotes.org. The district covers a large geographical area, from the Vancouver suburbs north to Battle Ground, and on to the northeast corner of Clark County, including Amboy and Yacolt. It is the county’s third-largest in terms of enrollment, serving 13,801 students this year, according to the state schools database.

In the past, the district has seen a big disparity in levy votes between those rural areas and the areas closer to Vancouver. So for my analysis I split the precincts into three groups: Those generally lying north and east of Battle Ground, those lying south and west, and precincts that lie entirely or partially within the Battle Ground city limits.

Sure enough, those traditional disparities were very apparent in the February election. The rural voters in the north and east gave only 42.98 percent approval to the levy. In the city, it was closer, with the levy getting 49.08 percent approval. On the other hand, the precincts south and west of Battle Ground strongly favored the levy, with 55.26 percent voting yes.

So why is there such a difference? Although I’m not aware of any place that publicly collects and disseminates demographic data based on precincts, there are a number of websites that offer this information by ZIP code. I looked at a site, zipdatamaps.com.

I expected to see that people in the north were a lot poorer, suggesting economic forces were at play. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Take ZIP code 98601, which is Amboy. The median household income is $96,000, compared with $93,107 in 98604 (Battle Ground) or $92,450 in 98686, which includes Pleasant Valley. Race isn’t a factor either — the entire district is overwhelmingly white.

So what was the difference? Support of Donald Trump. According to a map published by The New York Times, Trump beat Kamala Harris by 57 percentage points in 98601, Amboy. In 98604, Battle Ground, he won, but narrowly. In 98686, Vancouver, Harris won by 31 percentage points.

In other words, attitudes about national politics seem to have carried over to local schools. That’s sad. But, the Feb. 11 voter turnout was only 33 percent. The levy could pass Tuesday if more voters turn out, especially from those precincts south and west of Battle Ground.