BRUSH PRAIRIE, Wash. — At the southern end of the Battle Ground school district, you're just as likely to pass a field of horses as you are new homes still under construction.
Signs advertise newly built homes and townhouses, while families stream in and out of open houses in new subdivisions.
This is an area that illustrates the pressures Battle Ground Public Schools describes at its southern campuses, where there are more students than the schools were built to serve, with more growth expected in the coming years as development marches on.
"How can we service that many kids with school psychologists, nurses?" Superintendent Mark Ross said in an interview with The Columbian last month. "What size library do we need? What size cafeteria do we need?"
But the south end of the district also appears to overwhelmingly support school bonds to pay for facilities. Election results at the precinct level — small voting districts — suggest southern neighborhoods supported last month's school bond, in some cases by more than 70%. Precincts in the city of Battle Ground itself also supported the $224.9 million bond measure, which ultimately failed last month with 58.7% support. Bond measures require 60% support to win.
The district will run the same bond measure in an April 24 special election.
Support, meanwhile, is scarce in rural parts of the district, suggesting an urban-rural divide. Clark County's largest district stretches from Washington State University Vancouver in the south to the county borders in the north. Areas north and east of the city rejected the proposal, and only one precinct north of Battle Ground voted to approve the bond.
In one precinct east of the city, for example, only 37.3% of people voted in favor of the bond — the lowest support in any precinct. That same precinct also had one of the highest turnout rates in the 55-precinct district: 44.4%. The district overall had 36.4% turnout.
While relatively high turnout rates and low support are hallmarks of these precincts, neither bar is hard to meet given the sparse population in rural Clark County. That same precinct has only 151 registered voters total, 67 of whom voted in February's election. Of those, 25 supported the bond.
Precincts at the south end, meanwhile — those where neighborhood schools will receive the brunt of the funding should the bond pass — saw the opposite effect. While support and population are high, turnout trends low. The precinct surrounding Prairie High School, for example, approved the February bond measure with 78.3%, the highest rate of support in the district. But only 23.7% of the neighborhood's 1,399 registered voters returned their ballots. That's 331 votes.
Shawna Barttelt lives in the south end of the district and is among the bond measure's supporters. The mother of three and her family purchased their home three years ago after struggling to find a place in their price range. For her family and others, the area offers affordability and the security of a recently built home.
But Barttelt, whose son attends Glenwood Heights Primary School, worries how overcrowding on campus may affect her children's education. She supported last month's school bond election, and plans to again in April.
"We love our school, but they need to be replaced," Barttelt said. "We see firsthand the overcrowding and also all the new construction going on around us."
The co-chairs for the Battle Ground Citizens for Better Schools, Cathy Golik and Sue Cranke, hope precincts like Barttelt's will help turn the results for the district. It's unlikely "no" votes will become "yes" votes, they say, but they hope knocking on doors and talking to voters in highly populated neighborhoods in those precincts will push the bond over the edge. Volunteers dedicated time to mailers and information districtwide last time, Golik said, but there isn't enough time before the April 24 election to devote energy to the parts of the district that have already turned down the bond measure at such a high rate.
"We don't have the time or the money to rehash that in such a short amount of time," Golik said.
The pair recall 2013's levy election in the district where, in February, 15,978 people voted and the levy failed with 46.6% support. The district ran the same levy in April and, after a significant get-out-the-vote campaign, 20,718 people voted and the levy passed with 56.3% support.
Cranke hopes the district will see that same groundswell of support.
"They passed it in a short period of time because people got involved," Cranke said.
