The day after getting home from our honeymoon, my wife came running into the living room, yelling with joy. The photos from our wedding photographer had finally arrived. We looked through the images and laughed at all the little things that hadn’t gone to plan, and appreciated the moments that had turned out perfectly. “That was the best day of my life,” she said to me as we finished looking through, “but I would never want to pull that together again.”
For school administrators, I would imagine that the end of a bond or levy campaign feels something like this. According to the stories we’ve heard, the process is impossibly hard. Each step requires meticulous planning and hard work—and most of the time, the work is completely unfamiliar, unlike anything the district has undertaken before. There’s no manual on how to pass a bond in your district. But then, if all goes well, you’ve pulled off an extraordinary event. For bond and levy campaigns, you will change the lives of thousands of students, staff, and community members for decades to come.
In this special edition of SchoolCEO, we’re diving into school referenda. In some ways, the bond process is the ultimate marketing effort—a test of the community’s trust in your schools.
So to tackle this mammoth topic, we started interviewing industry experts: architects and investment firms. Then, we turned to those in the trenches. We talked through the campaigns of over fifty successful districts who ran bonds between 2016 and 2019.
What we quickly learned is that each campaign is unique. One school leader’s advice might directly contradict another’s. So for this topic, we’re taking a new approach. Instead of bringing you a guide to passing a bond, we’ll be sharing wisdom from districts that have succeeded, with lessons they learned along the way.
Think of this as a clearinghouse of ideas that have worked for others. We hope you can find your own district in some of these stories, then borrow the ideas that worked. And if you like this edition, look out for more strategies and ideas in Part 2, coming out in February!
The day after getting home from our honeymoon, my wife came running into the living room, yelling with joy. The photos from our wedding photographer had finally arrived. We looked through the images and laughed at all the little things that hadn’t gone to plan, and appreciated the moments that had turned out perfectly. “That was the best day of my life,” she said to me as we finished looking through, “but I would never want to pull that together again.”
For school administrators, I would imagine that the end of a bond or levy campaign feels something like this. According to the stories we’ve heard, the process is impossibly hard. Each step requires meticulous planning and hard work—and most of the time, the work is completely unfamiliar, unlike anything the district has undertaken before. There’s no manual on how to pass a bond in your district. But then, if all goes well, you’ve pulled off an extraordinary event. For bond and levy campaigns, you will change the lives of thousands of students, staff, and community members for decades to come.
In this special edition of SchoolCEO, we’re diving into school referenda. In some ways, the bond process is the ultimate marketing effort—a test of the community’s trust in your schools.
So to tackle this mammoth topic, we started interviewing industry experts: architects and investment firms. Then, we turned to those in the trenches. We talked through the campaigns of over fifty successful districts who ran bonds between 2016 and 2019.
What we quickly learned is that each campaign is unique. One school leader’s advice might directly contradict another’s. So for this topic, we’re taking a new approach. Instead of bringing you a guide to passing a bond, we’ll be sharing wisdom from districts that have succeeded, with lessons they learned along the way.
Think of this as a clearinghouse of ideas that have worked for others. We hope you can find your own district in some of these stories, then borrow the ideas that worked. And if you like this edition, look out for more strategies and ideas in Part 2, coming out in February!