Thursday night saw the “formal” kick-off meeting for the campaign to pass November’s school levy. There had obviously been many meetings before that, initially to just get this thing on the ballot in the first place, and more recently just to track what the School Board was up to and get ready for this larger meeting. But Thursday was over 30 people, where we’d been running 6 to a dozen for months, had an agenda, brochures and flyers, and sub-groups working on specific tasks. Crazy! We even raised $700 to help pay for campaign materials, and sold out an order of 80 lawn signs, which was pretty darn cool.
The turn-out was still University heavy, but a lot more balanced than any previous MARQS event. Even if it’s possible that the U community can carry this thing on their own, it’s clear (to me, at least) that we don’t want to go that route. Having a significant part of town resenting the U community for “imposing” higher taxes on them just isn’t a happy thought. Luckily the last two school measures (the 2000 levy that the state revoked a year later, and the vote 3 years ago to build the wonderful new elementary school building that just opened) passed with substantial majorities that included major support from across the community, so hopefully we can get the same broad support for this levy.
Oh, and WeatherGirl got to do the welcome and overview of the meeting (damn near killed her – she hates public speaking – but she handled it fine) and got elected MARQS treasurer :-). And almost every “official” speaker went out of their way to point out how wonderfully useful the MARQS website is. It’s a really nice example of how a decent tool (WordPress in this case) and a focussed webmaster who cares (WeatherGirl in this case) can make something really useful without a huge amount of effort or getting all fancy. I think it’s indicative that there are 32 posts from several different people and 9 “static” information pages (that have in fact been edited and updated quite often). If we’d tried to run this by just editing static HTML (which is how it started life) I can pretty much assure that it would have updated much less often and be much less useful in many important ways.
Now we have to make good on all this promise and get this thing passed. Gooooooo TEAM!!!!
