Editorial holds funding foes' feet to fire.

Madison, Wisc., is a community that has long been strongly supportive of its public schools. Over the years, the support has gone beyond rhetoric. In referendum after referendum, the citizens here have voted to approve extra spending for the schools, even as neighboring districts routinely rejected such requests.

In February 1997, though, the voters' mood was much more skeptical, and a last-minute, high-cost advertising campaign fed that skepticism. A referendum asked voters to approve exceeding a state-mandated revenue cap to fund maintenance needs that had long been deferred as the schools pumped more money into classrooms.

The debate proceeded in the usual fashion until the last week before the election. Then the state Realtors association, the two largest shopping malls in town, and a major insurance company all chipped in big money to fund a TV blitz opposing the referendum.

This sort of spending was unprecedented in school elections. And it worked. The voters defeated the referendum.

That was the backdrop for our February 20 editorial School foes warp election, one of five Capital Times editorials to earn the newspaper the first-place award in the Inland Press Association's national Editorial Excellence competition last October.

The Capital Times had supported a "yes" vote on the referendum. We had criticized the business intervention in the campaign in its waning days. We saw the expensive media blitz as a distortion of the conversation between voters and elected officials that a referendum is supposed to represent. And so in this editorial two days after the election, we laid out in greater detail the way we saw this blitz undermining the electoral process. We called the referendum foes to now devote some of their energy and their cash to improving the schools.

It's worth noting that the malls to a large degree and the insurance company to a lesser degree are advertisers with our paper. It's also worth noting that we never felt any pressure from them or from our publisher to trim our sails on this issue.

We were not alone in our outrage. Some community groups launched boycotts of the mall and the insurance company. The boycotts did not have a great economic impact, but they did turn up the heat on these businesses. As the year went on, the Realtors joined the schools in a partnership to promote the public schools to new residents, and the insurance company made peace with the schools, even acknowledging it perhaps had not done its homework before opposing the referendum.

The district attorney has not brought charges against the organizers of the ad campaign, although the case is still open. There has not been any subsequent referendum. The question now is, will big-money politics be a regular part of the landscape on school votes, or was the February blitz an aberration?

We're hoping that the heat we helped generate in February will keep it in the category of an aberration.

NCEW member Phil Haslanger is editorial page editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.