Looking back, the ringing battle cry of the No on Vouchers campaign was definitely transmitted by telephone. Thousands of CTA members, leaders and staff, with hundreds of coalition partners from other unions, organizations and the community, made more than a million phone calls to voters.
In addition, volunteers wrote thousands of postcards, spoke out at scores of community forums and media events, and held rallies to communicate the importance of opposing Prop. 38.
In all of CTA's four regions, dedicated volunteers staffed phone banks night after night. Teachers, staff and community members - including students from a Catholic girls' high school - made heroic efforts to help voters understand how vouchers would hurt public schools.
Makeshift phonebank-in-a-box aids volunteer effort.
Many areas, among them Georgetown, Madera, Nevada City, Placerville, South Lake Tahoe and Tahoe/Truckee, set up phone banks for the very first time.
"In the past, getting phone bankers was like pulling teeth," says Carolina Monroy, a CTA staff consultant who is a veteran of several campaigns. "This time, all our chapters readily participated."
"We wanted to stop efforts by the Draper campaign to mislead the community into thinking that Proposition 38 was good for urban families - and we succeeded," says Inglewood Teachers Association President Jimmy Ellis, whose chapter's phone bank made more than 10,000 calls to Inglewood voters.
For those who couldn't come to the phone banks, the phone banks came to them. The phone-bank-in-a-box program, which provided cell phones, scripts and lists of registered voters all in one package, helped teachers in rural areas especially. "We got these boxes in places where they have never phoned before," says Shirley Guy, CTA political consultant. "The effort was very successful."
The phone-bank-in-a-box also came in handy in Los Angeles, says Sharron Lewis-Campbell, a classroom teacher on loan to the campaign. She used it to organize No on 38 phone banks at NAACP headquarters.
"These people believe in public education," she says. "They came because they didn't want to see money taken away from public schools."
CTA-Retired members Jack Walters and Yvonne Adams from San Diego work the phones.
Lewis-Campbell maintains that CTA not only benefitted from the volunteer efforts in the campaign, but also from the valuable relationships that were initiated. "These people are sincere in working to make education better," she says. "They are committed to working on this effort now that the campaign is over."
"The membership response to the call for volunteers was incredible," says Steve Savage, president of the South San Francisco Classroom Teachers Association. "Teachers were incensed by Tim Draper's threat to public education, to education funding and to their jobs. They got behind this fight whole-heartedly."
Savage expended enough energy in organizing phone banks and spreading the word to members that he recharged his chapter.
"Organizing was my personal goal as president and, let me tell you, this has been a fabulous tool. It's been a positive experience for new members and it's re-energized our veterans."
It was a similar story in the Riverside City Teachers Association. Chapter President Dennis Hodges says, as early as last July, his members started participating in a weekly community event at which they distributed reading information and homework tips to parents. In September, teachers began registering voters and handing out campaign materials. In the final weeks of the campaign, they brought along the equipment necessary to show the No on 38 video on a continuous loop.
It had been a chapter goal to get more involved in the community. "It was really a very positive experience," says Hodges. He believes chapter volunteers really helped sway opinion.
"It didn't look good for us at first, but when teachers started calling the public, the public started responding," says Orange Service Center chair Jim Rogers, who helped organize a series of anti-38 rallies to energize voters in Orange County.
"It gets tiresome when politicians create a situation of 'need' and then say they need to come in and fix things." He says the victory renewed his faith in people. "I'm relieved that the voters in California really do support public schools - even with all the negative rhetoric that's been spread around."
