BROOKSVILLE — Hernando County school officials told voters this fall that they planned to devote about three-fourths of their share of the Penny for Projects sales tax revenue to technology, mostly new computerized tablets.
The Brevard County School District also asked for a sales tax increase in November, but said it would spend less than 3 percent on technology and none on tablets.
"There is no way we would have bought tablets," said district spokeswoman Michele Irwin. "We did not believe our community would support the purchase of tablets."
If Hernando wants to know how to pass a tax to support schools — and the School Board is set to talk about a special election for that purpose next month — Brevard is one of five counties in Florida that might be able to help.
Voters in those counties all approved school-only tax referendums this fall while Hernando voters decisively rejected Penny for Projects, a 1-cent sales tax that would have been shared by schools, Hernando County and the city of Brooksville.
Those five counties included liberal-leaning Palm Beach and Broward counties, where voters might be expected to support taxes, but also Republican-dominated Escambia, Marion and Brevard counties.
"Ours is a very conservative community," Irwin said of Brevard, which rejected a school-only tax in 2012.
She and other backers of successful tax efforts used some of the same tactics as advocates for Hernando's Penny: promising to spend the money on specific purposes and assigning a community group to ensure that the district lived up to this pledge.
The Hernando School Board, after agreeing to work with the city and county earlier this year, will now discuss a school-only tax. Advocates in other counties said that was crucial to their success.
But most of those campaigns also lasted at least a year. A special election might not leave adequate time, they said, and carries added costs that could send the wrong message about fiscal responsibility.
As was the case in Hernando, advocates of taxes in other counties raised money for campaign ads. But they also did something that critics said was notably absent here: They built grass roots campaigns.
Irwin helped spearhead the campaign in Brevard.
She got around restrictions on public employees advocating for taxes, she said, by using her position to educate voters about the tax, not promote it. She also devoted her own time — when the restrictions don't apply — as did the teachers she enlisted.
"We knew we had to capture employees," she said.
They, in turn, recruited parents, partly by passing out leaflets that listed the cuts that would come if the tax didn't pass — including elementary school art classes — and what the tax would pay for: "Roofs, security systems, HVAC (air-handling) systems, bandwidth — nothing fun."
Irwin said avoiding any seemingly frivolous expense was one reason the district didn't devote money to tablets, which in Hernando were pitched as necessary to meet state technology mandates. Also, she said, the district hopes to find money for the devices through grants or dollars expected to be approved for that purpose by the state Legislature next year.
In Marion County, a volunteer group called Marions United for Public Education led the campaign for a four-year property-tax increase expected to raise $14 million annually, said Ray Seaman, one of the group's founders.
It enlisted teachers unions and parent organizations, Seaman said, whose efforts were more important than the advertisements paid for by a political committee. The committee in Marion raised about $40,000 to promote the school tax, about one-fourth as much as the campaign account for Penny for Projects in Hernando.
"We were able to go to all the school open houses. We met with parents and teachers on the ground. We passed out literature," Seaman said. "What really wins campaigns is voter contact, not carpet bombing with advertisements."
It helped, he said, that the goal of the tax was both short, four years, and narrowly focused on elementary school libraries and art, music and physical education teachers.
His group didn't have to sound the alarm that these jobs would be cut. The community had been mobilized by announced layoffs of noncore positions the previous year.
"That was the first mass layoff in the district's history," he said, and voters realized "the district had come to the end of its rope."
The referendum passed comfortably, receiving 54 percent of the vote, but not by nearly as wide a margin as the one in Escambia, where a half-cent sales tax was approved by more than 69 percent of voters.
Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said the district has built credibility with the public by its careful use of its current half-penny tax, which has been used to build schools and add facilities since 1997.
The county's Sales Tax Watch Dog Committee ensures the district spends money from the tax as voters intended and issues a report every three months.
In Hernando, School Board Chairman Gus Guadagnino says he fears that by teaming with the county for the failed Penny for Projects, it has cost the district a crucial advantage. Because the tax expires at the end of this year, the district now will not be able to ask votes for a continuation of an existing tax.
That was a key to Escambia's success, Thomas said — that the district brought the matter to voters three years before its current tax expires. In case it had failed, he said, the district could have still requested a continuation of a tax in 2016.
This year, "we were able to say we're not asking for anything more than we've asked for for the last 15 years," Thomas said.
"I think if we were asking for an additional tax, it would have been a much heavier lift."
Dan DeWitt can be reached at ddewitt@tampabay.com. Follow @ddewitttimes.