Citizen involvement is the key to school planning and getting the voters to approve the bond issues in a fast-growing Michigan district. (Author/MLF)

Superintendent of Antigo Unified School District, Antigo, Wisconsin, explains the use of school-level and community-level data to build support for bond and budget referenda. Describes the benefits of data-driven decision-making. (PKP)

A small rural Missouri school district successfully campaigned for an 81-cent tax increase: 38 cents for a levy to operate schools, and a 43-cent bond issue that would allocate money to build new facilities. Passage of the referendum required at least a year of hard work and planning, positive advertisements, and a lot of community involvement.…

Issuing municipal bonds requires many decisions and involves a number of individuals. Traces basic and essential steps to ensure a successful endeavor. (MLF)

Thanks to previous bond issues, the Walled Lake (Michigan) Schools had a well-defined technology plan featuring staff development, student performance benchmarks, and rooms of outdated computers. After three bond issues failed, the district adopted leasing as an alternative. Their present three-year contract supplies 154 used computers and a…

Examines how an Illinois school district used teamwork and planning to acquire state funding for construction and renovation of two high schools. Planning efforts included conducting a community-based strategic planning, researching the funding program, working closely with state organizations for acquiring grant funds, educating the community,…

Within the general framework of a multifactor term structure model, the fundamental partial differential equation (PDE) satisfied by a default-free zero-coupon bond price is derived via a martingale-oriented approach. Using this PDE, a result characterizing a model belonging to an exponential affine class is established using only a system of…

Despite the recent upheaval in public finance, the typical school district still approaches, organizes, and perceives a school finance referendum no differently than 40 years ago. Political strategy remains a rather shunned, undeveloped resource at a time when election success is most needed and when school administrators cannot take public…

One alternative to the insurance crisis faced by school districts is self-insurance, either through pooling or capital market funding. After a brief discussion of the insurance issue, research and literature dealing specifically with self-insurance through pooling and capital market funding are described. Finally, an assesment is made of the…

A review is presented of the history and evolution of general obligation school bonds and capital outlay financing for public education. Following a discussion of past legislation of several states concerned with school borrowing, the evolution of school bonding is explained in terms of increased school financing from 1900 through 1958.…