Lewis County Auditor Larry Grove checks a ballot box in February 2020.
After more ballots were counted in Tuesday’s school election, two Thurston County districts are — for the moment, at least — breathing sighs of relief.
After the first round of ballots were counted Tuesday night, a North Thurston Public Schools bond was teetering on the edge of passing, a Rochester School District bond was well behind the necessary threshold to pass, and the future of a Yelm Community Schools levy was uncertain.
But North Thurston and Yelm received a boost in the Wednesday evening count.
North Thurston Public Schools gained significant ground, with its bond now pulling in more than 61 percent of the vote with 1,700 ballots left to be counted countywide.
The bond will pay for, among other efforts, safety and security improvements such as secure entrances for all schools, “major renovation” to River Ridge High School and Komachin Middle School, maintenance at every school, and upgrades at Horizons elementary, Seven Oaks Elementary, and Meadows Elementary, according to the NTPS website.
“I’m so happy,” Superintendent Debra Clemens said Thursday in a phone interview with The Olympian. “I just feel like we know what our community needs us to do, and they’ve given us this overwhelming support and we’re going to make it happen.”
Rochester School District’s capital bond did not experience the same boost: It gained 370 yes votes and 222 no votes in the latest round of results and sits almost 4 percentage points below the necessary 60 percent. Superintendent Kim Fry said the district said the Thursday night count would make the outcome clear.
“It’s creeping up, but I don’t think it’s going to make it over the bar,” Fry said Thursday. “It’s very close. Clearly a majority of our community feels this is an important proposition for the safety of our students and the experiences that our students will be able to have during their high school years.”
The Rochester bond would’ve gone toward a building addition to Rochester High School, among other projects.
Fry said the district will “go back to the drawing board” to decide what it will bring back to voters and when it will ask for community feedback on what it will take to get 60-percent-level support.
Yelm Community Schools’ replacement operations levy, which was in limbo Tuesday, crept further above the simple majority it needs to pass. But the district isn’t celebrating yet.
In initial counts, the levy had just under 51 percent of the vote; as of Thursday, that number edged to 51.7 percent.
“We’re up 218 votes, and I’m not sure there’s 200 votes still out to be counted,” Yelm Superintendent Brian Wharton said in a phone interview with The Olympian Thursday morning. “We’re not throwing the party yet, but we feel a lot better than we did the other day.”
About 20 percent of levy dollars this year will go toward special education, Wharton said, and that was his first thought when the original results came in.
“That is always the biggest concern, because what we get for state and federal dollars for special education doesn’t approach the services we’re providing for kids,” Wharton said. “When you start thinking about levies passing and not passing, that’s where my mind went: to those students and how we would provide services without the levy.”
The local trend of levies, which need a simple majority to pass, succeeding while bonds, which require a super majority, struggle to get the necessary votes was reflected statewide.
Only 5 out of 16 capital bond measures in the state were passing in early results Tuesday, while 25 of 27 levies were passing, according to a press release from State Superintendent Chris Reykdal.
