By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Strip away Cheviot and Green Township from Tuesday's vote and Cincinnati Public Schools' $480 million bond issue would have passed.

Indeed, if the Cincinnati Public Schools district did not extend beyond the city limits, then Cincinnatians Active to Support Education (CASE) and the Cincinnati Board of Education would be celebrating today instead of trying to figure out where to go from here.

But about 14 percent of the votes cast Tuesday were from suburban voters who live in the Cincinnati school district. A number of suburban Hamilton County communities are entirely or partially within the district - Cheviot, Silverton, Golf Manor, Amberley Village and parts of Green, Springfield, Sycamore, Delhi and Columbia townships.

The same block of anti-tax voters who thumbed their noses at the idea of building a light-rail system gave the back of their hands to the school system's ambitious plan to build schools and refurbish old ones.

And the weather - cold, wet and raw - pushed down the turnout just enough in Cincinnati's inner-city wards, where the public schools are the most dilapidated and in need of replacement, to prevent the 4.89 mill, 28-year bond issue from passing.

"It seemed like everything was lined up against us,'' said Brewster Rhoads, the veteran political operative who ran the pro-bond issue campaign for CASE.

Tuesday night's unofficial vote count had the bond issue failing by 1,355 votes out of more than 87,000 cast.

Cheviot and the Green Township precincts in the school district were enough on their own to kill the school issue; with 5,500 votes cast in those precincts, the issue failed by 3,003 votes.

High homeownership areas - 62 percent in Cheviot and 87 percent in Green Township - are usually the hardest areas for tax issue campaigns to crack. They are also areas where the percentage of children attending private rather than public schools is high - 45 percent in Green Township and 43 percent in Cheviot. Without Cheviot and Green Township votes Tuesday, the ballot issue would have passed by 1,288 votes.

Those Cheviot and Green Township voters, Mr. Rhoads said, "have been part of the district historically, but they don't identify with it.''

But the issue failed, too, in Mount Washington and in some of the city's largest west side wards, including Price Hill, Covedale, College Hill, and Westwood - some of city's most conservative wards.

In a school district where 71 percent of the elementary and high school students are African-American, the school issue could be expected to do well in the city's predominately black wards, and it did.

But turnout in black wards was slightly lower than the districtwide turnout of 40.7 percent; and that may have made a difference.

Ishton Morton, the get-out-the-vote coordinator for the Cincinnati Chapter of the NAACP, said he spent Tuesday in black precincts around the city and concluded that the lack of polling places - with sometimes three or four precincts voting at one location - contributes to lower voter turnout.

"Low-income people, people without cars, are somehow expected to stand in the rain for a bus and then get a transfer to another bus just to get to the polls,'' Mr. Morton said. "No wonder a lot of people just throw up their hands and say `forget it.'"

Pinkie Williams, a 68-year-old Evanston grandmother whose children and grandchildren have gone to Cincinnati Public Schools, spent a frustrating day Tuesday working for Democratic candidates to get voters to the polls in black neighborhoods.

"There are people out there who have all their lives heard it doesn't do any good to vote, it doesn't matter; and it's hard to break through that," Mrs. Williams said.

"We have young people in this neighborhood whose mothers were 15 years old when they were born," Mrs. Williams said. "They try real hard, but what could they teach them about being a citizen?

"I'd love to go down and register those mean little guys on the street corner with their pants hanging down," Mrs. Williams said. "They're old enough to vote. But they're not going to."

But Mrs. Williams blames Cincinnati Public as much as she does the voters for the difficulty in passing school ballot issues.

"The school board never seems to fulfill its promises," Mrs. Williams said. "People get tired of it."

Lawyer Christopher Finney, treasurer of Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST), said he believes the school board asked for too much from property owners in an election where they were also being asked to fund light rail and elderly services.

But Mr. Rhoads believes there was a general anti-tax sentiment among many voters Tuesday, "because they seemed to be hearing an anti-tax, anti-government message from every candidate from the president on down."

CASE and its allies went to extraordinary lengths to try to pump up voter turnout in areas of the city that historically support school ballot issues, Mr. Rhoads said, with phone bank operations, door-to-door leafleting and high-visibility gimmicks such as volunteers with signs on busy street corners.

"It just wasn't enough," Mr. Rhoads said. "We tried everything, but there were just a lot of people out there who couldn't goose themselves to go to the polls."

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com