An initiative round-up

NEA Today, Jan 1999

The Colorado vote against tuition tax credits turned out to be just one of nine initiative and referendum victories scored by NEA members in November.

On the West Coast, the California Teachers Association successfully supported a $9.2 billion bond measure for school construction and repair and defeated an initiative that would have created an unaccountable school bureaucracy and cost public schools tens of millions of dollars each year.

In Oregon, voters turned back a "paycheck protection" initiative. The measure, opposed by the Oregon Education Association, aimed to prohibit payroll deduction for any organization that used any of the deducted funds for political purposes.

A similar initiative was defeated in California last June. Behind both measures were groups pushing tax subsidies for private education.

In Nebraska, voters soundly rejected a measure that would have limited the amount of money state and local governments could raise through taxes.