Brecksville-Broadview Heights Levy Campaign Under Way

Superintendent Scot Prebles wants the community to know that he thinks the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District will be more than able to maintain the quality of its programs with the budget cuts the Board of Education recently approved. 

“I feel good right now about the state of the school district,” Prebles said during a levy campaign meeting for the district Thursday night. 

His fear? That if more cuts are necessary, he won’t be able to say the same thing. 

The Brecksville-Broadview Heights Board of Education voted last month to put a five-year, 5.3-mill levy on the May 3 ballot. A 5.8-mill levy attempt in November failed. Thursday’s meeting was to drum up support for the cause and gather volunteers to do some of the work on the ground.

They have a lot of work ahead of them if they want the levy to pass. Levy campaign co-chairman Greg Skaljac compared election day to Sunday’s Super Bowl, calling this a “must-win” levy.

“We can’t just show up and play,” Skaljac said. 

The levy’s campaign steering committee is made up of Prebles, Skaljac (who is also a member of Brecksville's City Council), Megan Sarfi and David Schroedel. They also have a number of other community members who already have signed on to work as the campaign manager, treasurer and the heads of subcommittees. But they need more hands to get everything done, Skaljac said.

Cathy Harbinak, the district’s coordinator of community relations who is heading up the campaign’s communications team, estimated that more than 100 community members attended Thursday’s meeting at the . After the presentations—and a performance from the high school’s Pep Band—people had the chance to talk with leaders of the different teams and sign up if they were interested.

The teams include:

• Communications, which would deal with areas like social media,
• Fundraising,
• Ground and field, which would need people to work on events like rallies or town hall meetings,
• Voter identification and registration, and
• Literature creation, such as postcards.

The presentations also briefly addressed the collection of the board passed last month. 

The district is framing the cuts as a way to change how they operate – the cuts will not be repealed if the levy passes. The superintendent called this a “maintenance levy,” and said that it is made necessary by the state’s funding system. Ohio’s system relies heavily on local funding and had been ruled unconstitutional four times in the past. Former Gov. Ted Strickland had introduced a new system designed to fix this inequity, but it was not fully funded. The Columbus Dispatch reported in September that Gov. John Kasich plans to repeal it.

The district hasn’t shied away from the tough decisions in the meantime. The budget cuts will touch all areas of the district, from transportation costs to high school elective offerings. The district made getting community input on these cuts a priority. Prebles said district representatives met with about 40 focus groups and held , using that feedback with other input to create the plan.

Levy campaign co-chairman Schroedel praised the district’s efforts on the cuts, saying he had never seen a district react in that way. The community wanted them to spend money in a different way, he said, and now the district will. 

“They’ve done their part,” Schroedel said, “and now it’s up to us to do our part to get this levy passed.”

 Any interested community member who wants to get involved in the campaign can e-mail volunteer coordinator team leader Lila Tamulewicz. Tamulewicz said people can also sign up online.