WICHITA, Kansas — Wichita school leaders said they will wait for final results of Tuesday’s bond issue election before deciding next steps on addressing the district’s facility needs.
Unofficial results updated Wednesday by the Sedgwick County Election Office show bond opponents leading by just under 300 votes, with more than 4,000 potential mail and provisional ballots still to be counted.
The district is seeking a $450 million bond issue to finance school construction, upgrades and repairs.
Wichita Superintendent Kelly Bielefeld said the district will regroup after the final tally and decide what to do next.
“Facility needs have not gone away and won’t until we have funds to address them,” Bielefeld said during a news conference at Black Traditional Magnet Elementary School, which is slated to be rebuilt as part of the current bond plan.
“I don’t think ignoring it or kicking the can down the road is the right approach. It’s not my approach,” he said. “My approach is to hit it head-on and try to do what we need to do to make our community a better place and improve our outcomes for kids.”
Mail ballots can be counted until Friday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. Results won’t be final until a vote canvass March 6.
Neal Allen, a political science professor at Wichita State University, said the tight election is not a surprise, given the district’s demographics and the current political climate.
Allen said progressive causes tend to do well in special elections and primaries, such as when Kansas voters rejected an August 2022 ballot measure that would have stripped away abortion rights.
But there’s still a strong anti-tax, limited-government sentiment — even in urban areas that tend to lean left.
“The ‘vote yes’ campaign did a good job having a short message that taxes would not increase,” Allen said. “But it’s a hard thing to convince voters that your taxes won’t go up even though you’re authorizing new spending.”
He said the national conversation around government spending was also a challenge for bond supporters.
“What’s going on in Washington right now has an indirect effect, at best, on school capital outlay,” he said. “But it makes sense for voters to make a connection between federal government chaos over spending and then, at the same time, a local school district asking for a bond issue.”
Allen said early and absentee votes in the bond election leaned slightly toward opponents, which is a reversal of recent trends.
“It really shows that the 'no side' got organized very well and has spent a lot of money,” he said.
Bond opposition spokesman Ben Davis, head of Wichita United for Better Education, said he expected a tight election.
“This thing was always a little difficult to gauge because it really did transcend traditional party lines,” said Davis, a Republican strategist and former campaign manager for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach.
He said some Democrats opposed the bond because of the district’s plan to close schools or questions about overall spending. And some Republicans voted yes as a general message of support for public schools.
“It wasn’t going to be automatically predictable,” Davis said. “But I feel fairly confident that the no’s will win it at the end of the day.”
Depending on the outcome, the district could request a recount.
They could also do what leaders in the Kansas City, Kan., district did last year: After Kansas City voters rejected a $420 million bond in April, the district came back with a $180 million bond, which voters approved last November.
Wichita school board president Diane Albert would not say Wednesday whether a scaled-down bond issue could be an option.
“We still have things to solve and needs to address,” Albert said. “And so it’s all hands on-deck, and we’re going to look for creative solutions to solve the problems that we face.”
Bielefeld, the superintendent, said school board actions in coming weeks and months will show how the district continues to deal with aging buildings.
“You’ll see millions of dollars that we’re putting into repairing buildings — just the foundations of our buildings,” he said. “Those dollars don’t help kids learn and read. They just help keep our buildings open.”
Suzanne Perez reports on education for KMUW in Wichita and the Kansas News Service.
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