Fort Worth school voters are shouting: We want better academics. Will trustees listen?

There’s no single explanation for voters’ decision to deny three of the Fort Worth school district’s bond proposals — and barely approve the fourth, if vote totals hold.

The $1.5 billion price tag was huge. The economic climate is uncertain. It was a low-turnout election. The campaign for passage wasn’t robust.

But voters delivered a clear, stinging rebuke Tuesday. Even in our current fractured political climate, school bond propositions generally pass easily, and the verdict on these is a clear warning that voters are unhappy with the district’s performance and losing faith in its leadership.

This Editorial Board recommended that voters pass all four pieces, for the sake of the kids in FWISD, many of them from needy families. But we warned that the district’s lagging academic performance demanded attention.

Now, the voters have said the same, emphatically.

The biggest piece of the package, $1.2 billion for renovating middle schools and other campus construction, appears to have passed by a margin of just 42 votes out of more than 24,600 cast.

Additional mail or provisional ballots and possible recounts mean the matter isn’t yet settled.

The three other propositions, for new sports facilities and fine arts programs, failed by big margins. The closest was about 54 percent to 46 percent; in 2017, the district’s last bond election, two propositions each passed with more than 70 percent approval.

Add up all the votes cast on the four measures, and about 56,000 were against the district’s requests, with about 42,000 for it. That kind of rout in sports or business gets people fired.

School board President Tobi Jackson said the electorate’s message is clear.

“The community of voters demonstrated their desire for academic accountability and school reconstruction as top priorities” by approving the school-construction bond and rejecting the others, she wrote in an email.

The campaign for the bonds was probably rushed. Before Election Day, some complained that there hadn’t been enough opportunity for public input. And it’s been harder for districts to get bonds approved in recent years, especially for sports facilities, a reaction to the suburban football palaces that made national news.

But with little organized opposition and a sleepy overall election, the district should have been able to prevail. The varying margins on the four proposals, as well as the county’s two bond proposals (one of which failed), show many voters made independent decisions. And they didn’t like what they saw from FWISD.

In hindsight, the flaws in strategy are evident. The plan for three new sports stadiums was poorly explained. The bond for fine arts improvements included items that shouldn’t be paid for in bonds, such as audio/visual systems.

Officials made the case better for Proposition A. But a meat-and-potatoes proposal for basic school improvements and construction should have passed easily.

“The voters have expressed to me in conversation that academics are their priority,” Jackson wrote. “As academics grow and stabilize, the voters in our community will look to support ancillary areas such as fine arts and athletics.”

Voters understand what’s happening in the Fort Worth ISD, and they’re not happy about it. It’s a national trend: The pandemic opened a new window into school performance and practices, and parents in many places are angry at what they see.

In Fort Worth, that’s the very basics. FWISD spends nearly $1 billion a year. For homeowners in particular, it’s a tremendous cost. In return, they get a depressingly large number of kids who can’t read or do basic math at grade level.

These are long-term problems, affected by structural societal issues that our schools did not cause and cannot fix. Superintendent Kent Scribner and his team have said that they believe significant progress is at hand, accounting for the setbacks of the pandemic.

Jackson said that the district can improve trust with good stewardship of the construction projects planned under Proposition A.

“This will maintain and grow trust with the community and allow for future bond elections every four years,” she wrote. As for the extracurricular-activity needs, Jackson said FWISD must take steps to get the public “fully engaged” and better communicate needs in the next bond package.

The district could try again in May. Or it could wait four years, the typical time between bond packages. Either way, trustees better listen closely to what voters are telling them. They need to pressure Scribner and perhaps demand leadership changes.

If they don’t, the voters’ only option will be to turn the heat up on the school board itself.