Denouncing Sacramento for a school district’s financial troubles may be satisfying — and valid –  but it’s a poor strategy for convincing voters to pass a parcel tax, according to pollsters who surveyed  voters in Santa Clara County last month.  Their advice to school trustees looking to a parcel tax to help survive the bleak next few years: Don’t whine and don’t scapegoat. It won’t cut it to blame the state for your district’s financial troubles. Instead, convince voters that you have a plan to improve core academic programs.

The pollsters’ conclusion, that passing a parcel tax would be tough but doable, follows last Tuesday’s election in which seven of 11 parcel taxes passed statewide. Parcel taxes in two districts got less than the requisite two-thirds majority but more than the 55 percent threshold that Sen. Joe Simitian is proposing with a stalled proposed constitutional amendment SCA 6. (Only parcel taxes in Long Beach and Oxnard failed to get even majority support.)

EMC Research of Oakland and TBWB Strategies of San Francisco surveyed 900 likely voters in 2010. Their message is counterintuitive: It might seem obvious to stress the severe impact on programs of further cuts in state aid.

But dire warnings, Janet Bernstein of EMC and Jared Boigon of TBWB said, tend to reinforce negative impressions of schools, particularly among the 76 percent of voters without kids in public schools.  In the survey, 49 percent of voters said that state budget cuts were not the real of problem with education quality, compared with 38 percent who recent cuts have “severely impacted” local schools.

Success, they said, would come down to winning over an ambivalent 16 percent – those who, on the one hand, agree that schools need more money, while also believing that taxes are already high enough.

Trustees can take comfort in knowing that 65 percent in the poll said that even in this economy, they would vote for a generic parcel tax, without mentioning specific uses for the money or specifying the amount of the tax. But then given choices, 75 percent said they’d support a $50 tax and 67 percent said they’d back a parcel tax of $100 but only 53 percent would favor a $200 tax. The implication: Don’t try to solve your deficit all at once; go for a smaller ask and a shorter time frame. School boards need to build trust for the long haul.

Next year, there will be three chances to put a parcel tax on the ballot: by mail in the spring, at districts’ expense; in the June primary or the November general election. The latter would be too late for the 2010-11 fiscal year, but it also would likely draw a bigger Democratic turnout – a plus for a parcel tax.

The pollsters said a strategy that emphasized improving key academic subjects – math, science and English – would be better received than to imply that sports and the arts would be cut if a parcel tax weren’t passed.

Success, they said, would come down to winning over an ambivalent 16 percent – those who, on the one hand, agree that schools need more money, while also believing that taxes are already high enough. They need to be convinced that spending more money will bring results.

At the risk of questioning the wisdom of the crowd, I’d say that any effective campaign would need multiple strategies. In order to fire up parents and teachers to go door to door and do phone banks, parcel tax advocates would be foolish not to talk about what’s at risk because of further state cuts. And if art and music are truly on the block, say so while talking up the academic progress the district has made.

In taxing every property owner the same amount, regardless of size or value, parcel taxes are regressive. And they can widen the wealth disparity among districts. Palo Alto Unified’s parcel tax is $493, while voters in Franklin-McKinley School District, in a low-income area of San Jose, stretched to approve one for $72 per year.

But the parcel tax is also about the only local revenue option that districts have. It has been used primarily in the Bay Area, so it may be problematic projecting the results of the Santa Clara County poll to other parts of the state. However, the pollsters deliberately omitted contacting voters in those communities that have approved high parcel taxes – Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Los Altos – because they’d skew the results.

The California Teachers Association funded the poll. Bernstein and Boigon summarized the findings for county school trustees but did not release detailed data.

(Note to Santa Clara County readers: In the poll, voters from Morgan Hill were the least receptive to a parcel tax, with a bare majority. Just under two-thirds of San Jose Unified voters were favorable and more than 67 percent of East San Jose and Mountain View voters said they’d back one.)