Originally posted on IdahoEdNews.org on November 6, 2025
BOISE, ID – It was a mixed Election Night for school districts seeking bonds and levies.
And West Ada voters sent a mixed message in a pair of highly contested trustee races.
Nevertheless, there are a few takeaways from a muddled round of school elections.
Maybe it’s getting harder to pass a supplemental levy. Twenty-six school districts ran supplemental levies Tuesday night, seeking $101 million. Seventeen passed.
That translates — and no, we never promised you there would be no math today — to a 65% success rate. That doesn’t sound too bad, until you consider the history.
In May, 22 of 24 supplemental levies passed, a 92% success rate.
And from 2016 to 2024, a nine-year period and a sample size of more than 500 levy elections, voters approved 94% of all supplemental levies.
It’s not a good idea to draw sweeping conclusions from Tuesday. It is just one election night, after all. And by their nature, supplemental levies are hyperlocal elections.
But it’s also possible that Tuesday’s results are an early sign of something bigger. Economic uncertainty, maybe. Levy fatigue, maybe. Or a sign that school administrators and trustees — now forced to run levies on more crowded May or November ballots — will have to find new ways to get their message out.
For now, anyway, nine districts will have to do $23.1 million worth of cost-cutting and soul-searching, after Tuesday’s failed levies.
It was a bad night for repeat levies. The Marsh Valley and Valley districts went back to voters Tuesday, five months after locals rejected supplemental levies.
The second round wasn’t any different. Marsh Valley voters turned down a two-year, $2.98 million levy, reduced from May’s proposal. Valley voters again said no to a two-year, $600,000 levy.
Yes, your high school social studies teacher was right. Every vote does count. And that’s never more true than it is in local, low-turnout school elections.
The Valley levy election was the closest race of the night, again. Tuesday’s levy failed by just four votes — closer even than May’s seven-vote margin. It’s a rural district divided. And last week, EdNews’ Sean Dolan took a closer look at self-described “dirt farmer” Dean Dimond’s campaigning against the levies, which has gotten the attention of Secretary of State Phil McGrane, Idaho’s election guru.
But Valley wasn’t the only buzzer-beater Tuesday night. Supplemental levies in Mountain Home and Orofino passed by 20 votes and 14 votes, respectively. A plant facilities levy in Kimberly fell 11 votes short of the needed 55% supermajority.
Special education-related levies pass … mostly. The special education funding shortfall was a recurring theme Tuesday night, as eight districts said they planned to put some supplemental levy dollars into special education services.
Six of these eight levies passed; the exceptions were Kellogg and Marsh Valley.
This isn’t the last word on the issue. State superintendent Debbie Critchfield is proposing a $50 million special education grant program — hoping to narrow the $100 million difference between local needs and state and local funding.
Critchfield has an uphill climb. Legislators balked at addressing SPED this year. And now they are facing a projected $555 million gap between 2026-27 budget requests and state revenues. Tuesday’s elections at least give Critchfield some case studies to point to.
On any given Tuesday, bonds are really tough to pass. Speaking of uphill climbs, three districts ran bond issues Tuesday. All three failed, and none came particularly close to the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass.
You don’t need to be a master prognosticator to see this coming. The math and the odds are stacked against passing a bond issue in Idaho, and that helps explain why fewer than 40% of school bond issues have passed from 2016 to 2024.
But in 2025, schools pitched a shutout that administrators don’t want to see; all six bond issues failed. After Idaho put $1.5 billion of state money into school buildings — and maybe because of Idaho’s historic investment in school buildings — that two-thirds obstacle appears as imposing as ever.
It’s even tougher to pass a bond when no one wants to. On Tuesday, Camas County ran a $1.75 million bond election that can best be called performative. The district needed to run this bond issue, unsuccessfully, in order to qualify for $1.75 mllion in state funding. Before the election, Superintendent Kevin Lancaster said that part of his job was to lose a bond election.
Mission accomplished. The bond issue failed with only 15% support. Evidently, words traveled quickly across the wind-scrubbed Camas Prairie.
A partisan nonpartisan race, a split vote. Trustee elections are nonpartisan, but the two races in Idaho’s largest school district did a pretty good job of hiding that fact.
Incumbents Lori Frasure and Angie Redford courted support from Republican circles and received at least $6,700 in support from the Idaho Majority Club PAC, which is funded in part by several Idaho GOP lawmakers, past and present.
Challengers Dara Ezzell-Pebworth and Meghan Brown received at least $5,400 in support from the Idaho Students First PAC, which has in turn received money from the National Education Association.
The four candidates more or less ran on similar themes. The incumbents touted West Ada’s low property tax levy. The challengers chastised the district’s decision to order former West Ada teacher Sarah Inama to take down a classroom poster depicting multiracial hands and bearing the slogan, “Everyone Is Welcome Here.”
Frasure was re-elected with 54% of the vote, defeating Ezzell-Pebworth in a tight race.
Brown received 61% of the vote, trouncing Redford.
Some elections fall into a pattern. Others just provide puzzlers.
Kevin Richert writes a weekly analysis on education policy and education politics. Look for his stories each Thursday.
Idaho EdNews data analyst Randy Schrader contributed to this report.
