Schools Launch Voter Registration Drive

In what school district officials say is an effort to bring democracy home to parents, 50,000 voter registration cards and form letters were handed out to students this week with a message to parents: Register and vote.

Despite the ambitious aims of the program, Tina Vega, outreach supervisor for the county registrar of voters, said organizers do not expect overwhelming results.

“It’s never really been a big success,” Vega said of school-based efforts to promote voter registration. “Either parents are registered to vote, or [they] won’t register because they are not citizens or are not interested.”

Vega said registration drives at back-to-school nights, for example, have shown lackluster results. In one instance, she said, a PTA group returned only four of 150 registration cards.

Vega said the registrar has the numbers of the applications passed out by the school district and will know after the Feb. 26 deadline how many parents stepped forward to register.

Mike Vail, the Santa Ana Unified School District’s senior director of facilities, said the district was prompted to begin the registration drive after a poll showed that only 17% of registered voters in the city also were parents.

The survey was meant to gauge support for a bond measure to pay for school construction, but district trustees failed to place the measure on the ballot.

The effort, which also included 5,000 packets sent to district staff, cost about $1,200, Vail said.