School Voucher Backers Launch Salvo in TV Ad

SACRAMENTO — With less than three weeks remaining before the election, backers of the school voucher initiative on Tuesday launched their first television commercial, which attacks the role played by school employee unions in the opposition campaign.

The spot will air only in Southern California, and not in the San Francisco Bay Area for now, said Ken Khachigian, head of the campaign for Proposition 174, which is on the Nov. 2 ballot.

The pro-Proposition 174 campaign has so far failed to attract significant numbers of traditional Republican and business donors, but Khachigian said he hopes to raise enough money to air more television spots as the election nears. But at a news briefing, Khachigian called it “a major, major disappointment that the business community has taken a walk on this campaign” by not donating.

Proponents of the measure, which would give parents tax-supported vouchers of about $2,600 a year for private school tuition, are struggling in the face of opposition by top public officials, including Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and Democratic President Clinton.

Organized opponents include seven unions and associations representing public schoolteachers, administrators and other school employees.

With a war chest of more than $10 million, opponents have been on radio and television since August attacking Proposition 174 as too risky and costly. They have raised the possibility that tax money would be given to private schools that could discriminate against children.

Rick Manter, manager of the opposition campaign, said the lack of a full-scale television campaign by the initiative’s supporters shows a fundamental weakness.

“That is about as feeble an attempt to generate support for this as I can imagine,” Manter said. “They have no real campaign. . . . There is no support.”

In their first commercial, proponents use a dual theme: the big-spending campaign being waged by foes of Proposition 174, and what it suggests is the poor state of California’s public schools.

The 30-second spot opens with shots of several television screens showing snips of the opponents’ television commercials. It switches to a narrator who emphasizes the role being played by teachers unions in the campaign against the measure.

The narrator is a paid actress who supports Proposition 174 and home-schools her children, Khachigian said. She concludes by saying, “I want the best for my kids. Why don’t they?”

“My guess is that until the next seven, eight days go by, we’re not going to be doing well (in polls) at all,” Khachigian said. “I’m not so stupid to think they could run eight weeks of uninterrupted media and not have a great jump in the polls.

“I would guess that their lead was substantial right now,” Khachigian added.

Khachigian said key supporters have called on former President Ronald Reagan to join the effort but have received no response. When he was in office, Reagan supported the concept of using tax-funded vouchers and tax credits to help parents pay private school tuition.

Khachigian charged that donors have been “intimidated by the notion that the teachers (union) would retaliate against their businesses”--an allegation denied by leaders of the California Teachers’ Assn., the largest single donor to the opposition campaign.