Hood Canal School District — WA

1. Snapshot

The smallest district in the failed-bonds cohort: 337 students in a single PK-8 school in Shelton, Mason County, on the Hood Canal. Rural-Fringe locale. SAIPE poverty 15.0% — the highest in the WA cohort. Demographics 45% White / 20% Hispanic / 20% Native American / 14% Multiracial — the highest Native American share in the cohort. Per-pupil expenditure $26,242.81 (high — driven by small-district fixed costs and WA’s funding floor). Chronic absenteeism 59.9% at the single school — by far the worst in the WA cohort and a national outlier. Zero nurses across the school (the district has 0 nurse FTE). Teacher certified rate 81% — also lowest in the cohort.

2. Why this was a hard sell — community context (ACS)

This is a high-homeownership, modest-income, low-inequality rural community — the kind of place where every voter has skin in the game on a property tax. The 86% owner-occupied rate means nearly every household pays directly. With 337 students, a $34M bond is ~$101,000 per student — the highest per-student bond ask in the cohort by a wide margin (compare Eastmont at $19,700/student or Battle Ground at $6,880/student). That ratio is a campaign-explanation problem: small-district capital needs require the same fixed-cost building blocks as large districts, but each household carries a much larger share.

3. Peer comparison

Top-10 peers via MCP (default weights + 0.20 plantOps emphasis). FMX-customer status now resolved against opted-in local benchmarking server.

No confirmed FMX customers in top 15 peers. This is rarer in the cohort — outreach narrative shifts from “see what your peers are doing” to “be the first in your peer cluster on the data infrastructure.”

4. The gap story (what the data would have shown voters)

HCSD’s data tells a different story than the bigger WA districts — and an alarming one:

• Plant operations spending: $1,562.30 / pupil vs national median $1,324 — already 18% above the median, despite the small-district fixed-cost penalty. They’re not under-investing.
• Capital construction outlay (FY2020): $933,000 — substantial for a 337-student district. There is active facilities investment.
• Chronic absenteeism: 59.9% at the only school. The peer median across the 5 closest comparables is ~15% — HCSD is 4× the peer rate. This is the single most damning data point in the WA cohort and the strongest educational case for new/expanded facilities. The bond materials don’t lead with it per available coverage.
• 0 nurses, 0 nurse FTE for 337 K-8 students — peer median across rural single-school NJ/MA/CT districts: 1 nurse each. HCSD is alone in the peer set in having no health staffing.
• Teacher certified rate: 81% — peer median 95%. The bond pitch should have paired the building condition with the staffing-difficulty argument: “We can’t fully staff this building because of the working conditions.” Whether that’s accurate or not, the data alignment is striking.
• Per-pupil instruction $10,102 — above some larger peers but not dramatic. The spending pattern says “we’re trying to keep the classroom funded against rising fixed costs in a tiny district.”

5. Bond history (MasonWebTV + Ballotpedia)

• Feb 2024: $33.5M bond, 56.84% Yes (1,284 to 975) — failed
• Nov 2024 general: similar measure, 58.1% Yes — failed by 45 votes (per WA Policy Center)
• Feb 11, 2026: $34M bond — failed (third consecutive attempt)

This is a district trending up — 56.8% → 58.1% → (Feb 2026 result in similar band per coverage). They are converging on 60% but the supermajority barrier is still defeating them. The data narrative here is the same as Eastmont, just at smaller scale: “the voters are with us; the rules aren’t.”

6. What voters / opposition actually said

The Vote Yes campaign site (voteyesforhoodcanalkids.org) carried the proponents’ arguments; no organized opposition messaging is captured in news coverage. The Washington Policy Center coverage (a right-of-center think tank) attributed the failure to “growing distrust” of school districts — but the trajectory (climbing 56→58%) and high homeownership (86%) don’t square cleanly with that narrative. A more honest read: 86% owner-occupied + 11.4% local poverty + a $101K-per-student ask = tax-capacity ceiling, not distrust. The 60% supermajority converts a 58% Yes into a defeat.

7. What we could have told them

1. “59.9% chronic absenteeism. Peer rural districts run at 15%. Our single school has an attendance crisis, and the building is part of the diagnosis.” This is the single strongest data point and was not the campaign’s lead per available materials.
2. “$1,562 per student goes to keeping this 1-school facility standing — 18% above the national median. We’re already over-investing in maintenance. The bond is to stop the maintenance treadmill, not start a new spending line.” Defuses the “you’ve been wasting money” critique.
3. “58.1% Yes in November 2024 — short by 45 votes. We are 45 votes from passing this bond; we are not 45 votes from convincing voters. Six more Yes voters per polling place gets this done.” Reframes the gap to make it feel achievable. The 45-vote margin is a campaign-mobilization number, not a persuasion number.
4. “We have zero nurses for 337 K-8 students. Every comparable rural NJ/MA/CT single-school district in our peer set has at least one. Some of what’s in this bond is the working conditions that let us hire the staff this school needs.” Pairs the staffing gap with the building case in a way the previous campaigns didn’t.
5. “Teacher certification rate 81% — peer median 95%. We’re not getting our pick of teachers. New facilities don’t fix recruiting alone — but degraded facilities are visible in interviews and explain part of the gap.” Honest, specific, defensible.

8. FMX outreach hook

HCSD is a supermajority-barrier failure on a third attempt, trending in the right direction but unlikely to clear 60% without changing the campaign data narrative. Unlike Eastmont (0.5pp from passing) or East Valley (5.4pp gap), HCSD has a deeper structural challenge: the per-student bond size and the small tax base make every fraction of a percentage point harder to win.

Best contact: Jeanie Beebe (Director of Finance and Operations) — she’s the one defending the math to skeptical voters and has the smallest staff to do it with. The chronic-absenteeism, no-nurse, low-teacher-certification data points are already in HCSD’s reporting; what’s missing is a condition-and-work-order narrative that links the building specifically to those outcomes. That’s the FMX pitch.

Opener: “Your campaign has converted a 56.8% to 58.1% to a Feb 2026 attempt that fell short of 60% again. The next attempt — and there will be one — won’t move 2+ more percentage points by repeating the building-age argument. The conversation that closes that gap is per-room work-order density and what specific building conditions correlate with your 60% chronic-absenteeism rate. None of your top-15 peer matches are obvious FMX customers we can point to as proof — but with 337 students and a single building, you’d be the smallest district running this playbook and you’d have the most controlled dataset in the cohort.”

Caveat for the outreach team: HCSD’s tiny size (53 total staff FTE) means the FMX rollout effort needs to be sized to their capacity — not a large-district deployment. The pitch is “lightweight data for a high-stakes campaign,” not enterprise operations.