Rocky Mountain News

Colorado Hands English Immersion Backer His First Loss 
By NANCY MITCHELL, Rocky Mountain News

Stay away - far, far away - from issues of race, ethnicity and  culture.

Keep $3 million under wraps until the last possible moment.

Then, in a blitz of ominous ads, hammer the "No" message home.

That's the skeleton of the strategy behind English Plus, the group formed to fight a ballot initiative requiring yearlong English immersion programs for students who speak little English.

As Election Day drew to a close, the strategy against Amendment 31 had scored a surprise victory across Colorado. It's a feat unheard of in states where similar ballot measures have gone before voters.

In California in 1998, voters approved an English immersion ballot measure by 61 percent. In Arizona in 2000, a similar initiative won with 63 percent of the vote.

And in Massachusetts, voters in this election approved a similar measure by a margin of 2-to-1.

But Colorado voters handed the first loss to Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley multimillionaire who has bankrolled the English immersion campaigns across the country.

"I would imagine he learned something here in Colorado," said John Britz of Welchert & Britz, political consultants based in LoDo.

Unz, speaking from an election victory party in Boston, denied it.

"The opponents in Colorado did pretty much exactly what the opponents did in Massachusetts, and in California and in Arizona," he said. "The only difference was the massive amount of advertising on the 'No' side, 99 percent funded by a billionaire heiress named Pat Stryker."

No habla español

In February, 68 percent of voters favored Amendment 31, according to a Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll.

Britz and his partner, Steve Welchert, did nothing. At least, not publicly.

When Unz visited Colorado in the spring and held news conferences on the Capitol steps, they still did nothing. They
particularly did not, to the chagrin of local Hispanic activists, talk about the initiative in terms of ethnicity or culture.

"Our polling shows no sensitivity to the Latino culture in Colorado," Britz said simply.

Welchert said the two were hauled into a meeting of local activists who wanted to espouse Hispanic pride.

Their response? "If this is about being Mexican, for Mexicans, about Mexicans, it's gone," he told them. "It's got to be about Coloradans."

The two also opted not to talk about the major target of the initiative - bilingual education. That's the practice of using a child's native language to assist in teaching English.

Unz and his Colorado chairwoman, Rita Montero, frequently threw out the term in derogatory fashion.

But bilingual education was too complex to easily explain, Britz said.

"Nobody understands what it is," he said, motioning to Welchert in a recent interview. "We didn't."

They did make a key decision in those early months. As members of English Plus battled the ballot language to the state Supreme Court, Britz urged them to ease up.

It was clear the court was going to allow the measure on the ballot, he said, and he wanted the most egregious language left in.

That included the penalties against teachers who violated the amendment, which later became a featured issue in the "No on 31" campaign.

Hiding $3 million

On July 28, Britz attended what may have been the most important meeting of the No campaign. He drove to Fort Collins to see Stryker, a medical equipment heiress worth an estimated $960 million.

Stryker, who describes herself as "just a mom in a minivan," had a big stake in what was becoming an increasingly controversial campaign:

Her youngest daughter attends Harris Bilingual School, where native English and native Spanish speakers help teach each other their languages.

"Can you guarantee me a victory for $3 million?" Britz remembers her asking. He didn't promise a win, he said, yet told her, "We will break the code; we will find a message to defeat 31."

But Welchert and Britz didn't want Unz or Montero to know about the money. Their strategy was to wait until late in the campaign to announce the gift, hoping to take the other side by surprise.

Meanwhile, Unz was loaning the pro-31 campaign more than $300,000 interest free.

"We decided to wait until Oct. 1," Welchert said, "and played poor, poor, pitiful me."

The donation was announced two months later, the day before a radio ad blitz began. Again, Welchert and Britz shrugged off advice. Many in English Plus, made up largely of educators and parents, wanted "happy ads" featuring classroom shots.

Instead, the TV spots are dark, showing still pictures of sad-looking children while an announcer ominously lists the faults
in Amendment 31. In one, the announcer states children who speak little English, largely Hispanic students, would disrupt the education of "your children" - presumably the majority white families of Colorado.

Media critics called the spots "ugly" and said they preyed on the fears of white voters.

"Yeah, it's ominous," Welchert says in response, "but it's cutting through."

By the first week of October, another Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll showed support for Amendment 31 had
plummeted by 20 points to just 48 percent.

Staying on message

Britz agreed to work on the No on 31 campaign on impulse, back in 1998. Then, only California had heard of Ron Unz's plan to end bilingual education.

A Hispanic leader asked Britz why he only came to see her when he wanted Hispanic support on a political issue.

"I said, if (California's) Proposition 227 ever comes to Colorado, I'll be there," he said. "We kept our word."

It wasn't easy. The two said the lure of a simple message - "teach children English" - was tough to counter.

"We thought," Britz said, glancing at Welchert, "I'm going to be honest here, we thought, 'We don't have a chance in hell.' "

Extensive polling told them people didn't understand bilingual education, for example, so they dropped it.

An "a-ha" moment came in September, Britz said. They were interviewing what they considered a typical suburban voter - female, Republican, a parent. The woman was adamant in her support of 31.

Then Britz said her own children would be affected. That her child's teacher might be distracted by having to work with
students who know little English.

"She turned," he said. "She said, 'They're going to put them in my kid's class?' "

That moment led to what would become a key slogan for No on 31 - the controversial "Chaos in the Classroom" theme hammered home in their TV ads.

As for the merits of the campaign and the criticism it has drawn, the two say that's politics. Welchert recalls that early meeting with Hispanic leaders.

"Do you want to win?" he asked them, "or do you want to be right?"