A mailer paid for by the Clark County Republican Party and the Washington state Republican Party went to voters in the Battle Ground Public Schools district the same time ballots landed in mailboxes.
The political mailer packs loads of information in an attempt to sway voters to fill out “no” on the ballot against the Battle Ground Public Schools Education, Programs and Operations (EP&O) Levy, Proposition 10, in the Feb. 10 election. One side states what the local Republican Party believes the school district’s priorities are, while the other side states further information. BGPS Superintendent Shelly Whitten said the mailer did include some facts, but it lacks major context at the same time.
The last time BGPS went out for a levy renewal, a nearly identical mailer went out to voters. Both the mailer opposing the April 2025 levy bid and the most recent one opposing the February 2026 levy bid misspelled Republican: “Rebuplican.”
“They ought to be embarrassed to say vote ‘no’ for education and then spell Republican wrong twice,” Battle Ground City Councilor Shane Bowman said regarding the mailer.
At the same time as the mailer hitting mailboxes, posts on social media reported defaced BGPS levy signs spray painted with “no” over them.
Before an interview with Whitten, The Reflector reached out to Clark County Republican Party (CCRP) Chair Matthew Bumala and Vice Chair Aimee Vaile — who also serves as Battle Ground Deputy Mayor — for input regarding the mailer and an interview regarding why the CCRP sent the mailer and opposes the school levy. Bumala and Vaile did not respond to the requests by press time.
“What I would love is, I would love that the individuals who put it together actually come and meet with me and have a conversation because what I do welcome is dialogue,” Whitten said regarding the mailer. “I want to have dialogue with our community. I know our staff wants to have dialogue with our community. We want people to make informed decisions, and I respect people’s decisions.”
The mailer lists the BGPS district priorities as allowing biological males to compete against females in sports, letting biological males in female locker rooms and restrooms and “usurping parental rights by keeping their child’s gender-transition, drug/alcohol treatment and mental health care secret.” Whitten said those are state mandates, and far from the district’s priorities.
“For us, it paints a picture unfortunately of things that we work with because they’re state laws that we have to follow,” Whitten said. “But they don’t make up even a fraction of the time that we spend in this district. We’ve been able to figure those things out and navigate them so that students are cared for no matter what the issue is, you know. We don’t have reports of students being victimized. We don’t have reports of there being issues. Obviously, we have a variety of views around those things that we’re working with all the time, but these are not things that are rising to the occasion.”
Whitten said the district’s priorities are high-quality instruction, a safe and caring environment and collaboration that cultivates trust. She added that in eight years in a superintendent role, including her time as deputy superintendent, the items listed by the mailer have barely come up.
“I can think of working through those twice,” she said. “So to say that it’s a priority, that’s just flat out not accurate. They’re not priorities of ours, but we work through them when they come up and we try to make sure that each and every student has a place in our school.”
Other aspects of the mailer include comparing pre-pandemic student totals to post-pandemic student totals, financial information and expenditures with missing context, Whitten said.
“For instance, there’s a situation where the expenditures that they’re listing don’t include the money that was used for capital projects, and so it shows that the money back when is actually less than our expenditures actually were,” she explained. “So they’re not comparing the right things.”
The mailer lists the “then” as 2019-2020 with $178.6 million to the “now” as 2024-2025 with $242.6 million, resulting in a 35.8% increase, according to the mailer’s statistics listed.
“The other thing is in one of the examples, they’re comparing actuals to projected budget,” Whitten said. “Those are two completely different things. Your budget, you don’t know that until it is actually finalized. So when they’re talking about inflation and inflationary rates, those are exorbitant based on the numbers that they’re using. Are those accurate numbers? For certain things in our organization, absolutely they are, but they’re not comparable in the two examples that are being given.”
Whitten further said the $178.6 million number is off. The expenditure should have been compared between $181 million and $242.6 million, which makes the increase more in line with inflation.
The mailer even lists enrollment being down from 13,365 to 13,081. However, the 13,365 number comes before the COVID pandemic. After 2020, student enrollment dropped 11,885 students the year the last EP&O levy came into effect in 2021-2022. The district has steadily increased in student population since then to now 13,103 for the 2025-26 school year. Whitten added that BGPS and Ridgefield are the only two school districts in the county with steadily increasing student populations.
While the previous EP&O levy added back middle school sports, the mailer knocked the school district for two fewer teachers while non-instructional, classified staff increased 80 in total during the mailer’s “then versus now” time frame. Whitten said the increase in non-instructional staff came from middle school sports, instructional aids for behavioral needs and for academic needs like graduation success coaches.
Since the double levy failure, those staff positions in middle school sports were fully cut and other non-instructional staff were greatly reduced, too.
The mailer also lists student performance with missing context, Whitten added. With the SBAC test no longer a graduation requirement, Whitten believes many students do not put in forth full effort, with many completing the lengthy tests in under an hour.
The mailer claims the state test scores indicate a failing status. Whitten explained the state tests are designed to measure readiness for college-level learning. She added that not every student will be attending college. The mailer utilized the stats for consistent grade-level knowledge and above, while Whitten highlighted the foundational grade-level knowledge and above stats.
“Our test scores are at 71% for ELA, 64% for math, and 66% for science,” she said. “And while those aren’t as high as I would like them to be, they are much better than the scores if you’re only looking at college and career ready students. The other thing is if you compare Battle Ground Public Schools with, and Washington state as a whole with other states who give the SBAC, we are second in ELA nationally and we’re fourth in math nationally, and we’re on par with the state averages.”
In the consistent view — which indicates college readiness — the test scores land at 48.1% for ELA, 38.8% for math and 42.7% for science.
Whitten said it is important that it is communicated with the public that the school district is comparable with the rest of the state, and doing well compared to the nation.
Whitten said the misinformation is extremely frustrating for the school district as they can not combat those inaccuracies due to the timing of the mailer. The school district is allowed just one mailer, which if the school district was forced to run another levy proposal, Whitten said district staff would have to prepare for a third, nearly identical mailer paid for by the local GOP.
Whitten added that she does believe who is listed as paying for the mailer is accurate, but she questions how it even came to be.
“My guess if you were to take a poll of all Republicans, because certainly some of them have reached out to me, I’m not sure that they would all agree with what’s being sent out,” Whitten said. “So I’m not sure how that plays. The unfortunate thing is when we don’t all get on the same page, and in the same room, some of the stuff that’s happening can cause a greater division in our communities, which isn’t good for our community as a whole. I think that we just need to be talking to each other and in productive dialogue, and unfortunately something like this doesn’t allow for dialogue.”
If the levy proposal were to fail in this upcoming election, Whitten believes the district will run again in November, and if that fails, consequences could be huge. She said the funding cuts necessary would impact the ability to have students who are career and life ready as programs that directly relate to careers and graduation pathways would be lost.
Making drastic changes to the budget, with a major funding source completely missing, could even cause state mandated issues that are highlighted in the mailer as reasons to vote “no” for the levy to come to light at a greater scale than it is now.
“I think the other thing that worries me greatly is there are issues that people are bringing to the table that aren’t Battle Ground Public Schools district issues,” Whitten said. “There are issues that are being brought to us from the state level and from other places, and we want to be able to partner with our community on those and work together to address those at a higher level. But doing this here, the only people we’re hurting is our own community because if we get in a financial situation where we get taken over, we’re taken over by the state. So that very thing that many of these people are fighting against will be the people that will be running our district.”
Whitten believes that if that were to happen, Battle Ground’s interests would be eliminated.
“And I can tell you, they’re not going to advocate for Battle Ground Public Schools the way that I’m going to advocate for our community in Battle Ground Public Schools,” she said. “They’re going to tell us how to do it and I think this will become a bigger problem, not a smaller problem.”
The school district does have a presentation available on its levy webpage that shows information combating the GOP mailer’s claims, available at battlegroundps.org/page/educational-levy and by clicking on, “Show me the facts.”
