A grassroots group seeking to create a city school system is against an immediate referendum vote on the issue, following the results last week of a poll commissioned by the Fairhope Schools Good 2 Great group.

“What we asked for with this poll was to tell us what the issues are for people and help us define our strategy and better define what our direction needs to be,” said Diana Brewer, one of the group’s leaders. “Then we would be able to decide what our next step is. Our next step is to recommend to the City Council that there not be a referendum, but that we continue to explore what kind of impact the local community can have to support our schools.”

Brewer and Amy Thompson, another group leader, said the group plans to address the council later this year to discuss what local support might look like short of immediately creating a separate city school system.

“Next steps are to continue to engage the community, to monitor what’s happening in Fairhope and Baldwin County Schools and advocate for change and improvement,” Thompson said. “We will continue to engage the feeder-pattern residents and to look for solutions to bring them in.”

In recent months, a majority of council members have expressed support for local control of city schools but been unwilling to commit to vote as a council for creating an independent city system, Thompson said.

Instead, those members have supported a referendum to let local voters express their preference about the issue, she said.

“While a referendum is not immediately on the table - what we are actively pursuing with the City Council are the kinds of local funding solutions that take us on that first step of local control,” Thompson said. “The quest for an independent Fairhope City School system continues. But we must pursue local solutions first - just as did other communities ultimately successful in creating City School systems. The community must understand what local control looks and feels like.”

The telephone poll of 301 voters in the Fairhope city limits was conducted on July 2, 3 and 5, by Lewis Powell, a political pollster and professor of communication studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The poll results showed that the top issue in the city for many residents was education, but that jobs and the economy was the top issue for low-income voters.

This kind of “message” poll did not ask yes-or-no questions on whether the city should split from the county school system but was intended to gauge the mood and relevant attitudes of the electorate, Thompson said.

The poll results indicated the G2G group would have its work cut out for it to win a referendum vote at this time.

“This was really about messages,” Thompson said. “It’s not just a straight-up yes or no. It’s more about what motivators are out there and what do people care about. The straight-up yes-or-no kind of poll would take place right before a referendum.”