Marin voters have a long tradition of supporting local taxes for their communities’ public schools.

Most of the time, local measures don’t have trouble winning the two-thirds supermajority vote needed for passage.

Politically, it is a tall threshold, but local voters place a high priority in education and having quality public schools. They also know that the quality of those schools is a big factor when people are shopping for homes.

They recognize the need to provide support for local schools in the face of politics in Sacramento and the rollercoaster of state funding.

Those local taxes are controlled locally, not by state lawmakers.

The Ross Valley School District, in past years, has won voters’ OK to renew its parcel tax. But in the May 6 election, voters sent a different message.

Ross Valley’s Measure E got a 62.5% majority. That’s normally a solid majority, but it is short of the 66.7% Measure E needed to pass.

There’s not any debate that the district needs the local tax — now at $699 per parcel annually. Loss of that revenue means deep budget cuts.

The district’s trustees will likely return to voters for another try.

In Measure E, the trustees’ proposal not only called for an increase, but it changed the format of the tax, from a flat charge per parcel to one based on a house’s square footage.

On average, Measure E was going to be a $268-per-year increase, plus continuing the district’s annual cost-of-living boost of 3% — a compounding factor that adds up.

That’s a significant increase, even though district officials stressed that even with the boost, Ross Valley taxpayers would pay a lot less than other Marin districts.

But the 52-cents-per-square-foot levy also meant an even larger increase for owners of larger homes.

The Measure E campaign stressed that most of the increase was vital in the district’s recruitment and retention of top-notch teachers.

Other Marin districts offer better pay and the cost of living in Marin leads many recruits to choose jobs in other districts or closer to where they could more easily afford to live.

That argument wasn’t enough to win the votes of two-thirds of the district’s voters, even in a special election where strategists predicted victory should be easier because the campaign could focus on likely voters.

The special mail-in election also became a target of critics, primarily the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers, Marin’s largest taxpayer organization, which called the strategy “sneaky” and actively opposed it.

It was ironic that changing the format of the tax to square-footage based has been advocated by the group as being fairer than the flat tax on the books in most Marin school districts. But the coalition thought Measure E’s increase was too much, especially given recent economic uncertainties.

District leaders, before they return with a new measure, need to reach out and find out why Measure E failed.

Was it that local voters have grown weary of the train of tax measures they’ve been seeing on the ballot — and on their property tax bills — in recent years? Was it a continuation of the political pushback seen in San Anselmo and Fairfax in the November election where a majority of people voted against local rent-control measures? Was the change proposed in Measure E too much for voters to embrace?

Was the district seeking too great of an increase? Was it that Trump’s tariff-driven economic nosedive was taking place when many voters were deciding how to vote on Measure E?

It is likely all were factors in denying Measure E the voter approval school taxes usually get.

Before the election, the district board engaged a consultant who conducted a voter poll that showed that support for the proposed tax was strong enough to reach the supermajority threshold.

What happened?

The school board needs to regroup, reach out to voters and seek helpful feedback that may enable a different outcome.