RACINE - A group of students gathered around Bianca Quintero shortly after they stepped off a bus on a corner at the intersection of 17th and Center streets Tuesday.

Quintero, 17, a Horlick High School senior spent a few minutes reminding her classmates about the rules of door-to-door campaigning before they split into groups.

The students weren't promoting candidates. The students, dressed in bright yellow T-shirts, were promoting Unified's referendum that appeared on Tuesday's ballot.

About 200 Horlick students, including the school's track team, took to the streets after school Tuesday afternoon passing out fliers to encourage people to vote for the district's $16.5 million maintenance referendum.

Voters approved the referendum 11,844 to 8,933.

Quintero, a leader of the group Students United for Immigrant Rights, helped organize her classmates to spread the word about the referendum in several wards in the city that typically have low voter turnouts. Students hoped to knock on an estimated 16,000 doors in Racine.

Quintero and her classmates wanted to do whatever they could to get the referendum approved.

"It's very simple. We don't want the roof to fall on our heads," Quintero said Tuesday. "Our schools are our second home. We need better."

While they might never know how much their efforts helped, voters approved the referendum by a comfortable margin - 57 percent to 43 percent.

Unified will spend the referendum money - $3.3 million annually during the next five years - on a variety of maintenance projects in the district's aging school buildings.

The referendum was important to Anthony Brulport, 18, a senior at Horlick, who said it's hard to visit other districts and schools where students seem to have more than Racine students do.

"You can't take pride in a school that's falling apart," Brulport said. "It's our home, where we spend more than half our life."

Two other groups, Students United in the Struggle and a student peace group, helped the students. Students spent more than a month organizing with the help of teachers and the Milwaukee group Voces de la Frontera.

Jeanne Geraci, associate director of Voces, filed the necessary paperwork with the school district to promote the referendum.

The Save Our Schools committee received a $1,000 donation from the Racine Education Association, the local teachers union, according to the district. The funds helped offset the cost of canvassing.

Unified students have campaigned for passage of past referendums, said Al Levie, a Horlick social studies teacher. Not all of have passed, but that never stopped the students and their teachers.

"The kids really see the value of saving their schools. That's why they're doing it," Levie said.