SANDPOINT — Luke Mayville, Yale graduate, author and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, credits his success to the education and inspiration he received from his teachers growing up — from his early years at Sagle Elementary to his graduation from Sandpoint High School in 2003.

Because of his adoration for the school system he grew up in, Mayville and a fellow SHS graduate who still lives in the area, Garrett Strizich, have organized a door-to-door campaign this weekend to advocate for Lake Pend Oreille School District's $17 million supplemental levy, which is up for vote on Tuesday.

"The schools meant so much to me growing up, I feared waking up out of town on March 15 and seeing that the levy failed by 20 votes, and that, therefore, the system that helped raise me would begin to die," Mayville said.

There are plenty of ways to get votes, including letters to the editor, waving signs and making calls. But, Mayville said, political science research, based on experimental evidence, shows that going door to door is the most effective way to get out votes.

Motivated by the mantra, "door to door wins the war," Mayville said the goal is to recruit enough volunteers to knock on 3,000 doors Saturday and Sunday.

"That is why we are trying to recruit as many volunteers as we possibly can," Mayville said. "We think if enough people come out and help us knock on doors, we can do it."

He had not counted the number of volunteers as of Thursday, but said he is "pleasantly surprised" by how much the idea has resonated with people. There are a lot of people already doing a lot of good work, he said.

It was about a week ago, Mayville said, when he was on the phone with Strizich that the pair began to fear the levy had a "very real" chance of failing. They looked at the numbers from the last supplemental levy vote two years ago and compared them to the numbers of the failed $55 million plant facilities levy in August, which he noted are two very different types of levies. Nonetheless, he said, he concluded that yes votes remained roughly the same, while the no votes from year to year had nearly tripled.

"We know there are many people who have supported supplemental levies, but objected to the building levy for any number of reasons, and will likely support this supplemental levy ... however, we doubt that this group alone accounts for the size of the margin in last year's vote," Mayville said. "We have reason to believe that opposition to levies in general, opposition to all levies, is currently energized in a way that it has never been before."

He said Strizich was committed to working on advocating for the levy, and decided it was worthwhile to come back to Sandpoint to help with the effort.

Four months ago, Mayville's first book was published, and while it was dedicated to his mother for bearing the burden of raising him alone, he acknowledged several teachers who inspired him growing up. One, for example, was his sixth-grade teacher at Sagle, Jackie Hanna, who read some short stories he wrote about his cat. She was the first to inspire him to write by telling him he could be a writer. In high school, he wrote an essay following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His English teacher, Marianne Love, asked him to read it during the school's post-9/11 assembly. That experience, he said, made him realized he had something to say.

"They were so pivotal in preparing me to do everything I have done since being in their classrooms," Mayville said. "When you've had experiences like that with a school system, it's hard to sit back and watch that system erode."

Following his Sandpoint education, Mayville bounced back and forth between North Idaho College, the University of Oregon and Lane Community College in Oregon to get his bachelor's degree before moving on to get a doctorate in political philosophy at Yale. As a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia, Mayville writes and teaches a course in the core curriculum about the "great books of western civilization, from Aristotle to John Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois.

He writes, mostly, about the Founding Fathers. His book, "John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy," inadvertently relates to the levy dilemma, he said. Oligarchy refers to a society where a small number of people have all of the power and resources. His book discusses the "drawing out" of who John Adams was, not just a former United States president, but also a philosopher and what he thought about the danger that American society would be dominated by a small, privileged elite.

"I believe, and this is something that John Adams believed as well, that public schools are one of the institutions in society that prevent us from becoming an oligarchy, that enable us to remain a republic," Mayville said.

Anyone interested in joining Mayville and Strizich in their weekend quest should be at Sandpoint Community Hall, 204 S. First Ave., at 10 a.m. Saturday. The group will also meet 10 a.m. Sunday at the community hall.

"If you can't make 10 a.m., just stop by whenever you can and we will make it easy for you to help save the schools," Mayville said.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.