School candidates in Nov. 8 election will be selected through trustee areas
Published in the February 3-16, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Candidates interested in running for the Morgan Hill Unified School District board seat left vacant when former trustee Amy Porter Jensen stepped down in October have between Feb. 16 and March 11 to file with the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters for the campaign.
County Office of Education Superintendent Jon Gundry announced that the June 7 primary election is the date voters in the MHUSD boundaries will select a candidate to replace Porter Jensen. After the election, the candidate who wins will immediately be sworn in as a board member, MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando said. Candidates must be at least 18 years old, a U.S. citizen and a resident living in the MHUSD boundaries.
Porter Jensen’s term would have ended in December so the winner of the June 7 election is filling an interim seat until the end of the year. The candidate who wins the November general election will then fill the seat for a term of four years. Two other seats, now filled by school board president Bob Benevento and board trustee Rick Badillo, will be open for candidates in the November election.
The June election will be district-wide while the November election will be divided into seven trustee areas. Last March, under the shadow of a possible discrimination lawsuit, the MHUSD board of trustees voted to approve trustee area elections and started the approval process with the Santa Clara County Committee on School District Organization to send a waiver recommending the state of California approve the request not to hold an election where voters would determine whether or not to do trustee areas.
“We just got word (in January) that our waiver was approved by the California Department of Education for the trustee areas,” Betando said.
The request now goes back to the Santa Clara County Committee on School District Organization.
“That county committee will then, hopefully, vote to approve the trustee areas that were approved by our board,” Betando said. “Come November, that will be what people will be voting for, those trustee areas since they were divided by incumbent areas.”
Candidates for Porter Jensen’s seat in the June election can come from anywhere in the district. In November, that seat will require a district-trustee area election. So if the winner of that seat does not live in that trustee area, the incumbent will not be able to run for that seat in the November election unless her or she moves to the trustee area district.
The June 7 election came into play because, at a special board meeting Dec. 8, MHUSD trustees were unable to come to a consensus on appointing a new member to fill the vacant seat left by Porter Jensen. The six trustees ended the meeting in a 3-3 deadlock between finalists Adam Escoto (favored by trustees David Gerard, Gino Borgioli and Badillo) and Mary Ann Groen (favored by trustees Benevento, Donna Ruebusch and Ron Woolf).
Porter Jensen resigned from the board Oct. 28 after she received many “harassing” emails and phone calls from a member of a parents activist group. Parents For Positive Change was upset by the school board’s decision in August to move sixth graders to middle schools. The group of parents started a recall movement against Benevento, which prompted a series of emails toward board members Benevento, Porter Jensen, Ruebusch and Woolf.
A Public Records Act request from local media brought to light the harassing emails to Porter Jensen as well as emails showing board members Gerard, Borgioli and Badillo were privately colluding with the parents activist group to coordinate the campaign against Benevento.
Parents For Positive Change have until Feb. 19, or a period of 120 days, to collect 6,289 valid signatures from registered voters living in the MHUSD boundary. If they collect enough signatures verified by the Registrar of Voters, the district would call a special election, possibly to be set in May or June 2016, that would cost the MHUSD about $503,000.
With trustee area district elections, the influence of each of the MHUSD board members becomes concentrated to a specific geographical area of the district.
“Now until we change, every citizen in the Morgan Hill Unified boundaries has a say and input into every single trustee election,” Betando said.
After November, citizens will have voter influence on only one trustee and have no say for six other trustees, he said.
If no one runs for a certain district, the selection of the board member will need to go through an appointment of the board after the election.
“We’ve added the trustee maps on our website (at www.mhusd.org) so that people can see which area they live in and can run for,” Betando said. “By those maps, they’ll see when that election will come up.”
No individual has yet told Morgan Hill Life of an intention to run for the vacant school board seat in the June 7 election.
At the Dec. 8 special election, the board of trustees interviewed seven applicants for the position left vacant after Porter Jensen resigned. The applicants were Adam Escoto, Angelica Diaz, Brian Sullivan, Julie Zintsmaster, Mary Ann Groen, Peter Mandel and Tara Bevington.
Santa Clara County Committee on School District Organization
