Published in the March 18-31, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Enacted in 2003, California’s Voting Rights Act is legislation designed with the intention to promote greater diversity in political representation in city, county and school district governance. It does this by moving them from “at-large” elections, where officials are elected by voters of an entire district or city, to subdivided “by-trustee-area” elections.
The law is based on an assumption that at-large elections can put voters who are members of a race, color or language minority group at a political disadvantage. Narrowing the campaign field to specifically bordered areas where candidates reside can potentially empower minority or disenfranchised voters by creating a concentration of specific groups by ethnicities in electing representation in governing bodies.
Historically, representation in Morgan Hill’s city council and the Morgan Hill Unified School District’s Board of Trustees has not reflected the diversity in our Latino population. Currently, not one city council member is Latino. Trustee Rick Badillo is now the only elected official on the school board who is of Latino heritage. (Claudia Rossi, a Latina, served on the school board but in November was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Education.)
Prompted by a letter sent to MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando by an Oakland-based lawyer advocate of by-trustee-area elections, the school board heard public input March 10. The board voted 6-0 to direct staff to hire a demographer and adopt criteria to create maps for a district of five or seven trustee areas seats.
More hearings will take place to give district residents an opportunity to express their opinions about how the trustee areas might be drawn for elections. Morgan Hill Life encourages public participation.
The new system of electing school board members raises some tough questions. Will an elected official target his or her loyalty to a narrow constituency instead of serving all students, parents and others in the entire district? Will it prevent excellent board candidates from serving just because they happen to live in the same trustee area that someone now on the board lives in? The city of Morgan Hill is growing in population. How might that create the need for redrawing the boundaries in the coming years, and thus make elections more complex as candidates and elected officials see their trustee areas change? And what if no one in a trustee area decides to run for school board? Will that require the board to appoint a trustee, and what will be the criteria for that selection? Many students attend schools in areas far from their homes to private and charter schools. How fair and impartial will trustee-area elected officials be in representing schools and students that are not in their own area?
There are also potential benefits to going to trustee areas in electing representatives. They might make it possible for candidates with little financial resources to run in an election. If a person only needs to concentrate their marketing dollars and time meeting with potential voters on a smaller section of the district, that might encourage more viable candidates to get involved.
The MHUSD serves about 9,000 students in a 300-square-mile sector of Santa Clara County that includes all of the city of Morgan Hill, San Martin, and Coyote Valley. It stretches all the way to Paterson in the Central Valley to Los Gatos. This crazy district dynamic makes it important that citizens voice their concerns and opinions during the upcoming hearings on how a possible layout of trustee areas will be drawn.
Superintendent Betando encourages more diversity in the school board, but says that might change if we move from at-large representation to trustee-area.
“I don’t have a particular stance either personally or professionally either way,” he told us. “But I do have a lot of questions. And I do think there are huge advantages to having representation of all groups, including ethnicities that are not represented. More than that, how do we educate and encourage people to become civic minded and participate in the public education, county or city government? How do we encourage those people who are not commonly represented in those areas? I think that’s our challenge.”
The Voters Rights Acts was put in place for a good reason. In the interest of serving the public good the best way possible, diverse representation must be a crucial consideration.
Basing representation on trustee areas might help stimulate increased diversity in representation on the MHUSD school board. But more importantly, we need to also encourage more members of Latino and other minority groups to participate in the democratic system. And we need to encourage the rise of potential elected leaders in these groups.
