San Diego school board elections need an overhaul | Community Voices for Education

San Diego school board elections need an overhaul (Editorial piece from San Diego Union-Tribune)

Taken from http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-san-diego-school-board-elections-20180803-story.html

By The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

There are always threats of legal action floating around San Diego City Hall. Some are taken seriously. Others are dismissed out of hand because they’ll never go anywhere. At the moment, one doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserves.

Bret Caslavka, president of a San Diego school reform group called Community Voices for Education, is threatening to sue the city of San Diego for failing to place district-only elections for the San Diego Unified School District’s board of directors on the November ballot. Approval of such a measure would eliminate at-large elections for school board members and cure what CVE sees as a violation of the California Voting Rights Act that leads to racially polarized voting and minority vote dilution.

School officials have refused to embrace the idea for months. No surprise. They have a good thing going. There are two races on the Nov. 6 ballot that pit labor-friendly incumbents against lesser-known challengers in an election that is likely to keep the status quo on a board that rarely has turnover, in part because of the influence of teachers unions. The system is so stacked against challengers that the only way these two made the ballot is after running as write-in candidates in the June 5 primary election, thereby needing just a single vote — their own — to ensure a November runoff election.

Since its inception, the San Diego Unified School District has had just three Latino board members and a single Asian-American trustee. That’s according to a letter CVE sent the City Council last month before it voted to put school board term limits — but not district-only elections — on the November 2018 ballot. The council has no authority over city schools, but changes to school district elections require voters to amend the City Charter. The council agreed to put this measure on the ballot following school board approval after a series of community meetings, surveys and supposedly honest debate.

Clare Crawford, who co-chaired the district’s advisory committee on school board member elections, told The San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Lauryn Schroeder that a shift to district-only elections had not been “adequately researched.” Please. Her committee could have taken the time. Or it could have delayed as it did because three of the five school board members are up for re-election in 2020.

Crawford raises one fair point: More than 40 percent of the district’s 126,000 students attend schools outside of their election district. Still, the district has twice as many Hispanic or Latino students as white students, and sizable Asian and black populations, state data show. They deserve representation.

As The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board wrote in June when calling the school board’s rejection of so-called “subdistrict” elections ridiculous, “it’s past time to make that change in the San Diego Unified School District.” Sixty percent of 1,243 people school officials surveyed by the district’s elections committee agreed that there should be subdistrict elections in all school board elections, almost twice the percentage of those who said no.

“Will it take a lawsuit for San Diego city schools to do the right thing? Maybe,” we wrote in June.

Even further back, the San Diego County Grand Jury advocated for district-only elections in May 2017, noting that San Diego is alone among the four largest unified school districts in California not to elect school board members by regions or subdistricts. Los Angeles, Long Beach and Fresno all do. The grand jury also reported that, in San Diego County, the San Marcos Unified School District was switching to such elections after a lawsuit that alleged violations of the California Voting Rights Act. There, the lawsuit argued, the system was working at a disadvantage to Latino voters and candidates.

In a required response to that 2017 grand jury report, the San Diego City Council wrote that it agreed with the jurors’ finding that “by instituting subdistrict elections and term limits, a large part of the elections process will be returned to the people.”

For the people’s sake, the school board and council should revisit district-only school board elections voluntarily before being forced to do so in court.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas