They Might Be (Hart) Districts

As you probably heard, the William S Hart Governing Board decided earlier this year to move to district-based elections. The top-2 and top-3 elections of the past are gone. Now the valley will be broken up into five districts, each with one seat. 

This was done is response to potential legal action against the district under the California Voting Rights Act, the law that the City, Sulphur Springs and COC were sued under. A CVRA lawsuit can be resolved in any of several ways, but a district-based election is the only way to inoculate against a lawsuit in the first place. 

Districts for school board elections can be tricky because school districts are already divided by attendance area. Board members will now have a greater incentive to push for certain schools, and less incentive to push for others. Ideally, their priorities will go forth unchanged, but anything can happen in politics, especially from (or in anticipation of) new challengers. 

The upside is that the cost of running a campaign will be a lot less, and we'll probably see more people run for office. The last election didn't even happen because no one else ran. There's also now a better chance of members with new perspectives joining the board, simply because each seat will have a different electorate. 

Thankfully, we now have more high schools than board seats, so no matter how you slice it, some board members will represent attendance areas of different schools and some schools will have multiple board members representing its families. 

At their meeting tomorrow night, the Hart District Governing Board will take their first look at maps of potential districts. The district's demographer is presenting two conceptual maps. Here's a look at each.

To mitigate the downside to districts, the lines should be drawn in a way that spreads board seats across attendance areas as much as possible (that's my view, at least). Map #2 takes a really interesting approach by drawing the Jensen district in a way that includes sizable pieces of five different attendance areas. It's almost like he'd have an at-large district, because he'd answer to voters from so many school areas. And of the two, I think the second map does the best job with putting board seats in multiple school areas.

These tables give a little better picture. The dark shaded cells are where a board member has a significant area in their district that includes the attendance area of that school. The light-colored cells are where there's a small overlap - maybe a condo complex or a small tract. I'm not pulling from census data or anything, just estimating, so I might be under- or over-counting some neighborhoods. I gave each dark cell a point and each light cell a half a point. 

I like how Map #2 manages to rope in larger neighborhoods, so when it comes time for a board member to protect their own constituents, more schools will have more members to count on. (Yes, I know, in a perfect world, they will all love each school equally. Just planning for the worst.) Castaic High School doesn't yet exist, and the geography and population of Castaic is such that they're probably going to have just one board member under any scenario. Keep in mind that these districts will need to be redrawn following the 2020 census, when many more people will be living west of the I-5.

The prepared presentation lists "Respect Incumbency, as much as possible" as an objective for the new maps. I don't know if that's a legal requirement, and I'm sure there's some wisdom to it (you don't want the new maps to kick 2 or 3 members off the board), but it raises a few questions. Both of these maps protect all five incumbents, including Robert Hall, who was appointed. But I'd really like to see what a map would look like, if incumbency is disregarded entirely, as our statewide districts now are. Not that we need to disregard incumbency, but it would be important to demonstrate just how much that factor makes a difference. If it does, that ought to be part of the public discussion.

I point this out, because three of the five members live close to one another, and two live very close to each other. Gloria Mercado-Fortine, Bob Jensen and Robert Hall all live within the Hart/Placerita attendance area. 

I wouldn't be surprised if Bob Jensen and Gloria Mercado-Fortine shop at the same supermarket. When I was in elementary school, both of their homes were even in the same elementary attendance area (Valencia Valley). They're both up for election next year, and it's hard to imagine the board agreeing to a map that pits them against each other, but still.

The impetus for the threat of litigation was that the school district has a significant percentage of Latino residents, and (a plaintiff might allege) those residents haven't been able to elect their candidate of choice. Even as moving to voting districts averts a lawsuit, the district still has to do their best to prevent the districts from having a discriminatory effect.The population of the Hart district is 29% Latino, but only 22% of citizens of voting age are Latino. In the first map, District 3 (Robert Hall) leads with 42% Latino (all residents) and 27% Latino (citizens of voting age). In the second map, it's District 4 (Sturgeon) at 38% population and 28% citizens of voting age.

This is just the begining. If you're interested in more information on these districts, the agenda item (with downloads) is here and the full agenda is here.