Election petition

The school electors meeting went on for 3 hours. The strategy report was overlong, and not entirely relevant. And not encouraging--lots of buzzwords. I think I see where they could save a chunk of change. Last year was pretty weird, of course, and this year the legislature has said they should balance their budget out of Federal ESSER-2 funds--which are explicitly NOT for balancing budgets, but for helping kids make up lost school time.

Attendance was high because of a petition to change the way school board members are elected. Currently all 7 are at large; the proposal said 1 at large and 3 each from the two new high school districts. The attorney was asked several times about what would happen next year, when 3 of the 6 West-ers are up for re-election. Apparently the clerk has to sort that out--which gives a little more power to the clerk than would seem reasonable.

To support the petition the partisans brought up the arguments that the diversity would be increased, that "the community" has a different reality, and that the school board was "stale" with little turnover.

The petition has nothing to do with the third point, the second isn't very relevant either, and the first fell to the floor when it was pointed out that the high school boundaries had been crafted to equalize ethnic, racial, and economic diversity on both sides. The partisans didn't notice, though. And, to make matters more interesting, the high school boundaries were drawn to equalize the number of high-school students, not the number of households or voters, which aren't equalized.

They'd have done better to argue that in smaller districts you are more likely to actually know your representatives, rather than just know their names.

I guess there'd been a lot of debate already, and people knew each other, because the pro-change speakers had a clapping section in the back right, and the no-change speakers' clappers were in the middle left. We went to find out, though I admit I have a "if it ain't broke" bias. Was the system broken? Not in a way they would fix. You aren't going to get people who don't have time to attend meetings to run for school board just by changing district boundaries.

The elephant in the room sat silently. Spring elections have low turnout, and the largest voting block is the teachers. I figured there was no point in opening that can of worms. This was the largest turnout at an elector's meeting that I've ever seen, and the first where teachers and administrators weren't the majority.

It lost 52 to 114. I did my part.