The third in a series of public hearings about PUSD transitioning from at-large to by-trustee-area elections, where candidates are elected by voters in a specific geographic boundary, was held at the Board of Trustees meeting last week.
Staff gave an overview at the Dec. 9 board meeting of the most recent district demographics and criteria for developing a new map that would be used in PUSD trustee elections, starting in the November 2022 general election.
When the map is finished, trustee board members will represent one of five areas divided in PUSD's enrollment boundaries, and be required to live in the area they represent. Instead of electing from a pool of at-large candidates for all available seats across PUSD in each election year, voters will be limited to electing a single trustee from among the candidates who live in their sub-district every four years.
The board will also be responsible for appointing a representative from that trustee area, in the event that no candidate declares for a vacant trustee position.
Development criteria for a new trustee area map include election areas that are "compact," "contiguous," "predictable and not jagged," and also identifiable by using natural boundaries, major roadways, "and other boundaries identified by residents."
The trustees asked multiple questions about dividing up the trustee areas by grouping communities of interest together, including what characteristics can be used to define a community of interest. Attorney William Tunick, who has been advising PUSD on the remapping process, said "there's a lot of different ways to talk about communities of interest."
According to Tunick, "A part of the district where all of the kids play AYSO soccer at a certain park in the district and others in the district play somewhere else" can be considered a community of interest, as well as large populations that share a language not spoken by the community at-large.
School districts can also sometimes address attendance boundaries, but Tunick said, "This process is not about redrawing or doing anything with the attendance boundaries. The question is, do you want the trustee area to either mirror attendance boundaries or in a lot of cases, districts feel that it's actually helpful to split attendance boundaries."
Tunick added, "That's one situation where you might actually say 'this is a community of interest, but we think it makes sense' … so that there's not this concern about one trustee feeling like they have one school or one school only has one trustee."
Board President Joan Laursen asked if there is "anything we should steer away from and not consider when we're thinking about communities of interest."
"To the extent that we consider a racial or ethnic group as a community of interest, we want to be careful under the federal Voting Rights Act about splitting that community of interest," Tunick said. "It's more concerned about splitting some communities of interest when they may be protected by law."
"I don't know that there's necessarily a prohibited type of community of interest if we can explain some rationale for why we think that group of population belongs together and might have common interests," Tunick added.
In addition to proposing the district's Spanish-speaking population and dual immersion language program participants at Vintage Hills Elementary School be named a community of interest, Laursen said "some of the elementary boundaries split those communities a little bit."
"We have a socioeconomic schism that tends to overwhelm participation in terms of parental participation at our schools, so I'd like to make sure that we can have those folks represented in our trustee area," Laursen said.
Other factors suggested for consideration include distributing secondary schools "in a manner that maximizes election area overlap and avoids single trustee in a secondary school area," and also distributing elementary schools "in a manner that maximizes election area overlap."
Student Trustee Saachi Bhayani said she supports splitting up PUSD's attendance boundaries "to make sure each trustee has multiple schools in their trustee area."
"Another thing I was thinking about is to ensure that multiple trustees also represent our secondary schools, such as our high schools and middle schools. That would be something good to have on the maps," Bhayani said.
Trustee Kelly Mokashi concurred and said, "It's important that we consider the attendance boundaries and we split that so that we're having better representation."
Trustee Mary Jo Carreon asked if a group of community members could make their own trustee area map for consideration, and Tunick said that "ultimately the board makes the decision," with some exceptions.
"You can't always keep every community of interest together because we have to worry about population balance and the other criteria," Tunick said. "At the end of the day it's up to the board say, 'We think this map best meets all of the criteria, maybe it doesn't keep all of the communities of interest together, or maybe it's not the most contiguous but we think this one does the best job of meeting all the criteria that we've looked at.'"
Staff has previously stated that the district could be ready for the general election in November 2022, when both seats currently filled by Laursen and Trustee Mark Miller will be open to challengers. Both Laursen and Miller have said they do not plan to run for reelection next year.
Community workshops about the remapping process will be held on Jan. 11 and in early March. A series of regular updates will also be delivered at board meetings through then. Once the first proposed maps are introduced next month, an online application will be available for public use.
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December 16, 2021 at 05:33AM
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Pleasanton school board weighs in on new election map criteria - Pleasanton Weekly
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