pinion At-Large is Not the Way to Go to Fix School Board Dysfunction

Over the past several weeks, there have been conversations about the possibility of changing the organization of the Manatee County School Board by adding two at-large members to the five-member board. The idea is to get more representation and cure dysfunction. However, our county commission has employed such a model for decades and the experience has been a cautionary tale. Fortunately, there is another way—two of them, in fact.

The School District Local Option Single-Member Representation Law of 1984 provided school districts with three alternatives to our current school board organization, in which five members are elected by countywide vote to represent individual districts. In my opinion, the current set-up is the worst option. Campaigning countywide is difficult and expensive. The magnitude of such a campaign surely scares off many potential candidates and magnifies the role of money and special interests in the races, which is never a good thing for voters.

Also, if you're ostensibly elected to represent the constituents of a defined district, it doesn't seem reasonable that you should be able to essentially lose the race among those constituents, only to be carried to victory by voters who have a different representative. That actually was the case in both of the school board races contested last year.

In the two-candidate district 2 race, Charlie Kennedy defeated Rodney Jones by nearly 11 points, countywide. However, among district 2 voters, Jones won by a whopping 9 percent. In district 5, incumbent Julie Aranibar enjoyed strong support among her constituency, evidenced by her finishing first in August's four-way race and then winning in 10 of the 14 district 5 precincts in the November runoff. Yet Aranibar still lost the countywide run-off (in which 104,000 votes were cast) by 7 points to Mary Cantrell, who many of the district 5 voters resented for being a Pinellas County resident who'd only met the residency requirement by signing a lease on a rental property once she decided to run for the seat.

While I take nothing away from the two candidates who won—neither chose the system we use and both won within the rules they were given—if the idea is for board members to be held accountable by the constituents they represent, our current design clearly leaves much to be desired.

One option for “single-member representation” is going to a seven-member board, in which two members are at-large, which board member Dave Miner asked the school board to put on the agenda for discussion at Tuesday's meeting. In that scenario, races for the five board members currently districted would only appear on the ballots of registered voters who live in that defined district. That would be a good thing. However, the other two seats would be elected countywide. Here's the very big problem that no one is talking about: doing so would create a situation in which one area of the county could potentially have three residents on the board.

Geographically, Manatee is a very large county. If three board members were from one pocket like Lakewood Ranch or Northwest Bradenton, residents would seem extremely unlikely to receive governance that was representative of the county as a whole. In fact, when the board voted to align its districts with the county commission district map in 2011, part of the reason was that the board had gerrymandered the districts so badly by that point that three of the five seats could actually be held by board members who resided within one mile of each other in West Bradenton.

The board had failed to address east county growth and as a result, what was then district 3 and is now district 5 (which includes Lakewood Ranch, Tara, River Club and other large east county developments), had a representative to constituent ratio twice as high as some of the other districts in the county. With the board dominated by west county influences, schools like Lakewood Ranch and Braden River complained about always taking a back seat to Manatee High. The at-large option could again create arguments of over-representation. Fortunately, the statute provides for two better alternatives.

The first would be a five-member board in which all of the members are elected within their districts—basically the option proposed by Mr. Miner, minus the two at-large seats. I think this would be a much better solution, as it would keep all five seats representative of constituents, while making sure that no area of the county has the unfair advantage of being overly represented.

If there is a desire to have more voices on the board, the final option is a seven-seat board with all seven members being elected from within their districts. The only drawback is that unlike the five-member option, which could remain aligned with the county commission's map, the seven districts would have to be drawn (which can only occur in an off-election year).

I first started hearing about the idea of a seven-member board with two at-large commissioners last month, while speaking with members of Manatee's Black Caucus and its NAACP chapter. Shortly after, it was brought up at a BOCC meeting by Manatee County Commissioner Charles Smith, the lone African-American on that seven-member board. District 2 (Smith's district) has the largest concentration of African-American voters in the county. It's probably not a coincidence that it's the only district to have elected an African-American to the Manatee County Commission—ever.

Members of the African-American community have a strong argument that single-member representation would better ensure that there is an African-American voice on the board. There have only been three African-American school board members in the history of Manatee County. The first was Louise Rogers Johnson, who was appointed by the governor in 1977 (Johnson Middle School is named in her honor, while G.D. Rogers Elementary is named for her father). She was followed by Ruby Byrd (mother of Bradenton City Councilman Harold Byrd) and Barbara Harvey, who retired in 2012. They are the only three African-Americans to have ever won countywide offices in Manatee County's 160-year history. In fact, the first African-American was only elected to the county commission in 1992 (Gwen Brown), when the county deliberately gerrymandered a district that was largely African-American in order to settle a lawsuit with the NAACP.

Those statistics, however, suggest that it would be unlikely for an African-American to occupy more than one seat on the board and particularly unlikely for one to win an at-large seat. Therefore, I find it curious that African-Americans would not prefer the single-member representation option of five districts, as the district 2 seat would represent a greater percentage of the overall vote.

If such a change is to occur, it would have to be approved by the voters. Through a majority vote, the school board can adopt a formal resolution directing such a referendum to be put on the ballot at the next scheduled primary or general election. There is also a process by which the citizens can force the referendum through a petition process requiring 10 percent of registered voters (around 22,000 verified signatures).

I believe that any changes to government organization, no matter how promising they seem, should be considered very carefully and involve a tremendous amount of public education and input. The fact that early discussions have only involved one of the three options, along with the points I've made in this column regarding why it could be the worst of the three available, demonstrate that there's still much debate to be had before anything is actually considered.

There are a lot of reasons our school board has become utterly dysfunctional in recent years, and most of them have to do with politics and special interests. Single-member representation would by no means be a cure all for our litany of ills, but if adopted correctly, it could reduce the influence of those increasingly sinister forces and give honest, grassroots, shoe leather politicking a better chance—and that, my friends, is never a bad thing for democracy.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the omission of Mrs. Louise Johnson as one of three African Americans to have served on the Manatee County School Board. 

Dennis Maley's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The Bradenton Times. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. Click here to visit his column archive. Click here to go to his bio page. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook.