School board considers redistricting | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    Public hearing Monday night

    The Beaufort County Board of Education will hold a public hearing on Monday (10-17-11) at Washington High School auditorium to hear comments from the public on the proposed electoral districts for school board members. The information can be accessed at the BCS website.

    Redistricting is required by the new census data, just as was true of the legislature's districts. The board hired a Raleigh attorney to advise the board on the process. You can read attorney Deborah Stagner's letter to the board at: this link.

    A table with the summary statistics of two proposed plan (Alternate 1 and Alternate 2) are also available on the website.

    Both proposals include keeping nine seats, elected by single member districts by the voters in each district. The statistics show that the districts in both plans meet the 5%+/- deviation from the ideal number of residents (not voters) in each district, although District 5 in Alternate 1 bumps right up against the maximum at 4.99% and District 8 has a 4.45% variance. District 8 is likely to grow outside the 5% variance before the next census. District 5 has relatively more sewer available and thus has relatively more growth potential than some of the other districts.

    Both alternatives appear to attempt to keep three minority districts. Districts 1, 2, and 3 and the current minority districts. Alternate 1 would keep District 1 as a "safe" minority district and District 2 would increase its minority percentage by nearly a percentage point. However, District 3 would decline from 40% to 36%; raising potential problem with achieving preclearance by the Justice Department.

    Alternative 2 would reduce the minority percent in District 1 by 3 percentage points while increasing it by 2 points in District 2. District 3 would no longer be a "safe minority" district, falling to 33% but District 6 would replace it with 45%.

    The gerrymandered District 3 would continue to stretch from one end of the county to the other, raising questions about whether it would survive a challenge under recent court decisions. In Alternative 1 District 3 would have a 35.74% minority ratio and 33.165 in Alternate 2. Thus, one wonders why it is gerrymandered as it is if this is not going to be one of the safe minority districts.

    The most notable characteristic is that both Alternatives were apparently drawn to protect incumbents from being paired against another incumbent.

    Neither of the plans appears to factor in school feeder patterns.

    There has been no apparent attempt to coordinate the school board electoral system with that of a revised county commission electoral system, nor has the school board apparently asked its consultant to consider any other alternative other than nine single-member districts.

    The public hearing, again, will be Monday night at 6:30 p.m. Presumably speaker will be able to sign up to speak before the meeting as is usually the case. The information does not say how much time will be allocated to each speaker.

    Note: There is a link on the school system site to N. C. G. S. § 115C 37. Interested parties should know that the Beaufort County Board of Education is controlled by local legislation and Section 37 should not be confused with the local legislation which is not provided on the site. See Section 37 (i).

    Commentary

    We urge those interested in public education in Beaufort County to attend this hearing. How the school board is structured makes a world of difference in many ways, not the least of which is how money is spent. School board elections matter and how the electoral system is structure makes a great deal of difference.

    We will save our comments of the merits of the plans until after the hearing and the board process the information that comes out of the public's comments.

    But we will say this much at this point. The fact that we have one of the largest school boards in the state (9 members) is a hark back to the merger of the city and county school systems. It seems to us that now would be an appropriate time for the board to consider alternatives that involve something other than 9 members. For example, why not look at 3 multi-seat districts, somewhat aligned to the high school attendance zones?