School board's redistricing is seriously flawed | Eastern North Carolina Now

nbsp;   Newly elected School Board chairman Mac Hodges failed his first major test in that new position. He did so by sitting by allowing the board to flounder in the redistricting process.

    The board voted recently to adopt one of two plans drawn up by a Raleigh lawyer without making any changes to refine either plan. Moreover, it chose not to consider any alternatives, such as reducing the size of the board. (The Beaufort board is one of the largest in the state.) Pitt County recently reduced the size of its board, but Beaufort's leaders took no cue from that.

    The reason the Beaufort school board is so large is that it was created with the merger of the city and county schools. At the time, in order to secure enough votes to pass merger, enough incumbents had to be put on the new board to meet the political requirements of the day. Those days are long gone however and there is no good reason the board should not have at least ask its consultant to come up with some options that included fewer than nine members.

    The reason fewer members is worth considering is that it creates larger districts, thus allowing other constraints, such as racial balance, to be achieved without having to split as many communities. Just look at the Aurora district, which extends from one end of the county to the other to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

    But the main reason larger districts and fewer members might be more practical is that it would mean the boundaries could be drawn more closely to match the school attendance lines. Simply stated, building districts that more closely match the feeder system of elementary to middle and high schools would mean that each board member would be representing more schools. As it is, one could argue that some current board members represent as many as five school attendance areas while another member represents only one or two. That has an impact, especially in dividing up capital outlay dollars.

    One variation that might have been considered is multi-seat districts. With some creativity, such districts can accommodate the Voting Rights Act and still have the boundaries not split as many neighborhoods and communities.

    The current board structure is a holdover from merger. And it is past time to at least look at how the board could be more closely structured to match current reality. Wonder what it would look like if the map drawer had been told: Show us a map as closely aligned to the feeder system (high school attendance areas) as possible and let us see what the population and racial demographics might be if each board member represented a high school attendance area, with multiple seats in the more populated district.

    We don't know. Nobody knows what the possibilities are and whether some other plan other than the one adopted would work better. The reason we don't know is that the board never discussed what the criteria should be before it sent to map drawer to the computer.

    But the most egregious failure of Chairman Hodges' leadership was to allow the process to ram through a plan that was opposed by all of the minorities on the board. That is not a good sign for getting preclearance from the Justice Department.

    It may be that DOJ will approve Alternative 1. That will probably depend on how much opposition is expressed behind the scenes by black leaders to the Justice Department. But if there is substantial opposition it is more likely that it will be sent back to be revised. Hodges acknowledged this when he said, essentially, we'll just throw this plan up in the air and see if it flies. But in the same breath he says "we're under the gun of a timeline." That's crazy.

    There is no deadline. That was proven the last time they did this. They did not get the job done before the next election.

    But the most egregious failure of leadership of this board is the fact that they allowed some computer nerd in Raleigh to draw our districts. Obviously the person who drew the maps did not realize that the old boundaries were created before Cypress Landing was developed. Nor were they knowledgeable enough to know that if they had turned the western tip of District 2 to the north rather than the south then they would have likely improved the minority ratio in that district (because the population has changed in that area since the original district was drawn).

    But it is difficult for us or the board to determine such refinements simply because the maps the consultant gave the board were not detailed enough to be able to determine such variations. She apparently put one side of a street in one subdivision in one district and the other side of the street in a separate district while the entire subdivision has only one entrance (i.e., not bisected by a major road or natural boundary). That's poor map drawing. Even though this was pointed out to the board in the public hearing, they chose to ignore it. But then they ignored every suggestion from the public.]

    I believe the reason they did such a poor job on the maps was that they got very poor information. But the reason they did not overcome that deficiency was, I believe, because of two reasons: Poor board leadership and a myopic view of how it would impact their own view of "their district." Former chairman Robert Belcher put it in words that used pronouns that indicated just that. Mr. Belcher referred to "my district... his (Mike's) district... her (Teressa's) district..." etc. We're sorry, but a district does not belong to an individual board member. It belongs to the people.

    I could go on and on. There are too many flaws in this process and the resulting plan to even identify them all here. If the Justice Department does send it back, hopefully they'll do a better job next time.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.
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