In recent years, there’s been a plethora of news stories about fiery school board meetings. But often, they’re pretty routine. In small school districts, that means open seats don’t always attract a lot of candidates come election season.
Aromas-San Juan is a small school district located primarily in San Benito County. Over the past 20 years, enrollment has declined by 25%. Last year, there were just under 1,000 students in its three schools.
At a recent board of trustees meeting at Anzar High School in San Juan Bautista, the mood was casual and light — almost jovial. There were only 20 people there including the board members. The rest were mostly teachers and administrators. No members of the public showed up.
“The board meetings are usually just the powers that be talking amongst themselves,” said Aromas-San Juan trustee Dan Kerbs.
Three out of five seats have terms that expire this year, but Kerbs and another board member are not running for re-election.
Across San Benito County, 26 school board races are up for election. Local voters wouldn’t know it, though, because only one of those races is on the ballot. The rest are uncontested or, in some cases, no one is running at all.
To be clear, uncontested races, especially for school board and special district seats, are common across the Monterey Bay area and in many other parts of the state and country. But 25 uncontested races out of 26 is striking.
“We actually have historically had fairly competitive races,” said Casey Powers, the sole Aromas-San Juan trustee who is running for re-election this year, albeit unopposed. She first ran six years ago.
“Mine was actually one of the first ones, in 2018, that was uncontested. So 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 all were uncontested and that was actually really rare.”
Powers said it was hard enough to find candidates to run. Then, in 2022, the board changed the way members are elected. They switched from an at-large method to a trustee area method.
In at-large systems, there is a single race held for all available seats on a governing body, and candidates residing in any part of the district can run. Under a trustee area system, the district is subdivided. Only residents of each area can run and vote for that area’s seat.
“So, in 2018, a district may have been at-large, had three seats available, had four candidates run for that office, and that district would have gone to election,” said Gina Martinez, the Monterey County registrar of voters.
If you take that same district today, after a switch to trustee area elections, now there are three races, instead of one, for those three seats. With the same four candidates, that will mean two of them are appointed without receiving a single vote and the remaining two candidates compete for one seat.
“When you take smaller jurisdictions and you divide them even further, what is that doing to the jurisdiction? What is that doing to the ballot? What is that doing to voter behavior? That is something that really needs to be looked at more carefully,” Martinez said.
When the Aromas-San Juan school board was considering making the change to trustee areas, Powers was concerned about exactly this prospect.
“We're a very small district, we're very rural,” Powers said. “And it's hard enough when it was at-large, let alone when we had to find people from particular areas.”
So why did she and the rest of the board go through with the change?
“I know that there has been a lot of litigation against boards for not moving to trustee areas,” Powers said. “So I understood, politically, why we needed to do it and why, fiscally, we might need to do it to not get sued.”
Across the state, this is a legitimate fear. Since a 2016 change to the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA), there has been a wave of litigation working its way up and down the state, forcing districts of all kinds to adopt trustee area elections.
The stated reason for the litigation is to increase political representation for minority groups. Much of the research has focused on changes to Latino representation before and after a change to trustee areas.
Asya Magazinnik is a professor of social data science in Germany, and before that she spent years researching trustee area elections in California, particularly in the context of the CVRA.
“We saw that, for large districts, which we defined as having enrollment above 13,700, you see this really strong effect on Latinos being elected,” Magazinnik said.
But this outcome, as Magazinnik points out, has only proven to occur in certain types of school districts, usually bigger ones with a high degree of residential segregation.
“The reforms don't have impacts everywhere. And they don't come without cost,” said Sam Asher, a Stanford PhD student who is studying political outcomes in districts that switch from at-large to trustee areas.
Asher, Magazinnik, and others interviewed for this story all said more research needs to be done to understand how these changes impact smaller districts.
If not for the threat of a lawsuit, the Aromas-San Juan school board almost certainly would not have changed its electoral system in 2022.
“I do wish that there was some flexibility within the law to account for these small districts,” said Aromas-San Juan trustee Casey Powers.
Although there is a dearth of quantitative data on the subject, Powers doesn’t need a white paper to tell her that, at least for Aromas-San Juan, the change to trustee areas had the opposite effect it was intended to have.
“Unfortunately, what's happened is that it's the people that I already know, who I know live in those particular trustee areas, that have become the ones who are being recruited to be on the board,” Powers said.
Instead of the change bringing in a wider slice of the Aromas-San Juan community, the school board is beginning to better resemble Powers’ friend group. She’ll be the first to admit that’s not a great look for democracy.