Dire consequences for Bay Area School Board elections
As recently reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, more than 100 Bay Area school board candidates are running unopposed.
That’s a problem, of course, for local democracy. When there are no choices to make, voters lose interest. When candidates have no competition, they don’t campaign, leaving their experiences and opinions hidden from view until they actually start engaging in debates and voting to support or oppose actions.
To make matters worse, a new “cost-saving’ measure takes the entire vote off the ballot when there’s only one candidate for local school boards and special elections. So, now, we won’t even know who gets the seat until after the election.
Serving on a school board is time-consuming, and often thankless work. But statistically, school board politics are the form of local democracy that claims the most active community participation.
“Given the huge time commitment if you do it well, given the amount of work involved, the amount of scrutiny and sometimes hostility school boards are experiencing, it’s not exactly an enticing position,” said Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association. “My fear is that if the position becomes less appealing, the only people who will run will have self-interested reasons for doing so.”
TRiGroup’s Advice:
- Become more familiar (again?) with the basic concepts related to politics in public education. Clarence Stone, Robert Putnam, and Michael W. Kirst are three very reputable authors on this important topic.
- Encourage and recruit reputable community members by hosting orientations and workshops in your district about how school boards school districts operate.
- Read the article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Dennis Delisle, the extremist running unopposed in Morgan Hill. Here’s a link.