And they are ordered to adopt single-member districts.
A federal judge found Spring Branch ISD violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the west Harris County district to overhaul its system so that the voices of Hispanic voters can be heard, but the ruling doesn’t come in time for Saturday’s pivotal board races.
Seven months after the conclusion of the federal trial against Spring Branch ISD, the judge ruled on Monday that the 33,500-student district uses a system of elections that dilutes the votes of Hispanic residents on the northside of the district, making it virtually impossible for their preferred candidate to win.
District officials pointed to a letter from the board president Monday afternoon which pledged that board counsel would “analyze all potential avenues for appeal.”
The plaintiff, parent Virginia Elizondo, sued the school district after running twice for the board and losing both times, claiming that the at-large system dilutes the Hispanic vote in a district that has almost twice as many Hispanic students as white students. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 stipulates that a violation would be in a circumstance where minorities had “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
Interstate 10 divides the district socioeconomically. The northside is economically disadvantaged and has a large population of Hispanic residents, while the southside, home to Memorial Villages, is a historically white, wealthy area. Currently, all board members are from the southside of the district.
While outgoing board member John Perez is Hispanic, the court found he was not the preferred candidate of the Hispanic community on the northside of the district. Before Perez was elected, a person of color had never served on the Spring Branch ISD board since the district’s inception in 1946.
“SBISD is a high-functioning school district. But the evidence shows that the District consists of two disparate parts: one located north of I-10, and one located mostly south of I-10,” U.S. District court judge Sim Lake wrote. “South of I-10 the students are more likely to be Anglo, affluent, go to college, and more likely to meet or exceed the State’s academic standards. North of I-10 the students are more likely to be Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, dropout, less likely to meet state academic standards, and more likely to be severely disciplined.”
The district argued that the past election results where northside Hispanic preferred candidates did not win had more to do with politics than race, as the southside is largely conservative and northside voters lean more democratic, but the judge struck down that notion, finding that the plaintiff had satisfied enough conditions, including the three Gingles conditions and senate factors two, five and seven, to show that, based on the totality of the circumstances, a system of geographic representation was fair and warranted.
The judge ordered that the district had 20 days to file a plan for single member districts, composed of either seven districts or five districts and two at-large seats. The plaintiff can file objections to the plan, but once they settle on a system, the district is prohibited from conducting at-large elections in the future and must have elected trustees represent single member districts.
See here for the previous update. Judge Lake, for what it’s worth, was appointed by President Reagan. The Houston Landing adds on.
The ruling caps a roughly four-year legal battle and adds to the growing number of school districts forced to change how voters elect trustees. U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake ordered Spring Branch to switch after this May’s board election from a fully at-large system — in which all seven trustees are chosen by all voters in a district — to one where at least five trustees are elected only by residents of parts of the district.
Lake ruled that the west Harris County district’s at-large election system enables to white voters to dilute votes cast by Hispanic residents. Lake wrote that white voters in the affluent southern half of long-divided Spring Branch “vote sufficiently as a bloc” to quash Hispanic voters’ preferred candidates, a key element that must be proven to establish a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Lake also concluded that it’s more likely than not that Hispanic voters would make up a majority of at least one potential single-member district, another requirement of a Voting Rights Act violation.
[…]
Spring Branch parent Virginia Elizondo filed the suit against the district in 2021 after she ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Spring Branch’s board. While 57 percent of students in the district are Hispanic or Latino, no person of color had ever been elected to the board until the May 2022 election. (Hispanics make up about 25 percent of potential voters, a demographics expert testified at trial.)
Elizondo argued the lack of Latino board members left families of color in diversifying areas of Spring Branch without a representative who understands their needs.
“Of course, I’m thrilled,” Elizondo said Tuesday of the court’s decision. “This is going to help all of our students and families feel like they have a representative that understands their situation. … I think it’s going to be a difference in, you can actually approach the board and they’ll actually listen to you.”
Spring Branch voters will still cast their ballots in the upcoming May 3 trustee election under the voting system now deemed illegal. After that, Lake gave the district until May 18 to appeal the court’s decision or draw up a plan for instituting a new election system. Lake allowed Spring Branch to elect trustees through all single-member districts or employ five single-member seats and two at-large seats.
[…]
While Lake found Spring Branch’s voting system unjust, he also wrote there’s no evidence that district leaders “failed to provide outstanding educational opportunities” for all students or “failed to act in the best interest of its Hispanic students.”
Critics across the state have taken aim at the at-large election system in recent years with a wave of lawsuits similar to that in Spring Branch. A Houston Landing report found last year the at-large system in several other nearby districts — Cy-Fair, Humble, Katy, Pasadena — often leaves the lowest-income neighborhoods without a local representative. A parent in Humble ISD brought a similar lawsuit against the district last year before recently withdrawing it.
See here for more on the now-defunct lawsuit in Humble, and here for more on the big-picture issue. The Trib recently had a big story about how conservative interest groups have taken advantage of the at large-only systems in several large suburban school districts to elect a slate of wingnut candidates and shift those districts’ policies well to the right. This stuff really matters.
As to what happens next here, let’s take a moment to enjoy the victory and congratulate the plaintiffs. This ruling will almost certainly be appealed, which means that the next stop is the Fifth Circuit, where justice goes to die. That said, past rulings in places like Farmers Branch and Pasadena have stood up, so there’s no point in being nihilistic. We move forward and work to build on what we now have.
Yesterday, John Whitmire and Greg Abbott were busy attacking the “Harris County Judges.” Nothing like Democrats working with MAGAs to help vote out Democratic judges, while Democrats are afraid to speak out.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND RACE CLASS VOTING
All state-wide constitutional executive officers are elected at large (though the SOS is appointed by the Guv). Now Republicans win all the time, previously it was the Democrats. It’s winner-takes-all and at the state level and it’s really where it matters most, since the state gets to preempt local laws, such as, e.g., marijuana law nonenforcement ordinances and local COVID measures a few years back. If you don’t like your school district, you can at least move, or get politically active and recruit current nonvoters to come out for you preferred ISD board candidate.
At the state level, no ethno-racial group can win all by itself even if they were cohesive. Instead, electoral coalitions are needed. Nor do we have black party, a white party, a brown party, and a yellow party. In order to win in a winner-take-all system, you have to have broad appeal, meaning you have to reach out and bring folks unlike yourself into the fold. I personally favor European-style PR systems, but that’s not going to happen here on a grand scale.
ETHNICITY IS NOT RACE, NOR VICE VERSA
So-called Hispanics can be of any race. Leaving aside that no one is really white (like a sheet of paper), Hispanics come in many gradations of “color” (pigmentation) too.
Mexicans, for example, can be black, indigenous, criollos, or European (Jewish, like the current president, with a German suname) or Central European like the Mennonites in Chihuahua. And, of course, there is intermingling and there are all sorts of blends of the above. And as for language, did you know that Mexico, the largest Spansih-speaking country by population, recognizes Nahuatl, Mayan, Mixtec and 60 other indigenous languages? The Mennonites speak Plautdietsch, learn standard German in school, and speak Spanish and English. Not sure their low-German mother tongue is counted as indigenous (They railroaded down from Canada in the last century).
Closer to home, Senator Rafael Edward Cruz would be person of color, I suppose, but only half-color since his mother was a presumably white Canadian. That just goes to show how inane the “person of color” label is as an alternate for “Hispanic.”
Short of very rare albinos, we all have some “color” though some of us may be more colorful characterwise than others.
Bottom line: We need to get rid of these classifications and the assumption of uniformity of economic and political interests of individual assigned to such classes.
What matter much more a socio-economic class, but that concept is taboo. And values, of course, matter too.
White people create the concept of Hispanic, Latino, etc, and then attempt to define it.
Since 1848, “Mexicans” were white. Otherwise, they could not have been citizens of the United States.
https://law.ucdavis.edu/aoki-blog/contesting-whiteness-inventing-hispanic
There is too much difference between cultures to vote as a group.
Even then, the other white with a Spanish last name could be a white or black woman married to a person with a Spanish last name.
Trump, however, may be able to unite them if he keeps doing what he is doing. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I’m glad to see this in SBISD. Even if we magically have a color-blind society tomorrow that removed all of the racial and ethnic barriers put into place and overturned centuries of injustice, it wouldn’t change the fact that northside Spring Branch hasn’t been meaningfully represented as long as I can remember.
The board members can continue to blather about “we represent all of the district and its students”, but their actions prove that they don’t. When they need to cut, that pain is inflicted north of I-10 (e.g. closing Treasure Forest ES and ending major programs at Northbrook HS and Landrum MS). And I get it – their neighbors and the people who got them elected would complain louder (or at least more directly, and may threaten to run another southsider against them) – but that’s not workable to have an actually representational board.
This is a highly regarded and respected district court judge, which will factor into any later appellate review.