Friday, March 28, 2008

At-Large Elections

I'm sure you've all heard the talk of moving towards at-large elections. I support this move for two main reasons, accountability and equity. Currently our BOE members are only accountable to their own constituents for their decisions, even though their decisions impact all residents in the county. Further complicating matters is that while somebody may live in one district, their children may attend school in another district (sometimes even more than one other district) due to either base assignment or magnet attendance. Who truly represents the interests of those families?

While accountability is an issue in this matter, equity is by far the most important one. Because the district boundaries are drawn only every ten years with the census, Wake County's tremendous growth causes those districts to become extremely unbalanced before the next redistricting. According to information I found on the WCPSS website, "To comply with one-person, one-vote, no district should be more than five percent above or below the population of the ideal-size district." At that time, it was reported in the June 1, 2001 edition of 'School Connections' that "The board used data from the 2000 Census and advice from its legal staff to draw districts equal in population. The nine districts had to include between 66,723 and 73,249 voters to meet legal requirements."

I do not have access to population figures for each of our BOE districts, but we all have access to the voter registration figures for each district as well as the school and student numbers for each district. While it is not the same as having population numbers, we can still look at those figures to get an idea of how unbalanced the districts are.

First, the voter registration numbers:

If we use the same criteria that WCPSS used in 2001, the ideal district would have about 58,493 voters in it. Adding the 5% variance above or below that ideal number, then each district should have between 55,568 and 61,418 voters. We currently only have 1 district that falls within those criteria.

Now for a repeat of the student population numbers by district:

You can see that we have very unbalanced districts and I think its safe to say that this is due to the tremendous growth in the 'suburban' areas of the county. Even after the district boundaries are redrawn with the next census(2010-11), this same imbalance will occur by the time we redraw the boundaries again in 2020-11. The growth may occur in different areas of the county, but the imbalance will be there and citizens will not be properly represented. We can avoid this heavy imbalance by moving towards district seats that are voted on by all citizens. This will ensure that no areas of the county carry more pull than they should and more importantly, that some areas of the county are not underrepresented.

This is a bi-partisan issue that will ensure fairness for ALL citizens, whether they be Republican or Democrat, urban or rural, or live in 'old' Raleigh, North Raleigh, Apex, Zebulon, or Cary. Please write your NC Senate and House Reps, your mayor, city council members, and BOE rep in support of at-large elections.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Equal Representation Revisted

A while back I posted the numbers of students in each BOE district. The imbalance was startling. I ran the numbers for 2007-08 and not much has changed. 'County' districts are underrepresented while Cary and Raleigh 'city' districts are overrepresented again.