The center holds: Electing Wichita school board by districts makes a big difference | Opinion
Before we finally close the book on the election of 2023, it’s worth noting that the Wichita school district dodged a bullet for the second election cycle in a row.
Had it gone a different way, we’d have likely spent at least the next two years staring down the barrel at book bans, “Dr. Facebook” decisions on what vaccinations to require, micromanagement of what teachers can teach about America’s checkered racial history, and the attempted erasure of the very existence of LGBTQ people from the educational experience in the state’s largest school district.
We may still have those fights, but the voices of reason on the board still have the votes.
It was a close-run thing, but moderates and progressives managed to maintain a 4-3 majority.
The fate of the school board was decided not a week ago, but a year ago, on Nov. 8, 2022, when voters decided to elect six of seven school board members by district, with one elected district-wide.
That replaced what had been a confusing, capricious and even borderline racist system for electing the school board, and we’re better off for it.
Before the changeover to the new system, the board was divided into districts, but only the primary election was voted that way, and primaries were only held if there were four or more candidates running in a particular district.
In the general election, everybody got to vote for everybody else’s school board representatives.
Make sense to you? It never did to me either.
What it did do was ensure that a lot of people in the community were disenfranchised and represented by a school board member elected by somebody else.
Let’s run some numbers.
In last week’s race for the one at-large seat still extant on the board, there were 43,649 votes cast. Melody McCray-Miller, a former county commissioner and state legislator, edged out challenger Brent Davis.
In the District 3 race in south Wichita, there were 4,906 votes cast, with Ngoc Vuong beating Ken Carpenter.
In District 4, representing central and north Wichita, there were 3,990 votes cast, with incumbent Stan Reeser holding serve over Jason Carmichael.
All the votes were pretty close, with the moderate-to-progressive candidates winning with about 55% of the vote.
So, using the 43,644 votes in the at-large race as a baseline, if the election had been held under the old system, the will of the 4,908 voters who actually live in District 3 would have been overwhelmed by 38,738 votes from outside their area.
In the case of District 4, the voters who live in the area would have been outnumbered 10-to-one by outside-the-district voters, 39,654 to 3,909.
In this year’s race, Davis carried some heavy baggage from his 2021 school board campaign, where he proposed an irresponsible and reprehensible plan to experiment on the district’s children by separating them into groups, masked and unmasked, and seeing which group caught COVID the most.
This time around, it’s entirely plausible that Carpenter, Carmichael, or both might have fared better than Davis did and flipped the majority to the right, if everybody in the school district was still voting on every seat.
That’s not what representative democracy looks like, and it has led to political mischief.
Two years ago, there were four board seats up for election and the Sedgwick County Republican Party schemed up a campaign to try to seize the majority in one election cycle.
The party recruited and supported four socially conservative candidates who ran as a slate, based mostly around opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates and vaccines.
Under the previous voting system, the Republicans knew they only had to win in the vote-rich and conservative-leaning suburbs of east and west Wichita. In the event, they won three out of the four seats, getting Diane Albert, Kathy Bond and Hazel Stabler on the board.
Incumbent Julie Hedrick held off Davis, mostly because of Davis’s scary proposal to experiment on the kids.
This election, progressives and moderates needed to win all three board seats to maintain the majority. They did.
And the new board will be more reflective of the diversity of USD 259, where minority children are the majority of students.
Right now, the board is six white people — five female, one male — and one Native American woman, Stabler.
The incoming board will still have Stabler, plus Miller, an African-American woman and Vuong, an Asian-American man.
It’s not a perfect mix.
Hispanic children are the largest racial/ethnic group in the district, and the last Hispanic-American on the board, Ron Rosales, got voted out in 2021, a casualty of the Republicans’ attempted takeover.
Maybe voters will fix that next time around. With district-by-district elections, they’ll have a chance.
