Vote ‘Yes’ on electing Wichita school board members by district | Editorial

Wichita school district voters will have the opportunity in the Nov. 8 election to change the way that school board members are elected.

Vote “Yes” and file this one under “Should have been done long ago.”

The current system for electing board members is a weird hybrid system that has been nothing but confusing to voters and open to manipulation since it was created in 1994.

The USD 259 board is divided into six districts with one at-large member.

But the voting districts only come into play when there are four or more candidates seeking one of the seats.

In that rare case, an August primary election is held where the voters in each district narrow the race down to two candidates for the general election. If only three people file, then all three advance to the November ballot.

But when the November general election is held, all the voters throughout the school district get to vote on all school board seats, regardless of which school board district those candidates will supposedly represent.

It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the system we have. And it would be hard to come up with a system that would be less fair, harder to justify or clunkier for voters.

It would be as if we voted on our state lawmakers in a primary, but in the general election, Kansas City and Johnson County decided who’d represent Wichita at the Statehouse.

Yes, it’s that bad.

The ballot measure, officially titled “Wichita Public Schools District Elections for School Board Measure,” would change the system to a district-by-district vote.

Voters in a given school board district would get to elect the person to represent them on the school board. There would still be one at-large seat voted on districtwide.

If that sounds more like America, it’s because it is.

School board elections are nominally nonpartisan.

But last year, the Sedgwick County Republican Party tried to engineer a conservative partisan takeover of the school board and came within an eyelash of succeeding.

Party leadership created a campaign and found four people to be in it.

Those candidates, Diane Albert, Kathy Bond, Hazel Stabler and Brent Davis, were presented as a slate in Republican Party-funded campaign mailers and ads.

It almost worked, and it would have if Davis didn’t go full crackpot near the end of the campaign and propose using school children as Guinea pigs for an unethical medical experiment — to separate the children into masked and unmasked cohorts and then study them to see who got COVID more often.

Apparently, experimenting on little kids was a bridge too far even for anti-mask conservatives. He lost, narrowly, while the other slate candidates won.

Six of the current seven board members are Republicans.

In northeast Wichita District 1, Albert, a Republican, won despite a 14,000 to 7,000 Democratic registration advantage in her district.

We hate to bring up race, but the disparity on the school board is so outrageous that there’s no choice.

Seven out of 10 USD 259 children are Hispanic, African-American, or mixed race. The board is six white people and one Native American.

More immigrants and children tend to live in central areas of the city, so those school board districts have fewer voters per capita than the suburbs to the west and the east.

Each district has about 55,000 residents.

But east Wichita school board District 2 has 42,833 registered voters and District 5, west Wichita, has 34,648.

In contrast, southwest Wichita District 4 has 28,448 registered voters and southeast Wichita District 3 has 26,415.

It’s plain to see how Districts 2 and 5, in an at-large general election, get to control who represents Districts 3 and 4.

That has to change.

The ballot proposition wouldn’t prevent the Republican Party from recruiting and funding conservative slate candidates.

But if board members were elected by district, those candidates would at least have to try to justify to the central city’s Hispanic and Black residents why they’re the better choice — and not just appeal to folks in the ‘burbs.