|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A slim majority of Humble Independent School District trustees blocked an effort Tuesday to require that every resident has a school board member living near them.
In a 4-3 vote, trustees signaled they weren’t open to discussing the possibility of adopting election changes that would create more geographic representation on the board. The trustees were considering a proposal to carve the district into “single-member districts,” in which voters choose a representative who resides in their community.
The fast-growing, 47,500-student district is governed by seven “at-large” trustees, who are elected by all voters in the district and are not required to live in a specific part of Humble. The proposal blocked from further consideration Tuesday would have adopted five single-member districts and two at-large positions.
Currently, all seven board members reside in the boundaries of Kingwood High School, where about two-thirds of students are white, and Atascocita High School, where one-third of students are white. No board members live in the other three high school boundaries, including the more-diverse Summer Creek and Humble high schools on the district’s south side.
None of the trustees who voted against the measure — Robert Scarfo, Chris Parker, Kenneth Kirchhofer and Michael Grabowksi — spoke of their reasoning during Tuesday’s meeting. They also did not return calls for comment about the proposal in recent weeks.
Trustee Martina Lemond Dixon, who raised the prospect of the change in December, requested that board members hold a public hearing about the topic in February.
“When I look at our school district and the growth and so much of the development since I've even been on the board in seven years, I think it is worth a conversation and to hear what people throughout the district think about this process,” she said.
Lemond Dixon said she floated the idea now because the district would need time to make the changes if approved by the board. Humble’s next board elections are scheduled for 2025 and 2027.
Supporters of single-member districts say trustees elected under the system are better positioned to understand and champion each community’s needs. But critics argue it can yield a board filled with trustees narrowly focused on their neighbors — at the expense of the entire district.
Opponents of the setup also note that the setup can lead to the election of a trustee backed by a relatively small number of voters. In Humble’s 2023 board elections, voter turnout ranged from about 1 percent to 5 percent of registered voters on the district’s south side, compared to about 10 percent to 15 percent in the Kingwood area.
“How is it fair that low voter turnout districts only need a fraction of the number of votes to win compared to a high voter turnout area?” said Humble resident Justin Lurie, who came Tuesday to ask for more transparency from the board on the issue. Lurie said trustees should be working for all kids and staff in the district, not a small group of constituents.
Nancy Morrison, who spent eight years on Humble’s board before losing her re-election bid in 2023, said it’s not the first time the topic has come up in the racially and socioeconomically diverse district. Roughly one-third of Humble students are Hispanic, one-third are white and one-quarter are black.
During her terms, Morrison was concerned the board wasn’t representative of Humble’s Hispanic population, which has steadily grown over the past decade, particularly on the district’s south side. The current board is led by five white and two Black trustees.
Morrison predicted trustees’ resistance to change would alarm families ahead of the 2025 election, in which four seats are up for grabs.
“Southside parents are beginning to wake up. The board is skewed to a particular area and every area of this district is very different,” Morrison said. “It’s gonna take the public to wake them up. Some won’t want to (approve) it, because it will knock people out of their seats. But if they don’t take action, they’re gonna stir the south side up.”
Trustee Robert Sitton, who voted in favor of discussing the measure further, said he’s never been a proponent of single-member districts, but he believed it was worth hearing the community’s thoughts.
“The problem comes into play when certain factors get involved, and not every trustee is for every student,” Sitton said. “I don't know the answer today, if this is the direction we need to go into, but … with the growth that we've had and the diversity that we now have in our district, it's definitely something that we should at least consider.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
