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Orange County Board of Education voting map nixed by county committee

A committee that oversees the creation of election boundaries for local school districts rejected a voting map proposed by the Orange County Board of Education in favor of a map submitted by a member of the public.

The choice by the Orange County Committee on School District Organization, which came following an 8-2 vote taken during a sometimes boisterous public meeting late Thursday, sets up a potential legal challenge from the conservative Board of Education.

The maps must be in place prior to the June 7 primary, when three of the five members of the board are expected to run for re-election.

Committee members said the plan they chose does a better job of keeping together communities of interest and doesn’t chop up South County into two areas.

“The compactness of the districts on this map is superior to the other,” said Kathy Moffat, an Orange Unified school board member who sits on the state-empowered committee, which is made up current and former school board members from across the county.

Their vote was greeted by screams of “communist” and “white (expletive)” from some members in the audience who backed the plan from the Board of Education.

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The Board went to court on Jan. 20 to get its proposed map approved. The group’s petition alleges that the county committee has gone beyond its authority “to advantage certain partisan political interests by creating districts with a partisan advantage for candidates favored by union and other left-leaning interests” while posing disadvantages to the conservative majority on the Board – Mari Barke, Tim Shaw, Lisa Sparks and Ken Williams.

Barke, the Board’s president and one of the three members slated for election in June, said in a text message Friday that in the wake of the committee’s decision the board will “continue its legal challenge to the Committee’s unlawful actions.”

“Additional lawsuits would not surprise me at all,” she wrote.

“I was disappointed that the County Committee decided to exceed its authority last night, do a wholesale redistricting when the Board had not requested that, and voted to approve a plan that discriminates against one of our minority communities in pursuit of partisan ends.”

Barke was referring to an allegation that came up frequently Thursday night. The new boundaries, OCBE supporters said, split up the Vietnamese community in central Orange County, merging some parts with the Korean community.

Paul Mitchell, a Sacramento-based redistricting analyst and data consultant hired by the county committee, noted that while the redistricting process requires that attention should be paid to communities of interest, race cannot be used as a predominant factor in drawing voting districts.

“It is clearly an important community of interest, and one that should be looked at closely to be sure that nobody is inadvertently diluting the voting power of that community of interest,” Mitchell said via Zoom during the Jan. 27 committee meeting in the Orange County Department of Education chamber in Costa Mesa.

Four recent redistricting plans in Orange County – for the county Board of Supervisors, State Assembly, State Senate and Congress – split in their approach on how to incorporate central Orange County. “In two instances, they take the little Saigon, Garden Grove area, and they draw down towards the water. And in the other two instances, they take that Garden Grove, Little Saigon area and drive it up around towards Fullerton, in a kind of crescent shape,” said Mitchell, who heads Redistricting Partners.

Mitchell – who tweaked the winning plan – submitted another plan as well, at the committee’s request, but that one was ruled out during a meeting last week.

RELATED: Orange County School Board asks court to intervene in dispute about voting maps

The plan chosen at the Jan. 27 meeting was submitted by Anaheim resident Billie Joe Wright, president of the Hacienda La Puente Teachers Association and a 2016 candidate for the Anaheim Elementary School Board. Wright submitted his plan initially to the Orange County Board of Education, and said he kept revising it based on feedback from board members and others.

But Wright said most members of the Board were not interested in any map that came from outside. “It was not a fair process,” he said Friday. Wright’s claim was echoed previously by Board Trustee Beckie Gomez, who told her colleagues last month that their map making process lacked transparency and community input.

Minutes from a December meeting show board members openly voicing concerns about how the redistricting would affect upcoming elections and their districts.  Redistricting is not supposed to take into account how new boundaries would affect incumbents or others in future elections.

Four of the five elected members of the Orange County Board of Education are conservative and have taken public stands against the use of face masks in schools and ethnic studies curriculum. The Board also filed a lawsuit, now pending, against Gov. Gavin Newsom over his state of emergency health declaration, which has allowed for anti-pandemic steps to be taken in public schools.


Source: Orange County Register

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