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Board effort seen as partisan
Democrats pushing bill to change elections
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Published: June 7, 2009
RALEIGH
The school board in Forsyth County has always been an anomaly.
Sixty-two years ago, it became the first local school board in North Carolina to be chosen directly by voters.
Now, it is one of the few school boards that are still elected on a partisan basis, in which candidates formally identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats.
The General Assembly is on the verge of changing that.
But the move, which supporters insist has wholly nonpartisan roots, has taken on a highly partisan air.
Democrats have used their majority in the legislature to quickly advance the bill, which would create nonpartisan elections to the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board. The final vote is scheduled for Monday.
It's the culmination of a three-year effort by local activists who believe that partisan elections discourage new candidates with fresh ideas from running for school board. The group leading the effort is known as CHANGE, which stands for Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment.
"This would allow someone who doesn't feel strongly about a party affiliation -- who wants to run for office but doesn't want to have a ‘D' or an ‘R' by their name -- to be good citizens and participate in the process," said state Sen. Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth, who promoted the bill in the Senate last week.
Republican critics see a less pure motive. They believe the bill is a backhanded way for Democrats to change the political makeup of the school board, which has been controlled by Republicans for many years.
Even if the initial proposal was well intentioned, Republicans say, the way it has been forced through the legislature -- despite objections from Republicans and from a majority of the sitting school board -- is a case study in cynical politics.
"This has just been a shameful partisan effort in my mind," said Sen. Pete Brunstetter, R-Forsyth. "Once they believed that they had the votes in place to accomplish the task, then what we saw was just politics as usual, which is not change."
Most boards nonpartisan
One of the main arguments of the bill's supporters is that out of 115 local school boards in North Carolina, 100 of them are chosen in nonpartisan elections.
That indicates that Forsyth County is behind the times, the supporters say.
But they have not made the same case for elections to other local boards -- such as the Winston-Salem City Council -- where the argument seems to apply just as easily.
According to statistics compiled last fall by the UNC School of Government, there are 551 municipalities in North Carolina, and 542 of them elect their city councils or town councils in nonpartisan elections.
Of the nine remaining municipalities that use partisan elections to seat their council, Winston-Salem is one.
Unlike the Republican-controlled school board, the city council in Winston-Salem has a reliable Democratic majority.
No one has called for the city council to be changed from partisan to nonpartisan.
"I do not believe we would be seeing this legislation if the board of education was majority-Democrat," Brunstetter said.
When told that the vast majority of city councils in North Carolina are nonpartisan, leaders of CHANGE reacted with surprise and said they have never seriously considered a movement to change the Winston-Salem council to nonpartisan elections.
Steve Boyd, a CHANGE member who has helped lead the school-board movement, said that the group may look at the issue of nonpartisan city-council elections in the future.
He said there is no inconsistency, and no political motivation, in trying to make one board nonpartisan but not the other. He said that the school-board movement arose slowly and organically, because some CHANGE members felt that the school board should be more receptive to the public and that more newcomers should be encouraged to run for the board.
"Our thought was, we need more competitive elections, and we need to open the process to people who are simply concerned about education," Boyd said.
CHANGE members acknowledge that they have no concrete evidence to suggest that nonpartisan school boards produce better policy, or attract more candidates, than partisan school boards. And CHANGE says it is not accusing the current school-board members of having partisan motives for any of their policy decisions.
It's mainly about ballot access, Boyd says. The current party system tends to favor entrenched incumbents, and it especially puts unaffiliated candidates at a disadvantage.
"Those that would paint us as partisan, I just throw up my hands, honestly," said Boyd, who is a Democrat but said he is thinking of changing his registration to unaffiliated. "I understand that, but frankly I feel like that charge is coming from a Raleigh framework."
The movement for a nonpartisan, school-board election arose far from Raleigh's partisan halls. It began with a small group of activists in Winston-Salem, meeting once a month and doing research on the local history of the board of education.
Fighting for ballot access
The 2006 school-board election was a clear example of the problem, in their eyes. That's when Sandra Mikush ran as an unaffiliated candidate. She collected enough signatures to get on the ballot and raised far more money than most of the other candidates, but she failed to win a seat on the board.
Mikush is now helping lead CHANGE's effort to make school-board elections nonpartisan. She said she has not thought about whether she would like to run again for the school board.
"I really haven't focused on that," Mikush said. "One of my primary goals in all this is to see really robust elections with a whole lot of candidates running for office."
Eventually, CHANGE ran a petition drive and collected 10,000 signatures in support of nonpartisan school-board elections. But the proposal had to be enacted by the General Assembly.
Crucially, the group succeeded in getting and retaining the support of Democratic legislators who represent Forsyth County, despite the fact that some prominent Winston-Salem Democrats oppose the move to nonpartisan elections.
Those Democratic opponents include school-board member Vic Johnson and the African-American Caucus of the Forsyth County Democratic Party, which is worried that a change to nonpartisan elections could hurt black representation.
A partisan history
One thing is clear: The composition of the local school board has been steeped in politics for many decades.
Before 1947, the General Assembly appointed all county school boards -- a legal gimmick that allowed the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature to control the education bureaucracy in western Republican counties.
But in 1947, Forsyth County legislators filed a bill to allow the county to elect its own school board. The bill passed without much opposition because Forsyth County was reliably Democratic at the time. Forsyth County thus became the only county in the state that elected its own school board.
Meanwhile, the city of Winston-Salem had a separate school board, which was appointed by the city's board of aldermen.
In 1963, the city and county school boards merged, and starting with the 1970 elections, the legislature passed a law requiring all county-wide school boards to be elected rather than appointed. The law required nonpartisan elections for most school boards, but it allowed some boards, including the Winston-Salem/Forsyth board, to remain partisan.
Ever since, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board has been shaped by electoral politics and the power of incumbency. Starting with the 1992 elections, after a lawsuit from the NAACP, the board was divided into districts. Two members of the nine-member board represent a district covering eastern Winston-Salem, designed to ensure black representation. Those seats have always been held by Democrats.
But the other seven seats have been mainly controlled by Republicans.
Members of CHANGE said last week that they are disappointed that their bill has taken on a partisan tone in the General Assembly. The wrangling in the legislature, they say, is not reflective of the grass-roots movement that gave rise to the bill.
"This process is how democracy should work, to a ‘T,'" said the Rev. Ryan Eller, a lead organizer of CHANGE, referring to the grass-roots movement. "Folks ought to be responding to citizens in the way that our elected officials have responded to us."
■ James Romoser can be reached at 919-210-6794 or at jromoser@wsjournal.com.
■ Journal researcher Julie Harris contributed to this story.
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