07/10/14: Norfolk should vote on electing school board

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

NORFOLK CITIZENS deserve the opportunity to vote on whether our School Board should be elected. The current petition drive, which ends next Monday, is the latest effort to put the question on the ballot.

The General Assembly passed leg islation 22 years ago to allow localities to elect school boards. Like so many things in Virginia, it was a long time coming.

Virginia considered elected school boards, then called school trustees, when revising its constitution in 1901-1902. The constitution, adopted by the legisla ture in 1902 but never ratified by the people, was a post-Reconstruction document designed to limit voting rights for blacks. Electing school trustees might have led to the election of black trustees, something one convention delegate considered “abhorrent.”

Virginia adopted its current constitution in 1971, but the prohibition on elected school boards remained in place until 1992, when Virginia became the last state to allow them.

Norfolk remains one of the final holdouts; more than 80 percent of Virginia’s 135 localities have made the switch. The issue of race of school board members has largely faded from view.

The biggest hurdle to making the transition to an elected school board is getting the question on the ballot. Three efforts in the mid-1990s failed, as have a couple since. The barrier is rather high: signatures of 10 percent of registered voters as of the beginning of the year . The time for collecting signatures is rather short: The petitions must be submitted 111 days before the election.

Norfolk had 115,801 registered voters as of January 1, 2014, so 11,581 valid signatures are needed. Organizers say they are close but they will continue to push until Monday’s deadline. They need more than the 11,581, because some of the signatures won’t be valid; duplicates and those not registered in Norfolk are the most likely culprits.

This latest effort is perhaps the most robust so far. Organizers have canvassed neighborhoods and been present at the polls . Volunteers are manning three sites across the city: outside the DMVs on Poplar Hall Drive and Widgeon Road and outside the Pretlow Library.

Putting your signature on the petition doesn’t mean you support elected school boards; it means you support the idea of allowing the citizens to decide. We can — and should — have a robust conversation about the pros and cons of an elected school board after signatures have been gathered.

Then we can talk about the lack of taxing authority for school boards. Then we can talk about whether student performance is better or worse under an appointed or elected board. And then we can talk about which — appointed or elected — is more accountable to the citizens.

Maybe, after all that, Norfolk will remain in the minority of localities in Virginia that has an appointed school board. I can live with that if that’s what voters decide.

But give us a chance, once and for all, to express our collective opinion on the matter.