Buncombe County School Board members and elected Democrats say they were blindsided by the General Assembly’s passage this month of a bill that mandates redrawing the county’s election districts and changing the school board elections from county-wide to district voting.
Critics say the bill — which was opposed by all but one of Buncombe’s House and Senate representatives in the General Assembly, and by all of the current seven school board members — was “rammed through without public comment and without discussion” in the Republican-controlled State Assembly, according to state Rep. Caleb Rudow (D-Buncombe). Some Democratic representatives contend the move was part of an effort to get more Republicans on school board seats.
Supporters of the bill, HB 66, contend that at-large county-wide voting gives an advantage to candidates from population-dense Asheville — which tends to vote liberal — to the disadvantage of candidates from less-populated rural areas, where voters are more conservative.
Although school board elections are ostensibly nonpartisan, the Buncombe board currently consists of five Democrats, one Republican, and one Independent.
The new law, which does not require the governor’s signature, requires voters to choose among candidates living in their district, plus one at-large board position instead of voting for all seven members at large under the previous system.
It also mandates the creation of six new election boundaries with relatively equal populations. The new districts must be drawn using U.S. Census data by Feb. 1. Critics also complained about the expense of redistricting, estimated to be as much as $100,000.
It does not change attendance districts for the Buncombe County Schools system’s more than 22,000 students. Nor does it affect elections for the Asheville City Schools board.
Democrats say a small contingent of Republicans, including a trio of school board candidates who lost their races last year, urged Daniel to work the legislation into HB 66.
“This is a small, very right Republican group, who felt as though they didn’t get what they wanted in the school board election, and so they’re trying to change the rules to increase their chances of getting more Republicans on the school board,” said Lindsay Prather, a House Democrat from Candler who represents western and southern Buncombe County and who sits on the Assembly’s Local Government Committee.
Republican Sen. Warren Daniel of Morganton, whose district includes eastern Buncombe County, led the change, adding an amendment to a bill that initially focused on Catawba County school systems.
Part of the bill’s goal was to “localize the election” and “bring the candidate closer to their individual constituents,” Daniel told Asheville Watchdog.
Daniel said he was influenced by people on the 2022 campaign trail who said he needed to make school board elections a legislative priority. By spring, constituents were backing the effort on social media and through grassroots promotion.
“School District Voting has backing!” Buncombe County GOP chair Doug Brown said in a May 26 email to party members. “This opens the door for Republican School Board members to get elected. We need 300 emails to go to Senator Daniel by May 31st.”
Daniel has offered the board legislative resources and staff to assist with the redrawing of districts, but board members and Democrats are worried about the outcome if they accept the offer.
Michael Bitzer, chairman of Catawba College’s Department of Political Science and History, said ongoing redistricting efforts in North Carolina are “attempts to rewrite the rules of the game of politics” at both state and local levels.
“What a politician who is able to redraw district lines is going to do is redraw the lines that are best favorable to his or her political party,” said Bitzer, author of Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina.
“That’s just that. When we talk about redistricting, we’re talking about the most partisan activity in American politics … because if you have the ability to draw the lines, you have the ability to determine who gets elected.”
“It was very, very underhanded”
According to emails obtained by The Watchdog, Democratic Sen. Julie Mayfield alerted the board May 22 to Daniel’s amendment. The bill was ratified 17 days later on June 8.
The seven-member school board voted unanimously June 1 to support a resolution opposing the legislation. Democratic representatives Caleb Rudow, Eric Ager, and Prather spoke in opposition to the bill on the House floor June 7, decrying a process they said gave people little time to voice their opinion.
But by the time the bill made it to the House, no changes could be made.
“I just feel like it (the amendment) was very, very underhanded,” at-large school board member Amanda Simpkins said. “If it had been in there at the beginning, my guess is 1,000 percent it would have been amended because all of the legislators other than him (Daniels) that represent us are not in favor of it.”
Board member Rob Elliot, who said he sent Daniel emails but has not heard back, echoed frustrations about a lack of transparency.
“We have put together as clear communication as possible to explain what our students and staff need,” Elliot said. “That was ignored and instead what we got in return was this, without any communication. So yeah, it is partisan.”
Mayfield said Daniel told her in January or February he was thinking about pursuing the legislation and then called her May 9 and said he was “possibly going to introduce it to the redistricting committee” that day. She said she voiced opposition both times and, in the latter instance, immediately texted Superintendent Rob Jackson, school board chair Ann Franklin, and vice chair Amy Churchill about Daniel’s intentions.
Board members voiced frustration that Daniel still had not spoken to them or responded to messages about the bill as of mid-June.
Daniel did take a call with Jackson, Franklin, and Mayfield, said board member Amy Churchill and Mayfield.
In an emailed statement, Jackson said the current election process had “yielded politically and ideologically diverse representatives” since at least 1975.
“Although the newly-passed statute will require BCS to redraw electoral districts in a way that may no longer align with our existing attendance zones for our neighborhood schools, we remain confident that dedicated and talented Board Members will continue to be elected by the community to lead our schools,” the statement read.
Franklin, the school board chair, did not respond to requests for comment.
Redistricting cost remains unclear
The new law triggers potentially tens of thousands of dollars in costs related to redistricting.
Daniel said he heard the process could cost between $20,000 and $100,000.
Board of Education Attorney Dean Shatley said he has contacted demographers and a law firm to find out how much the redistricting might cost and is awaiting a quote.
Board members, General Assembly members, and Shatley said the project will be complex, especially because some census blocks mix both Buncombe County Schools and Asheville City Schools districts.
“That’s not ideal,” Shatley told board members during their June 1 meeting. “After talking with a demographer, it’s going to be very time-intensive… to really figure out how (we are) going to draw the lines.”
Board members framed the cost in terms of teacher salaries.
“It will be many teachers’ salaries,” Elliot said. The salary for a new teacher is $37,000, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
“The idea was at least two years old”
District elections were proposed for Buncombe school board in the 2021-2022 legislative session in House Bill 118 by then Republican state Sen. Chuck Edwards. The Buncombe school board voted to oppose the bill, and it was eventually withdrawn from the House.
“The idea was at least two years old,” Daniel said. “When I started campaigning and talking to folks in Buncombe County … especially [for] Republicans, it was an issue that just kind of constantly when you asked them their priorities, this was always one of them.”
According to Mayfield’s office, 66 county school boards including Buncombe had at-large elections, 15 had district elections and 19 had a combination.
In a newsletter before the bill passed, Daniel said he “received many, many emails and phone calls from Buncombe County residents in favor of these changes. I also received emails and phone calls not in favor of the bill.”
School board members and General Assembly Democrats said the redistricting will happen because a “small, vocal group” wanted it.
They pointed to three Republican-backed candidates, Kim Poteat, Greg Parks, and Sara Disher Ratliff, who ran unsuccessfully for the Enka, Erwin, and Reynolds districts respectively. Some have been vocal in their support of HB 66.
Brown, the Buncombe County GOP chair, said he didn’t know if the three talked to Daniel about HB 66. The Watchdog tried to contact each, but reached only Poteat, who said the bill was “common sense.”
When asked, Poteat would not say whether she had spoken directly with Daniel about the bill.
Brown said he has talked to Daniel about school districts and said he “handed him a letter” during a recent convention and told Daniel, “This is one thing we want done.”
In an email to The Watchdog, Brown said that HB 66 “is not about affecting election results; HB 66 is about getting a fair playing field. [The] trend towards school district voting instead of at-large voting: this is a natural trend as the difference between conservative values and progressive ideologies widens, voters want to know who is an R and who is a D.”
Asked about the seeming contradiction between what he said in his email and the May 26 GOP email, Brown responded:
“Now with H(B)66 … the people who live in their districts get to vote for their representatives without the extra players from around the county tilting the scales in favor of the D team.”
Daniel said he heard from people who wanted “at least some voice” on the board.
“There’s a lot of people on the conservative side of thinking that the current board is sort of monolithic in terms of their philosophy,” Daniel said. “They wanted to have some diversity of thought.”
The bill specifically prohibits partisan considerations and election results data in drawing new lines, he noted.
“It by no means means that somebody from another political persuasion is going to get elected,” Daniel said. “It just means that whoever is elected will be a candidate who’s closer to their local district in terms of who they represent.”
Board member Amy Churchill, a Republican, criticized HB 66 on social media. Churchill said she realizes nothing in politics is truly nonpartisan, but said she believes strongly “that you should check your party affiliation at the door when you’re sitting on the school board.”
Ramming through policy?
Mayfield said she was unhappy with the process more than the outcome.
“I’m not happy with it, and that’s not because I have a philosophical opposition to districts.” Mayfield said. “ I think districts are fine. My issue with this is that this is about the process, and that this was not done with any kind of public engagement or public outreach.”
Board members said they felt the amendment was “snuck” into the bill to prevent debate.
Responding to that allegation, Daniel said “in legislative terms, this wasn’t a fast process,” adding redistricting had been discussed for a couple years.
“I shared the bill with my colleagues and the local school board probably a week or 10 days before we started moving with it,” he said.
Mayfield said she understood why board members are frustrated. “They didn’t have the conversation with Senator Daniel in January, and they didn’t have the conversation with Senator Daniel in early May,” she said.
Prather, Rudow, and Ager said the bill was rushed and Democrats weren’t invited to the negotiations.
“We shouldn’t make policy that is recommended by a partisan group, and then gets rammed through without public comment and without discussion,” Rudow said.
“It was done in a fairly sneaky way,” Ager said. “The willingness to try every trick in the book to have their political side win really just shows how difficult our political process is now. … People don’t feel like they have a voice, and in a democracy when people don’t feel like they have a voice, things get really ugly really quickly.”
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Andrew R. Jones is a Watchdog investigative reporter. Email arjones@avlwatchdog.org.
This is long overdue. Districting has been historically uneven. NC overall is a red state and has had to suffer
democrat won local and state wide elections because of cities like Asheville, Raleigh and Charlotte being so liberal. Liberalism is no longer the party of collaboration it once touted itself to be. As a former liberal, I had to break off from the extremism it was heading toward and have never looked back. The party system overall nneds to be re-vamped.
At large voting should be a state wide method in all elections to be fair and balanced. Let the majority of people decide the direction they want to go in any district, state or country.
Besides this being sour grapes from Democrats as it will likely mean some Republican representation, – of course they’re objecting anyway they can to this change -, means the Commission will at least have to hear from differing points of view. I’m hopeful that that will lead to better government. Right you have items passing unanimously, for example the recent large property tax increase, which suggests they didn’t hear or consider any other alternative or way of accomplishing their goal, which to a Democrat means raising taxes. And why shouldn’t the more conservative parts of the County have their views represented on the Commission the governs us all.
As they did in districting County Commission seats, the right-wingers could not win an at large vote, so they (thanks to Chuck Edwards) legislated seats that Republicans were sure to win. If the right wingers ideas are not appealing to the vast majority of voters, it just may be that they need to come off the rigid pseudo-religious, authoritarian stance that they continually spout. North Carolina is NOT a basically “red” state. It is very purple, with more people registered Democrat or Independent than registered Republican. This looks very much like a repeat of the minority seeking to dictate their “values” on the majority.
Agreed!
Agree, sadly.
Prior response is written with a true republican slant. It is NO secret that every state in the US is literally screwing the democratic process in local political operations, in order to get MORE republicans into the mix. MAGA party mentality all the way.
Ditto!
I’m confused — When at-large County schoolboard voting took place were citizens of Asheville allowed to vote even though Asheville has its own schoolboard?
As a parent of two BCS students, I am very frustrated with this bill. These changes are not warranted. There is no indication that the way our school board elections have occurred for close to forty years needed to be changed! Schools are already struggling with finding funding and balancing the budget. We do not need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on re-drawing district lines. Less funding only hurts the students. They want to re-draw district lines based on population and not on schools attended. Which means that depending on where a student lives they may be represented on the school board by someone in a different district from their school. How does that even make sense? Oh, wait. It doesn’t. But if I can vote for all the seats on the school board, then that means that I would technically be represented by and supporting all the school board members, not just one. That school board member then has an interest in supporting all the schools, not just the ones they represent, and I have 7 people making decisions in the best interest of my students and our schools, not just 1. My middle school kid even gets it. He just said to me “if they only represent one district won’t they make decisions that are good for that one school?” I looked up information on all the candidates for school board, learned about them all, and listened to recommendations from teachers, former teachers, and former school board members to decide who to vote for. I had no clue about their party affiliation, although one of them it was blatantly obvious because of his opinions, and didn’t care. I know that one of the concerns that was people were confused about why candidates for school board in districts where they didn’t live were on their ballot. I work Early Voting. I got asked this question often. I explained that you can vote for all school board districts no matter where you live. And that was usually the end of it. No one was upset, no issues, no problems. Usually the bigger concern was when someone was voting for BCS when they thought they should be voting for Asheville City Schools or vice versa.
At large voting in the South was often used to disenfranchise Black voters. Pretty sure that’s the legacy here to. Here’s the link to to an NAACP article on it:
https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/At-Large-Voting-Frequently-Asked-Questions-1.pdf
*correction- At large voting should not be a state wide method.
Republicans have no shame.
Redistricting is the only method Republicans can use to stay in power, and they use it maliciously and unscrupulously in all states. When prompted, they say things like “elections have consequences,” and “Democrats do it too!” But the thing is, Democrats usually -don’t- do it, except in a very small handful of locations like New York and Illinois. Sounds like if Democrats do it too, everyone should be in favor of changing laws to limit gerrymandering! Except whenever they’re out, the only party that seems to oppose them is the Republican party… Funny how that works!