Houston Landing take a look at the big picture.
In Katy and several Houston-area districts, school boards have employed an election system — known as “at-large districts” — that has contributed to most trustees living in wealthier neighborhoods, a Houston Landing review of election records shows. As a result, many families and students in lower-income areas have had no nearby board members representing their interests.
In Pasadena, four of the district’s seven trustees live within 1 ½ miles of each other. In Spring Branch, an overwhelming majority of trustees have lived in wealthier neighborhoods south of Interstate 10 over the past decade. And trustees in Humble have typically lived anywhere but their district’s less-affluent areas.
School boards have enabled this phenomenon by using at-large districts, in which elected officials are chosen by voters throughout the district.
While school boards haven’t explicitly tried to exclude candidates from less-affluent areas, the at-large system has had that effect in several districts. That’s largely because voter turnout is typically stronger in higher-income areas, where residents often support their neighbors for elected office.
Other school boards, meanwhile, have embraced an alternative known as “single-member districts,” which breaks up a school district into smaller geographic areas, with one elected official chosen by residents of each area.
The single-member approach doesn’t guarantee a high-functioning school board. Houston ISD, which uses the setup, has been marred for years by trustees from different factions of the city fighting each other.
“I think (geographic representation) is important, but … I really want the best person for the position,” said Shawn Miller, who lives on the historically underrepresented north side of Katy and lost his bid for the school board in 2023. “If that means two people from the same area for the two top candidates, then so be it.”
But supporters of the single-member system argue it produces elected officials who more intimately understand the needs of underrepresented neighborhoods. Campbell said Katy trustees would be better positioned to address student behavior challenges at Paetow High, which reported the most fights and in-school suspensions in the district last school year, if more board members lived near the campus.
“It’s easy to feel isolated,” he said. “Like I want the best for my kid, but am I the only one?”
A lack of geographic representation has persisted for years across several of Houston’s largest school districts.
Katy serves over 90,000 students at 72 campuses across the suburbs west of Houston. The fast-growing, rapidly diversifying district stretches over 180 square miles, with many of its Black, Hispanic and lower-income students attending schools on the north side of Interstate 10.
Yet today, only one of Katy’s seven school board members lives north of the highway. Since 2014, no trustee has lived in the boundaries of three high schools — Paetow, Mayde Creek and Morton Ranch — that rank lower on the state’s academic accountability system.
“The makeup of the board certainly does not reflect or seem to reflect the entire district,” said Scott Martin, who centered his 2018 school board campaign around switching election systems when his neighborhood on the district’s east side lacked a local representative. “If I had a problem or an issue, it wasn’t at all obvious to me who I would have called about it.”
Pasadena Independent School District covers 85 square miles in southeast Harris County, spanning from the refineries dotting Highway 225 to middle-class subdivisions on the district’s burgeoning west side. Nearly 50,000 students attend the Hispanic-majority district, about 80 percent of whom are considered economically disadvantaged by the state.
Despite Pasadena’s wide expanse, the district’s school board representation has been concentrated in the middle of the district, where every trustee but one has lived within a three-mile radius over the last decade.
Most strikingly, four current trustees reside within 1 ½ miles of each other. District budgets and county property records show the average home appraisal value in their neighborhoods range from about $325,000 to $350,000 — well above the district-wide average of about $200,000.
“No one takes responsibility in representing you,” said Yen Rabe, a former Pasadena teacher who ran unsuccessfully for the school board in 2019 and 2021. “When people run against that tight-knit group, they don’t win. … When you go to the board meetings, you’ll see everybody votes the same way.”
There’s more, so read the rest. Be sure to look at the included maps like the one I embedded above, they’re pretty striking. I’ve been an advocate for more single-member districts in cities and school boards precisely for this reason. It’s everywhere you look – before the city of Austin finally switched to single member districts for their City Council, it was the case that the large majority of their Council members only ever came from a handful of neighborhoods. That’s just not representative government. In addition, this is often associated with racial disparities in Council or Board memberships; that too was the case in Austin, and in Farmers Branch, and is the central allegation in the current lawsuits in Houston and Spring Branch.
One argument against single member districts for school boards is that school board members are supposed to represent and advocate for the school district as a whole, and that having members represent geographic areas can end up with them pitted against each other. Evan Mintz makes a version of this argument in the CityCast Houston podcast from March 8 when this story is discussed. It’s a fair point but the flip side of it is that many schools are often less visible to board members who don’t live near them, and they wind up on the short end of the stick because no one is advocating for them. Scott Martin’s point about not knowing who to call if one has a problem is another issue with at large-only systems.
That doesn’t mean that they have to be single member district only. A mix of single member districts and At Large representation, like Houston and Pasadena do for their City Councils, can make sense. This allows for members who explicitly represent the system as a whole and who can also serve as backup members for each district as needed. But imagine living north of I-10 in Katy ISD or Spring Branch ISD. Would you feel like your voice was being heard? It’s hard to see how.
