The federal trial between Spring Branch ISD and a parent alleging the district violated the Voting Rights Act sheds light on what the plaintiffs characterized as vast inequities fueled by a lack of elected representation from the district’s northside.
Cross-examinations between the plaintiff Virginia Elizondo’s lawyer, Barry Abrams, and three Spring Branch ISD trustees grew tense Thursday and Friday as Trustees Chris Earnest, John Perez and Courtney Anderson advocated for the at-large system the district uses that allows voters to cast ballots for all seven seats on the school board.
That system, the plaintiff’s side argued, dilutes the Hispanic vote from the north side of the district, a population that encompasses more than half of Spring Branch ISD’s students and forms a majority of the voting-age population in at least one single-member district.
Perez, a Hispanic trustee elected in 2022, fervently denied that claim.
“There is no one lived experience of Hispanics in the district,” he said. “A single Hispanic isn’t going to be able to walk in and understand the tapestry of Hispanic lived experiences… You’re looking at ideologies and political factions across the Hispanic community that no single person is going to say ‘I have the unified banner.’”
He also took offense to the term “token Hispanic,” which the judge and the plaintiff used to describe his position and asked the plaintiff to apologize “on behalf of the district.”
Earnest, who along with Perez and Anderson represents himself as a conservative and ran on a platform of conservative values, said that he believed the at-large system “forces you to consider what’s best for the entire district as opposed to what’s best for my kids.”
When the board voted earlier this year to make $35 million in budget cuts, for example, he decided to eliminate Stratford High School’s block schedule, a decision that upset many of his friends with children at the school, but he believed was best for the district overall.
This particular round of budget cuts was heavily scrutinized during the proceedings, because all schools closed were on the north side. The district has said that was because of inefficiencies in those campuses, but Abrams countered that, saying that there was less discussion about the school closures on the north side than about aligning high school schedules across the district.
He implied during questioning with witnesses that this may have been because there was no representative on the board from the north side, and that north side voters, according to elections expert and Rice University professor Bob Stein, did not prefer a single candidate sitting on the board, providing a lapse in representation across a “divided” Spring Branch ISD.
See here for the background. The story has a lot of detail from the last day of the trial, so do go read the whole thing. One comment I’ll add, about the “surprising turn” on the last day in which two Poli Sci professors from Rice testified, one each for the plaintiffs and defendants, is that that was nothing new. I don’t know how often Bob Stein serves as an expert witness for these matters, but John Alford has been a consultant for Republicans and an expert witness for VRA defendants since at least the 2003 Tom DeLay re-redistricting. His history may extend farther back, but that’s as far back as I go in following this sort of thing. Anyway, you can expect the verdict to take several months to be delivered, you can expect it to have an effect on the other lawsuits in the pipeline, and you can expect it to be briskly appealed.
A hybrid At Large and District specific arrangement, similar to Houston City Council, would be an improvement on the current method.