Gaston lawmaker wants to change how school board candidates are elected
Through a house bill filed in February, Gaston Representative Donnie Loftis wants to change how school board officials are elected in the county.
If passed, House Bill 105 will make school board elections partisan, a move Loftis said he has been considering since he was first elected.
'Voters want to know the alignment, politically, of school board members,' he said.
In 2021, Loftis said, when he was first nominated to represent Gaston County in the 109th House District, he noticed discussion in the county about partisan school board elections and ward voting, and he wanted to act on it.
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Two years ago, he started working on a revision of a bill that established regulations for Gaston school board elections in the '70s, and said he felt that this was the right time to submit it.
According to Loftis, he spoke to each of the school board members and county commissioners ahead of submitting the bill to get their support.
School Board Vice Chair Dot Cherry said she is not surprised by the effort because the soil and water district supervisor and the board of education are currently the only two races that are nonpartisan.
If the bill passes, it will apply to the next board of education election in 2026, and candidates running for a challenged seat will need to win in the primary elections before the general election.
Loftis said he does not anticipate negative impacts from the bill because Gaston County is an overall Republican county.
According to Jourdan Davis, an assistant professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, there could be some complications to consider.
"The current makeup, maybe that is red, but I think that also can be a reason why including the parties would not necessarily be advantageous to people who are a minority in that county," she said. "So, if there were someone who were in the Libertarian party, for example, they may have good stances on education but because people don't identify with or approve of some of the stances of that libertarian party candidate, they might write them off when they normally wouldn't have."
Davis said the lack of labels also encourages voters to do their own research rather than making assumptions about the candidates' views.
The Foundation for Government Accountability, which advocates for partisan school board elections, said in a 2023 article that school board decisions can be inherently political, and running nonpartisan elections leaves voters in the dark.
"While some want to imagine a world in which politics stay out of the classroom, this is not a real possibility," the article said.
Davis said that in her opinion, the perception that schools are inherently political is misguided.
"Currently, without these labels, there is at least some barrier preventing the indoctrination of students into any particular ideology. However, if you were to make this into more of a party politics race, you are going to be adding party politics into schools," she said. "One thing people often forget is that politics is not simply Democrat and Republican … While there may be perceptions that schools are political, it is because fights for power are just inherent in human nature and adding party politics to that mix does not depoliticize, it just adds a new dimension of politics to it."
Altogether, Davis said the movement to make school board elections partisan is one that has been growing in North Carolina. House Bill 105 lists 39 other North Carolina counties in which school board elections are partisan.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: House Bill 105 would make Gaston County school board elections partisan
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