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Schools

Capo to 'Wipe Slate Clean' in Drawing New Trustee Boundaries

The board wants to do away with the gerrymandering that it said took place in the past.

Trustees for the decided Monday they want a fresh start in drawing new trustee areas.

The current trustee boundary areas don’t make any sense, said trustee John Alpay.

“I can’t help but think this was gerrymandered to the benefit of certain trustees. I’d rather wipe the slate clean,” he told the board.

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Later, Alpay said he didn’t have a specific former trustee in mind when he made his comment. The serpentine areas with odd tails just don’t make sense, he said. For example, residential neighborhoods in San Clemente, such as Talega, Forster Ranch and the Coast are all split between two trustee areas.

“I don’t see any rationale or reason for it,” Alpay told fellow trustees.

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The trustee boundary lines are more important than ever because starting with the Nov. 6, 2012 election, voters from each trustee area will only get to select one trustee. In the 2010 election, passage of  eliminated at-large voting for the seven trustees, who come from seven distinct areas.

The district has hired National Demographics of Glendale to come up with proposals for new boundary areas. The consultant presented 10 criteria the district could use to set priorities for the new map. The trustees, however, ditched two of them.

The first criterion eliminated was the goal of preserving the corresponding existing trustee area’s population and territory as much as possible. The second aimed to avoid having current trustees go head-to-head in the next election.

Trustee Palazzo, who along with Anna Bryson ultimately voted against the motion, said she would be OK if she had to face another trustee in the next election.

“I’m in trustee Area 2. My little area was part of Area 2 because the former trustee lived there,” Palazzo said. “I have no problem in being moved, even though I’m up for election.”

Palazzo lives in San Juan Capistrano, one of smaller cities within the Capistrano Unified School District, and portions of which are divvied up among four trustees.

Douglas Johnson, president of National Demographics, said it’s important that the trustee areas feature roughly the same population. Currently, they're out of whack.

For example, Palazzo’s Area 2 is 8,000 above the average, while Area 4, that currently of Bryson, is 9,000 people fewer than average.

“As the trustee of the 9,000 under [area], that is is something that has to be rectified,” Bryson said. “We want to make sure that we do it in a thoughtful, credible manner with dispassion.”

By law, the board must approve new trustee boundary areas by March 1, 2012, according to a report by staffers.

When presented with two possible timelines, the trustees chose the timeline with fewer public meetings that would finish sooner. That option was about $30,000 cheaper than going for the option that called for three public forums.

The board also agreed to forego an online software program that would have allowed voters to try their own hand at drawing new trustee areas. The “cool new tool,” as Johnson described it, would have cost another $11,500.

The district will spend about $40,000 for the consulting services, between $20,000 and $30,000 on related legal fees and as much as $364,000 on election-related costs.

In other news, the board:

  • Revised the , picking up half the cost of increased health insurance premiums on the point-of-service health plans and all of the price hikes on the HMO healthcare plans.
  • Hired lawyers to represent the district in .
  • Heard a presentation about how the district is faring academically, especially in comparison to other districts in Orange County and throughout the state.
  • Agreed to pay Orange County Social Services Agency $175,552.61 to partially reimburse costs to treat 26 students in residential-care facilities between July 1 and Oct. 7, 2010. The figure represents 40 percent of the $438,881.53 dispersed among a , including Arizona and Florida.
CRITERIA TO BE USED IN FORMULATING NEW TRUSTEE AREAS 1. Each trustee area shall contain a nearly equal number of inhabitants. 2. Trustee-area borders shall be drawn in a manner that complies  with the Federal Voting Rights Act. 3. Trustee areas shall consist of contiguous territory in as compact a form as possible. 4. Trustee-area borders shall respect communities of interest as much as possible. 5. Trustee-area borders shall follow visible, natural and man-made goegraphical and topographical features as much as possible. 6. Trustee-area borders shall follow municipal-jurisdictional boundaries as much as possible.  7. Trustee area borders shall take into consideration the location of schools. 8. Trustee areas known to be areas of higher-than-average population growth in the two to five years following this boundary-line adjustment may be underpopulated within the poupulation deviation amounts allowed by law.
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