Despite the uptick in public interest in education following Arizona’s #RedForEd teacher movement, many local school board races remain uncontested on the November ballot, and the elections will be canceled outright.
And a few races that are contested right now may not be for long, after candidates in Tucson’s three largest school districts are in court fighting legal challenges to their candidacy.
Further, some smaller and rural school districts can’t even find enough candidates to run.
Candidates in Tucson’s three largest school districts — Amphitheater, Sunnyside and TUSD — are set to be in court this week to fend off legal challenges to their nominating petitions.
In two of those school districts, Amphitheater and Sunnyside, if the candidates are disqualified from the ballot, the election will be canceled.
Candidates for public office qualify for the ballot by collecting a minimum number of signatures from registered voters in their district. To run for office in Tucson Unified School District, for example, a candidate must get 400 registered voters living within district boundaries to sign their petitions.
TUSD board member Mike Hicks submitted 518 signatures for his re-election bid.
But Joel Ireland, a former TUSD school board member, challenged Hicks’ signatures in court. He claims 190 of Hicks’ signatures are invalid, leaving him short of the minimum needed.
Hicks, however, said he’s not worried. The TUSD board is so dysfunctional that he’s not even sure he wants to serve a third term.
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you, if the challenge is successful, I’ll say thank you. Even my wife said, ‘Maybe this a blessing in disguise,’” he said.
He complained that three of his fellow board members spend their time fighting amongst themselves, and the other tries to micromanage, adding, “it’s as if they’re really not interested in what’s best for the students.”
Outside the courtroom after his preliminary hearing Thursday, Hicks commiserated with his fellow school board candidate, Felicia Chew, who is also facing a challenge in seeking a seat on the Amphitheater Unified School District.
He complained that the three women on the TUSD board — Adelita Grijalva, Kristel Foster and Rachael Sedgwick — are always fighting with each other, and always appear to be on “‘that day of the month.”
“Excuse the expression,” he added.
There are a variety of reasons signatures can be invalidated from a petition sheet.
In his complaint, Ireland argued that the bulk of the 190 signatures are invalid because signers weren’t registered to vote in Pima County, or were registered outside TUSD boundaries. A few signed twice, according to his complaint. Others listed their addresses as different from the one where they’re registered to vote. And some signatures don’t match those on file at the county elections office. Dozens more signatures should be tossed because the petition circulator didn’t complete the back of the form, the complaint argues.
Hicks said he suspects Ireland was only the front man for the person really trying to kick him off the ballot: his fellow TUSD board member Grijalva, who is also up for re-election.
Grijalva denied that, saying Ireland is a friend, but did it on his own, as he has challenged other candidate petitions in the past. And she noted Hicks was bounced from the ballot for not having enough valid signatures in 2008, when he first ran for the office, and should have learned his lesson then.
“You want to put in at least double (the minimum required number of signatures),” Grijalva said, noting she filed 800 signatures. “The bar is respectively pretty low, for all of us on school boards, so if you can’t put in the time to do that then you open yourself up to challenges.”
But even if Hicks gets bounced from the ballot, voters in TUSD will still have options. Five people, including Hicks and Grijalva, are running for two open seats on the board.
That’s not the case in Amphitheater or Sunnyside school districts.
Chew, a former Democratic city council candidate who is now running for the Amphitheater board, is facing a challenge to her signatures from Matt Kopec, a former Democratic lawmaker who is also seeking a spot on the board.
Two seats are open in Amphitheater, but only one incumbent, Susan Zibrat, is running. That means if Chew is knocked off, the election will be canceled, and Zibrat will win re-election without a challenge, and Kopec will be elected to the board without ever receiving a single vote.
Chew turned in 451 signatures. To get on the ballot, she needs 392 of those signatures to be deemed valid. In court, Kopec is arguing 124 are invalid.
When she ran for Tucson City Council, Chew said she had a campaign team that verified her signatures for her before she turned them in. But as a school board candidate, she doesn’t have the kind of help.
Chew suggested challenging her signatures was reprisal by Democrats because she’s worked with Republicans and supported Yahya Yuksel, a Democratic candidate in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional district that the party has disowned.
“I feel like a lot of this is kind of retaliation,” she said.
On the Sunnyside school board, two seats are open, and only three people submitted signatures to run for the offices.
To qualify to run for the Sunnyside school board, candidates must get 148 valid signatures. Gabriel Morales filed 165, though 99 of those are being challenged in court for a variety of reasons.
The challenge was brought by Steven Valencia, a retiree who is involved in local politics, though Morales suspects it’s being orchestrated by one of his opponents, board member Eva Carillo Dong.
Valencia denied this, and said while he had conversations with many people about the race, nobody asked him to file the complaint.
“If somebody is going to run and they don’t pay attention to what they’re doing, it makes you think they’re not going to be that attentive,” he said. “You have to do things right.”
All three of the legal challenges must be settled before Sept. 14, when ballots for the November election must be printed.
In many other local districts, voters will not have a choice as to who serves on their school board, and will not even get to vote for candidates.
That’s because when there’s an uncontested school board race, the County Recorder’s Office simply cancels the election.
Voters in Vail Unified School District wont have a choice of who represents them on the school board — the two incumbents were the only people who qualified for the ballot, and the election will be canceled.
Likewise, Sahuarita Unified School District voters won’t get to choose. One incumbent is stepping down, and one newcomer will get the job without a fight.
Flowing Wells Unified School District also wont get a vote on their new school board member. An incumbent is stepping down, and Kristine Hammar will skate into the gig unopposed.
In Catalina Foothills Unified School District, all three incumbents up for re-election are running unchallenged, and voters won’t get a chance to weigh in.
And in some of the smaller and more rural districts, there’s actually a deficit of candidates.
In Tanque Verde Unified School District, school board member Susan Fry is seeking re-election, but her fellow board member Steven Auslander decided to call it quits, and didn’t collect the necessary 44 signatures to qualify for the ballot.
At San Fernando Elementary School District in Sasabe, incumbent Roy Isaman didn’t file the one signature needed to keep his seat on the school board. Same for Redington Elementary School District in the northeast corner of Pima County, where incumbent Judith Dykes didn’t seek re-election, which she could have won with only her own signature.
Nathan Bacal, programs and elections manager at the Pima County Schools Superintendent’s Office, said when there’s a deficit of candidates, the election is canceled, and the seat is deemed vacant.
Then, much like if someone dies or quits mid-term, the school district solicits resumes from possible appointees, and sends on one to three names to the superintendent, who makes the appointment.
“This has been the norm where not all districts fill up, and there are some vacant seats we have to go through this process for. But that kind of took me by surprise as well,” he said.
