How gerrymandered can an election get? Parents inquiring why the Community Education Council advisory vote results were not yet posted have discovered -- once again -- that the Department of Education has unilaterally decided to change the rules of CEC elections midstream.

Originally, the result of the parent advisory vote was to be posted publicly on the powertotheparents website in early May, according to that site's home page. Instead, last week the DOE instructed the election vendor to withhold results of the parent advisory "straw poll" vote, which was intended to guide the real vote, until after the official selectors cast their votes, according to a Power to the Parents staffer.

The official CEC voting process is already convoluted: three PTA officials from each school each cast only two votes for candidates for the 12-member CECs. Deadlines for candidate sign-up, the straw poll, and the official voting have all been changed repeatedly this year at the DOE's direction. In the latest change, the CEC voting deadline was extended to midnight tonight.

Still, I look forward to finding out who will be elected to my CEC for the coming two-year term. As the new mayoral control law is considered, it will be up to next year's crew to promote parents' voices in the system. Preventing the DOE from manipulating community elections is one of many reasons why parent advocates would like to see administration of the CECs be made independent from the DOE -- perhaps placed under the Public Advocate's office.

As part of the rewrite of mayoral control legislation, CEC3 supports a public November CEC election held alongside other public elections. The current system is devised, controlled, and constantly changed in a murky and undemocratic manner by DOE. "Power to the parents," it's not.

EDITOR'S UPDATE: Representatives of other CEC’s are also speaking out about issues surrounding the election. Here is a letter sent on May 19 from the District 31 CEC to Jacqui Lipson, the CEC administrative coordinator at the DOE, raising concerns similar to those Jennifer wrote about in this post:

Dear Ms. Lipson:

CEC 31 is interested in obtaining the results of the District 31 “straw poll” for CEC candidates – as well as the CEC Candidates’ election results – which we were told would be released prior to the onset of PTA elections tomorrow (May 20th). Results from the straw vote were promised in “early May” but never received here in District 31 and since PTA elections begin tomorrow, results from the official selector voting were supposed to be released by today.

CEC 31 requests answers to the following questions:

  1. Why was the original “Advisory Straw Vote” voting deadline posted online at PowerToTheParents.org extended?

  2. Why were PTA selectors allowed to cast their votes in the “Official Selector Vote” past the deadline of May 15th?

In both cases, voting was supposed to end by a particular date but it was still possible to cast votes online past the originally posted deadlines, which were subsequently altered to later dates on the website.

  1. Why were PTA officers who wished to run for a CEC seat required to resign their PTA positions, yet CEC candidates are being told that if they wish to run for a PTA officers’ position now they may do so?

Should a CEC candidate also run for PTA office and win both elections he/she would be forced to make a decision regarding whether they wish to resign from consideration for the CEC or the PTA. This resignation will force one of the bodies (CEC or PTA) to replace the candidate and will cause undue hardship to both of these parent organizations. All of which can be prevented by simply having the CEC election results released today as promised. We hereby request those results for District 31.

  1. We wish clarification regarding a CEC candidate who has children in multiple public schools. Chancellor’s Regulation D-140 (Section V, A.3) states: When ballots are tallied, the nine nominees receiving the highest number of votes will be deemed conditionally selected. However, no school may have more than one parent representative on the CEC. If more than one nominee from the same school is selected, the nominee with the highest number of votes will be deemed selected. Other nominees from the school with fewer votes will be removed from consideration and replaced by the person with the next highest number of votes from a school not already represented on the CEC. This restriction shall not apply to situations where fewer than nine parents would be selected if the restriction were enforced.

In past CEC elections, a candidate who has children in multiple schools was allowed to represent any one of those schools as a CEC member, and if another candidate had a child in one of those same schools, the candidate with the multiple schools could be considered as representing a school other than the duplicate one. In this way both CEC candidates could be allowed to be seated on the same Council. Has this precedent changed?

  1. Do CEC candidates with children in multiple schools now have to choose in advance which school they wish to represent, thereby possibly disqualifying any other CEC candidate unlucky enough to be from that same school?

  2. We would like a copy of the guidelines and operating procedures followed by PowerToTheParents.org, the independent agent managing the CEC elections.

We formally request an expedited response with answers to all the questions stated above.

Thank you