Sunnyside School District reaches settlement agreement on by-district voting after being issued a violation in April
The Sunnyside School District will change how it elects school board members as part of a legal settlement designed to better represent the area’s large Latino population.
The agreement with Empowering Latina Leaders & Action calls on the school district to change its at-large electoral process to a district voting system.
The rural central Washington district was notified in April by ELLA, the ACLU of Washington and attorney Molly Peach Matter of Amend Law that the district’s at-large voting system violates the Washington Voting Rights Act and dilutes Latino voices.
Through reviewing ELLA’s data, the Sunnyside School District agreed to move to a by-district voting system and will redraw voting maps that will include three active majority Latinx voting districts. The district will also reimburse the ACLU for statutory legal fees.
“We’re already getting calls from other communities that are interested,” said Maria Fernandez, executive director of ELLA. “I’m talking parents, and I’m talking staff of school districts that have called ELLA and are asking, ‘How did you all do that?’ and ‘How can we get this done here?’ ”
“We’ve gotten calls from Toppenish, gotten calls from the Prosser School District. We’ve gotten calls from Moxee, and so we know that just locally here, there’s already a buzz about it,” Fernandez said.
David Montes, staff attorney for ACLU of Washington, said that last year is an example of how at-large voting has caused voter polarization in the area after Sandra Zesati, a Latina candidate, lost in District 5.
“Sandra Zesati ran in District 5, and with that 92% of the 58% of (Latino) people there, she would have won the election with not a single white vote,” Montes said. “She would have had 52% of the vote, but because it wasn’t just District 5 voting for her, but it was District 1 and District 2 and District 3 and District 4 all voting for her, she lost that election.
“The people of District 5 did not get to pick the person who was representing them.”
From 2011 to 2021, no Latino candidates ran for the school board, according to ACLU of Washington’s notice of violation sent to the school district.
In 2023, four Latino candidates ran for school board seats, with two of them running for the same seat. However, the two Latino candidates running against white candidates lost.
Fernandez hopes that with this change, it will help Latinos get elected and have representation in areas with high Latino populations.
“It was really important to be able to change that system so that the families and parents and students felt like they had representation, true representation at the school board level, because we know that whoever is sitting in those leadership positions gets to decide very important policy decisions and programming decisions and funding decisions,” Fernandez said.
The new voting maps and by-district system must be implemented for the 2025 primary and general elections.
Ryan Maxwell, superintendent of Sunnyside School District, said they are working together to redistrict.
“We weren’t aware this was an issue in the community, in terms of what people felt was the problem, and so the moment we got the complaint, we wanted to work with ACLU to make sure that our Hispanic population was represented to the fullest in our community,” he said.