One of the South Bay's largest highschool districts has finalized a brand new system for electing board of trustees members just in time for fall elections.
The Fremont Union High School District — which incorporates parts of Cupertino, Los Altos, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale — approved a map Wednesday evening that divides the district into five geographic zones. Voters in each zone will elect a candidate from that zone as a part of the county's effort to adopt a trustee-based area election system.
The recent election system will replace the district's at-large election process, during which voters selected any five candidates no matter where they lived, and can take effect within the November election when Board Chairman Jeff Moe and Trustee Rod Sinks retire.
First, one trustee might be elected from a zone that features North Sunnyvale and the opposite from a zone that features West San Jose, Saratoga and parts of Santa Clara, all areas which have been historically underrepresented on the board. The remaining three districts, which primarily include Cupertino and Central Sunnyvale, must wait for the 2026 district elections before their candidates might be elected.
“We had a lot of control over how we were going to conduct the process,” board Vice President Naomi Nakano-Matsumoto said during Wednesday’s meeting. “We have done our due diligence and in the end it appears to be the right thing to move forward with the area manager election.”
According to the board, the brand new map distributes the population evenly across the zones and the boundaries closely follow existing boundaries for prime school attendance and native middle and elementary schools that aren’t a part of the Fremont Union. The map also holds together smaller municipalities, including Saratoga, Santa Clara, West San Jose and Los Altos, and allows for Hispanic/Latino majority voting within the North Sunnyvale zone.
The district selected to transition in 2023 since it feared a possible lawsuit from community members over alleged violations of the California Voting Rights Act, a state law that protects racial minorities from having their votes diluted. Critics say at-large voting can prevent minority groups from electing their preferred candidates in the event that they aren’t a majority in a jurisdiction.
No local trustee was elected for the district's Hispanic/Latino electorate, which is concentrated primarily in North Sunnyvale and is a minority group protected by the law, which the district believes may lead to a lawsuit. According to the district, of the 30 board members elected since 1970, none have come from Santa Clara, Saratoga or North Sunnyvale. There at the moment are 13 in cities like Cupertino and eight in downtown Sunnyvale.
Throughout the transition process, some community members requested that the board reconsider, concerned that district staff didn’t adequately inform residents in regards to the change or conduct a radical evaluation of whether it was needed. A petition was launched in January that received greater than 2,300 votes to delay implementation until 2026.
Liang-Fang Chao, a Cupertino city council member who said she was representing herself when speaking on the matter, believes the method was rushed and would have liked to see the board wait or consider other options. She continued to support the map approved by the trustees because there’s a corresponding trustee area for every highschool attendance area.
Mother Jessie Jarecki, whose children will attend Homestead High School in Cupertino, believes it’s going to all the time be difficult to get nearly all of residents to agree on a map. She encouraged trustees to approve the map in order that they can deal with preparing for the November election.
“You have to do what you have to do so we can have an election,” she said, “and start getting people to plan for the election.”
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