CEDAR CITY — With the number of school board seats scheduled to increase from five to seven this year in Iron County, county officials are in the process of developing new boundary maps and will be holding a town hall to discuss the possibilities Tuesday.
Iron County School District’s official head count topped 10,000 students for the first time in October 2020, thereby necessitating the addition of two more seats on its school board, according to state law.
That means the Iron County school board will have a total of four positions up for election in November: the two new seats plus the seats currently occupied by incumbents Michelle Lambert and Dale Brinkerhoff, each of whom is in the final year of a four-year term.
Iron County Clerk Jonathan Whittaker has been reworking the county’s election maps to reflect population data from the 2020 U.S. Census. The adjustments include the addition of nine more voting precincts, bringing the county’s total to 50.
Whittaker and the Iron County commissioners discussed the different options for the school board district boundaries during Monday’s regular County Commission meeting in Parowan.
Iron County’s redistricting was also briefly mentioned during Tuesday’s Iron County School District board meeting in Cedar City. During the meeting, Brinkerhoff mentioned the upcoming town hall and noted that the school district itself doesn’t have any involvement or input in the process, which is strictly the county’s responsibility and is subject to state approval.
Section 20A-14-21 of the Utah State Code indicates that local school board districts are to be divided so that they are “substantially equal in population and are as contiguous and compact as practicable.”
Another aspect that is often considered, which is along the same lines of continuity and compactness, is what Whittaker called “communities of interest,” which essentially means striving to keep a town and its immediately surrounding areas within a single district, if feasible.
“I know that it’s ideal to have all of the above, but I think it’s nearly impossible to do that,” he said during the meeting. “Obviously, we want representation in all parts of the county, (but) if somebody’s serving in the Parowan area and you include one or two precincts in the Cedar Valley, those people, I don’t know whether they feel they have a really good say.”
Whittaker then noted that such a situation already does exist, as current school board member Ben Johnson, who is from Parowan, not only represents the communities of Parowan, Paragonah and Brian Head but also a section of northeastern Cedar City in the Fiddler’s Canyon area.
Deputy County Attorney Sam Woodhall said from a legal standpoint, equality in population appears to be the most important aspect to consider.
“As I understand the legal precedent, the population just can’t be understated,” Woodall said. “It has to be more of a driving factor here.”
Woodall also told the commissioners that the relevant state statute requires that such district boundaries be reevaluated at least once every 10 years, but that process can be done more frequently if desired.
“Let’s say that we do project one area to have some significant growth,” Woodall said. “Maybe we take another look at that in the next four to five years, instead of waiting 10 years, and then we can make adjustments to protect our communities of interest more carefully.”
The Iron County Commission has scheduled a town hall event in order to discuss the proposed school district redistricting options with the public. The meeting is scheduled to take place starting at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the main upper conference room of the Festival Hall in Cedar City.
Whittaker, along with the help and input of others, has developed three different proposal maps, which can be viewed online. The page features an interactive map that allows users to toggle the different options and view them as overlays. The number of people in a given district is expressed in black numerals within or adjacent to that district’s boundaries on the map.
For reference, Iron County’s population according to the 2020 Census was 57,282, meaning that if each of the seven districts were to have the same number of people, there would be 8,183 people in each. The idea is to keep the numbers in each of the seven districts as close to that target figure as possible, with a total deviation of less than 10% being preferable.
County officials have noted the urgency involved in deciding on a map soon in order to give potentially interested candidates time to decide whether they want to run for office. In this year’s general election, the designated filing period to declare one’s candidacy is from March 7-11.
Updated Jan. 30, 9 p.m. to reflect that the number of voting precincts in Iron County recently went from 41 to 50.
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