Latino Registration Drive Seeks to Win School Board Seats

Latino leaders in Santa Ana have launched a voter-registration drive to try to capture a majority of seats for the first time on the school board, which oversees a district with a large Latino population.

Seven candidates, including two Latinos, are vying for three seats on the board of Santa Ana Unified School District. The board has only one Latino member, Sal Mendoza, an insurance businessman who has held the seat for two years.

Eight school districts in the county will hold elections Nov. 7. In addition to Santa Ana Unified, the others are Huntington Beach Union High School; Garden Grove Unified; Irvine Unified; Newport-Mesa Unified; Orange Unified; Anaheim City School, and Lowell Joint School, which is partially in Los Angeles County.

The ballot will also include elections for two of five seats on the Board of Trustees of the Coast Community College District.

In Santa Ana, flyers distributed throughout neighborhoods urge people to register to vote.

“With an 80% Hispanic student enrollment, it is critical that we elect trustees who are sensitive and responsive to not only the educational needs of the general community but more importantly, the educational needs of the Hispanic community as well,” the flyers read.

The registration drive is being led by several Latino leaders in Santa Ana who have joined with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a Texas-based organization dedicated to improving political representation for Latinos.

Santa Ana Unified Trustee Mary J. Pryer, a school board member since 1971 and a conservative, has chosen not to run for reelection.

But James A. Richards, board vice president, who is seeking his third term, said he thinks special-interest campaigns border on reverse racial discrimination.

“I think that it’s very sad once any special interest group seeks any elections to see their group elected,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can tell people to vote for somebody because they’re Hispanic or vote for them just because they are black or just because they’re yellow. You’re not doing anybody in the community justice. You should vote for someone because they’re qualified.”

But Audrey Yamagata-Noji, a recently elected board member, called the voter-registration drive among Latinos a positive effort.

“There is a direct need to get more members of the Latino community registered to vote, to understand the process, especially after this poll guard thing,” she said, referring to poll guards hired by the GOP in the last election to ensure that all Latinos voting were U.S. citizens. The state Legislature has since outlawed the use of poll guards. (See story below.)

“The more people we get out to vote, especially in school board elections, the better,” Yamagata-Noji said. “And when you look at the population of our schools, it behooves us for parents to know the issues, know what we’re doing, know what is going on in Sacramento.

“Getting more minorities elected to office is a very good goal, whether it’s in Mission Viejo or Santa Ana,” she said.

In Orange Unified, a district that has been racked by controversy in the last few years by allegations of wrongdoing, only one incumbent is among the 19 candidates for four of the board’s seven seats.

Trustees Ruth C. Evans and Robert J. Elliott will not seek reelection, but Trustee Joe J. Cherry has registered to run again.

The three were accused by a grand jury in June, 1987, of “willful misconduct in office” for “not minding the store” while thousands of dollars in kickback contracts were negotiated from the district, in the biggest school scandal in Orange County in a decade.

An attorney for the three said in April that he would ask the state Supreme Court to reverse a ruling by an appeals court and to throw out the charges against his clients. None of the three, nor their attorney, could be reached to comment on the status of that case.