Arcadia Elects First Asian to School Board

Reflecting the changing demographics of the city, Arcadia voters Tuesday elected Annie Yuen as the first Asian American on the school board, and returned incumbent Joann Steinmeier to her seat.

The community, where more than 54% of the students in the public schools are of Asian descent, gave Yuen 30.3% of the vote and Steinmeier 31% to fill two seats on the Arcadia Unified School District board.

Yuen beat out four-term incumbent Mary Dougherty, who received 26.1%, and David Leong, who got 12.5%

For the first time, Arcadia voters cast their ballots using touch-screen machines.

In Pasadena, where voters used conventional punch cards, results were tallied less rapidly.

In the end, with all precincts reporting in the race to fill two seats on the Pasadena Board of Education, voters elected Peter M. Soelter and Ed Honowitz. Soelter garnered 5,766 votes (53.9%), compared to Ken Chawkins’ 4,930 (46%) for Seat 6. Meanwhile, for Seat 7, Honowitz registered 6,156 votes (57.3%) compared to Mary Dee Romney’s 4,579 (42.6%).

While Pasadena was stuck with the notorious chads, casting a ballot in Arcadia was like a trip to the ATM.

“It was so simple, you just had to read the instructions,” said Marilyn Mazone, a 42-year resident. “It stops the problem of hanging chads like in Florida.”

Absentee voters cast ballots that could be optically scanned, allowing their totals to be quickly combined with those from the touch screens.

In this race, incumbents Dougherty and Steinmeier faced a rare serious challenge as they sought their fifth and fourth terms, respectively. Leong, who moved to the city last year, has sat on the Garvey school board for seven years, while Yuen has been active in the PTA and Arcadia Education Foundation.

In Pasadena, Chawkins, a Southern California Edison executive and community activist, and Soelter, an accountant and president of the PTA at Wilson Middle School, were the top vote-getters for Seat 6 in the March primary.

Romney, a schools volunteer, and Honowitz, vice president of the Pasadena Education Foundation, were winners in the Seat 7 primary. In that district, which includes Sierra Madre and Altadena, reform was the key issue, with each candidate promising to bring changes to the struggling school system.

Pasadena’s 10th-graders score below their peers in the Los Angeles Unified School District on state standardized tests. Many of the area’s wealthier families send their children to private schools.