HAZLETON, Pa. — A federal lawsuit filed Monday claims the Hazleton Area School District's current method of electing directors dilutes the voting power of its Latino population and runs afoul of the law.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Aleida Aquino and Brendalis Lopez, two mothers with children in the district. It asks a federal judge to halt at-large voting for school directors because, their attorneys argue, the method violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee to equal protection.
"The district's at-large system unjustly dilutes the Latino community's electoral influence, ignoring their significant presence in the student body and the community," said Bernadette Reyes, voting rights counsel at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which helped bring the suit.
The Hazleton Area School District's nine directors are elected to four-year terms during district-wide contests. If they win, they hold at-large seats that represent the entire district, which encompasses portions of Luzerne, Schuylkill and Carbon Counties.
That method of electing representatives, called at-large voting, dilutes the voting power of the district's Latino population, which made up nearly 40% of the district's population in 2022 and about 65.7% of the student population, the lawsuit states.
Even though a Latino candidate might capture the most votes in primarily Hispanic precincts in the City of Hazleton, they still end up losing because the district's white population sufficiently turns out as a bloc against them, the suit contends. The district's school board has never seated a Latino director.
"Despite the substantial Hispanic population in the HASD and the political cohesion among Hispanic voters, Hispanic candidates preferred by Hispanic voters have consistently lost in elections for seats on the HASB and other local elections," the lawsuit states.
Attempts to reach the district's superintendent and its solicitor were not successful Tuesday.
The district began electing at-large school directors in 1989. Before that, directors were elected by voters who lived in their regions.
The school board voted to change that arrangement in February 1988 because critics believed at-large voting would arrest the parochialism that made consensus on spending a challenge, according to reporting at the time by the Standard-Speaker, of Hazleton.
Since then, the district's Latino population soared but its representatives never reflected community's diversity.
“For the Hispanic citizens in the School District, the promise of a representative democracy remains unfulfilled until we eradicate these structural inequalities in political opportunities,” Dan Brier, a local attorney who serves as co-counsel in the case, said in a statement.
Aquino and Lopez are represented by attorneys from the Voting Rights Project, Myers, Brier & Kelly, Winebrake & Santillo and Frederick P. Rooney.
