Wyoming Street in Hazelton, Pa. was once nearly vacant but since a wave of immigration, almost 90% of storefronts are filled.
Lawsuit seeks to overturn at-large voting system in Hazleton majority-Latino district
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Gabriela Martínez/WITF
Wyoming Street in Hazelton, Pa. was once nearly vacant but since a wave of immigration, almost 90% of storefronts are filled.
Two Latino parents are challenging Hazleton Area School District’s at-large voting system.
The suit – filed by the UCLA Voting Rights Project on behalf of Aleida Aquino and Brendalis Lopez in the Middle District of Pennsylvania – alleges the district’s method for electing school board candidates violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment by diminishing the voting power of Hazleton’s growing Hispanic community.
According to the complaint, 12,243 students attended Hazleton Area School District in the 2022-2023 school year. Nearly 66% of the student population – 8,041 – were Hispanic and 30% were white. The district is represented by an all-white, nine-member school board.
Some school districts are broken into voting precincts that elect their own school board members, but Hazleton’s at-large system has all voters choose between all candidates. Such systems have been found to discriminate against minority groups, whose votes are drowned out in the larger field.
Most of the district’s Hispanic population is concentrated in the City of Hazleton and in West Hazleton. Under the district’s at-large system, voters cast ballots for all the candidates in the jurisdiction, and that makes it difficult for the Latino voting bloc, which is not the majority in HASD, to elect the candidate of their choice.
“The problem with the way directors are elected is that they’re elected district-wide,” said Dan Brier, an attorney on the case. “So the racially polarized voting that exists, where the white voters vote in block to defeat Hispanic candidates, has been the problem. There have been very good Hispanic candidates, but they can’t get elected because Hispanics don’t make up a majority of the district and racially polarized voting has blocked their access to the school board.”
The suit also claims there has been “a significant lack of responsiveness on the part of HASB officials to the particularized needs of the Hispanic community at the HASD.” It alleges disregard to complaints related to disparate student discipline, lack of translators and student registration policies based on “unfair stereotypes.”
The lawsuit is asking the federal court to order the school district to implement an alternate system for electing school board members that would give Hispanics a fair opportunity to elect Hispanic candidates. One of the goals is to end at-large voting before the next Hazleton Area School District school board race in 2025.
A similar voting rights lawsuit against Bethlehem Area School Board in 2006 resulted in the creation of a new system that included six at-large seats and three smaller geographic seats, including one in a primarily Latino area.
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