A federal judge ruled Monday that Spring Branch ISD’s election system violates the Voting Rights Act and must be changed to give Latino residents more opportunity for representation on the district’s school board.
The ruling caps a roughly four-year legal battle and adds to the growing number of school districts forced to change how voters elect trustees. U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake ordered Spring Branch to switch after this May’s board election from a fully at-large system — in which all seven trustees are chosen by all voters in a district — to one where at least five trustees are elected only by residents of parts of the district.
Lake ruled that the west Harris County district’s at-large election system enables to white voters to dilute votes cast by Hispanic residents. Lake wrote that white voters in the affluent southern half of long-divided Spring Branch “vote sufficiently as a bloc” to quash Hispanic voters’ preferred candidates, a key element that must be proven to establish a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Lake also concluded that it’s more likely than not that Hispanic voters would make up a majority of at least one potential single-member district, another requirement of a Voting Rights Act violation.
“The evidence at trial established that the Anglo vote was sufficient to defeat the combined strength of the Hispanic vote and the crossover vote that Hispanic-preferred candidates received from Anglo voters,” wrote Lake, who Ronald Reagan appointed to the federal bench in 1988.
Spring Branch parent Virginia Elizondo filed the suit against the district in 2021 after she ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Spring Branch’s board. While 57 percent of students in the district are Hispanic or Latino, no person of color had ever been elected to the board until the May 2022 election. (Hispanics make up about 25 percent of potential voters, a demographics expert testified at trial.)
Elizondo argued the lack of Latino board members left families of color in diversifying areas of Spring Branch without a representative who understands their needs.
“Of course, I’m thrilled,” Elizondo said Tuesday of the court’s decision. “This is going to help all of our students and families feel like they have a representative that understands their situation. … I think it’s going to be a difference in, you can actually approach the board and they’ll actually listen to you.”
Spring Branch voters will still cast their ballots in the upcoming May 3 trustee election under the voting system now deemed illegal. After that, Lake gave the district until May 18 to appeal the court’s decision or draw up a plan for instituting a new election system. Lake allowed Spring Branch to elect trustees through all single-member districts or employ five single-member seats and two at-large seats.
“The board, administration, and SBISD counsel are currently reviewing the court’s order to determine what steps the district should take next,” Spring Branch Board President Lisa Andrews Alpe said in a statement. “Among other considerations, SBISD’s counsel will analyze all potential avenues for appeal.”
The Landing was not able to reach Alpe by phone Tuesday.
Spring Branch ISD, which serves 33,000 students in west Harris County, has long been a divided district, with tensions only escalating in recent years.
Interstate 10 splits the district into two distinct halves: the north, an increasingly diverse hub for Latino and Asian communities; and the south, a higher-income, largely white area marked by upscale subdivisions. Lake observed the effects of this split in his opinion.
“The evidence shows that the district consists of two disparate parts,” Lake wrote. “South of I-10 the students are more likely to be Anglo, affluent, go to college, and more likely to meet or exceed the state’s academic standards. North of I-10 the students are more likely to be Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, dropout, less likely to meet state academic standards, and more likely to be severely disciplined.”
Equity concerns mounted during the 2023-24 school year when administrators cut millions of dollars from the district’s budget. Families told the Houston Landing that they worried leaders were targeting the north side’s majority-Latino schools for heavier cuts, while district leaders said cuts touched every part of the district.
While Lake found Spring Branch’s voting system unjust, he also wrote there’s no evidence that district leaders “failed to provide outstanding educational opportunities” for all students or “failed to act in the best interest of its Hispanic students.”
Critics across the state have taken aim at the at-large election system in recent years with a wave of lawsuits similar to that in Spring Branch. A Houston Landing report found last year the at-large system in several other nearby districts — Cy-Fair, Humble, Katy, Pasadena — often leaves the lowest-income neighborhoods without a local representative. A parent in Humble ISD brought a similar lawsuit against the district last year before recently withdrawing it.
Supporters of the at-large approach argue it ensures representatives tend to all students, instead of just those in a trustee’s geographic boundary. Voter turnout also is typically lower in less-affluent parts of school districts, a major factor in racial and ethnic disparities on school boards.
Elizondo said the fact that Lake, who was appointed to the bench by a Republican, issued the opinion spoke volumes about the evidence she presented in her case. Republicans in Texas have typically been bigger proponents of the at-large voting system than Democrats.
“I’m really, really happy that the judge went by the law,” Elizondo said. “We proved our case and he sided with us completely, 100 percent based on what we were able to prove. The data, the research, was always in our corner.”
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