School board elections in the Helena-West Helena and Pulaski County Special school districts will be held in conjunction with the Nov. 8 general election without requiring voters to mark separate ballots or even vote at different locations.
Act 15 of the third special legislative session in 2016, held earlier this month, removed some legal obstacles to holding a school board election in November when voters are choosing their federal, state, county and local representatives.
"We're pleased with the results," said Andrew Bagley, who plans to run for election to the Helena-West Helena board. The legislation "does what it needs to do. We did not need the chaos of two lines and two ballots. We're happy."
Typically, Arkansas school districts choose school board members in a separate school election held on the third Tuesday of September. That will still be the case for nearly all of the state's more than 230 school districts this year. The election will be Sept. 20.
However, Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key earlier this year decided that the school board elections for Helena-West Helena and Pulaski County Special school districts will coincide with the Nov. 8 general election, as permitted by Act 1281 of 2015.
Both districts are now exiting five years of state control after they were taken over by the state because they were in fiscal distress, and have no locally elected school board members. Both systems will be returned to local control after the November election and subsequent training of their seven-member school boards.
The 2015 law allowing school elections to be held with the general election was out of sync on some points with older statutes.
Arkansas Code Annotated 6-14-102 and 6-14-106 limit school district ballots to only school-related issues and require that a school election take place within the physical boundaries of the affected school districts. Additionally, existing state law did not include a mechanism for the school district to share in the cost of the general election.
Pulaski County Election Commission staff members warned that, without legislative changes, as many as 67,000 voters in the Pulaski County Special district would have to go through two separate lines at their polling places to sign two poll books and mark two different ballots -- a school ballot and a general election ballot. And, as many as 7,300 potential voters would have to go to two separate polling locations to vote on a school board member, and on a U.S. president and a U.S. senator.
The dual elections would have required new poll workers, new poll books and additional equipment, Pulaski County Election Director Bryan Poe said before the special legislative session.
The newly passed Act 15 resolves the conflicts between the earlier laws, the Pulaski County Election Commission staff said Friday.
The school election issues and general-election issues can be on the same ballot, as a result of the new law. The requirement that a school election be held within the physical boundaries of a school district is waived for a November election, and early voting can take place for two weeks before the election. Early voting before a September school election is limited to one week before the election day.
The new law also authorizes a school district to reimburse each county in which the school election appears on the general-election ballot for additional costs incurred by the county for the school election.
The Arkansas Department of Education has not yet officially announced the candidate-filing period for the school elections in November.
Bagley, the prospective candidate for the Helena-West Helena district -- where voters will decide on a 9.75-mill school tax increase, as well as select a school board in November -- has worked with the Arkansas School Boards Association to determine that the candidate-filing period will likely begin at noon Aug. 23 and end at noon Aug. 30.
Metro on 05/30/2016