Politics & Government
Final Plan For 6 New Worcester School Committee Seats Submitted
A voting expert has drafted districts for six new Worcester School Committee seats in line with a 2021 lawsuit settlement.
WORCESTER, MA — The latest plan to create six new Worcester School Committee districts will go before the Board of Election Commissioners on Wednesday, and its architect says he was aiming to make the city's new voting scheme as clear for voters as possible.
Stanford University professor Nathan Persily was hired to create a map of six school committee precincts following the settlement of a 2021 lawsuit over how Worcester elects school committee members.
Persily faced several challenges in creating the map — chiefly that there's a mismatch between the number of city council districts — five — and the number of new school committee districts. That means some new school committee seats will cross council district boundaries.
In Persily's latest plan submitted Monday, only five voting precincts cross council district boundaries.
"There are literally thousands of potential plans that could be drawn to divide Worcester into six
districts and to comply with the applicable legal requirements in the consent decree and the
U.S. Constitution," he wrote in a memo about his map. "The attached plan attempts to do so while adhering to community boundaries and splitting the fewest precincts possible."
RELATED: Worcester Officials Seek Council, School Committee District Alignment
Previous proposed plans for the new districts had more crossover. For example, one version had five different school committee seats crossing into Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson's District 2 . Persily's latest update now only has two school committee districts inside Mero-Carlson's territory.
In February 2021, a coalition of local groups led by Worcester Interfaith and the Worcester NAACP filed a lawsuit against the city to change how voters elect school committee members. The all at-large system led to mostly all-white school committees, leaving nonwhite residents unrepresented, the lawsuit said.
On top of the six new school committee districts, there will be two at-large school committee seats, and the Worcester mayor will still serve as a member. Two of the six new committee districts are majority-minority.
Although the Board of Election Commissioners will review Persily's plan on Wednesday, he said in his memo to the city that the plan is final until the next redistricting period, which comes after the 2030 U.S. Census.
