With win under their belts, Keller ISD residents still aim to change voting rules
After two months of speculation and fury, the news broke on March 14 that the Keller school district would not split. While a cheer erupted from the area on Friday afternoon, the victory celebration was short lived, as many now want to change the way school board members are elected to prevent another one-sided proposal from ever gaining steam again.
Residents who spoke during school board meetings in January and February overwhelmingly opposed a plan to split the district along U.S. 377. The five board members who favored the split live in Keller; the two who opposed it live in Fort Worth.
Since January, a group of residents led by Dixie Davis have been circulating a petition to garner support for a single-member voting system for school board elections. Currently, board trustees are elected under an at-large system, which some believe is discriminatory. Davis lost a bid for the Place 7 seat to Heather Washington in the May 2024 election.
With the at-large system, voters choose candidates from across the district to represent the entire electorate. This, detractors say, allows majority voting blocs to effectively silence minority voices. One alternative is the single-member system in which voters in smaller sub-districts select candidates to represent their local interests.
This can be valuable in a school district as large as Keller, Davis said, which has a population of around 180,000 people. Under Davis’s single-member plan, each sub-district would have around 30,000 people, thus making it easier for candidates to engage directly with residents whose children attend the same schools, giving more of a voice to voters in each of the four main high school feeder patterns in the school district.
Davis’ petition has more than 2,000 signatures, but she needs 15,000 by August to get the proposal on next year’s school board ballot. Davis admits that’s a tall order, but she believes residents are frustrated enough to demand a change.
“The issue with the petition for better representation on the school board, that existed before the split,” said Davis. “It was really the split that launched this thing. The split really galvanized everyone. We launched it because of the split, but the need for that neighborhood representation was already there.”
At the same time, Brewer Storefront, the pro bono community advocacy arm of Dallas-based Brewer, Attorneys and Counselors, filed a federal lawsuit that would force the school district to move from an at-large voting system to a cumulative system. Under that model, voters have multiple votes in each election that can be divided among all open seats or consolidated in support of particular candidates.
Brewer alleges the at-large system violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ensures all registered voters have an equal voice.
While the petition and the lawsuit are active concurrently, there is no connection between Davis’s group and Brewer. In fact, Davis doesn’t believe adopting a cumulative voting system would fully solve the issue of unequal representation.
The split
In January, word leaked that certain Keller school board members had hatched a plan to split the district in half using U.S. 377 as the dividing line. The move was seen as a way for the district to get out of a financial hole that had left it with a $35 million shortfall in its fund balance and an anticipated $9.4 million budget deficit for the 2025-26 school year.
Under the plan, the eastern half of the district — and the schools within the Keller city limits — would detach from the west side. The west side would then be forced to create a new district, colloquially known as the “Alliance Independent School District.”
West side residents were up in arms, saying the move could devalue their properties by pushing them out of the highly ranked Keller school district. They also worried how the split would affect school resources, teacher retention and use of district-owned facilities on the east side.
What ensued was a weeks’ long fight that divided a community, led to a superintendent’s resignation and left the school board facing lawsuits and a Texas Education Agency investigation.