Election the next step after Gateway school district again fails to appoint a trustee

After four unsuccessful attempts to fill a vacant seat on its board of trustees, the Gateway Unified School District in Redding appears headed to a special election to replace a trustee who resigned after serving for less than two months.

Before Monday's meeting, the board received five applications for the vacant Area 2 seat, but one of the candidates, Sandra Masten, withdrew her name. So on Monday, the board interviewed the four remaining applicants: Joseph Fairfield, Jill Marshall, Jennie Morgan and Charity Tatlow.

With trustee Phil Lewis absent from the meeting, applicants needed a 3-0 vote to be successfully appointed to the board. None of the candidates received a unanimous vote, Trustee Dale Wallace said Tuesday.

The district has until April 7 to fill the board vacancy, but no further meetings were planned before the Friday deadline, said Debby Boontjer, executive secretary to the superintendent.

After the deadline passes, the Shasta County Office of Education has to notify the Shasta County Elections Office and request an election to fill the board vacancy, Boontjer said, citing state education law.

Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen has indicated the district's trustee vote would be included in a November election, Boontjer said. The Gateway district includes a large geographic area from north Redding to Shasta Lake and areas north of Lake Shasta.

The seat became vacant when then-board President Cherrill Clifford resigned Feb. 6 amid controversy over the firing in December of longtime Superintendent Jim Harrell. Clifford was elected to the board in November 2022 and sworn in Dec. 14, along with board members Lindsi and Elias Haynes.

The Hayneses and Clifford voted together to fire Harrell. Wallace and Lewis voted against the ouster.

While the district continues to review superintendent applications, the process of appointing a new trustee has come to a halt. And Wallace said he wondered whether the county will be prepared to hold an election in November.

"With the county voting out their voting system, they don't even know if they can do it, but you'd have to talk to Cathy Darling Allen on that one," he said.

Last week the county Board of Supervisors reaffirmed an earlier decision to do away with an electronic vote-counting system and develop a method of hand-counting ballots.

The three-member majority of the supervisors indicated they did not trust the Dominion Voting Systems machines the county had been using to reliably tally ballots.

Darling Allen said Tuesday her office was working to develop a system to ensure there is an election in November.

"We are actively working on resolving the outstanding issues that need Board action, for example obtaining new disabled access voting equipment, assessing and approving facility and staffing needs (for both in the department and to actually count votes). Within the department, we also need to fully develop processes and procedures to ensure timeliness in results reporting," Darling Allen said in an email.

The California Secretary of State must approve the county's hand-counting process, Deputy Secretary of State Susan Lapsley said. Machine counting has been used in the state since the 60s, she said. Shasta would be the first county in the state to return to manual tallying in more than 50 years, she said.

Developing a hand-counting process that is legal and in line with state requirements will be a challenge for Darling Allen's office, Lapsley said.

"If we end up at a place where we have an election failure, there is going to be a lot of shared blame. It's not going to rest with my office," Darling Allen said. "I feel like this was a lose-lose (March 28) to some degree because we expected supervisors to listen to our office. We expected to collaborate together and we've been really struggling to do that."

In a report Darling Allen issued last month, she estimated her office would need to hire an additional 1,300 people to hand-count ballots, and it could set the county back more than $1.6 million.

Reporter Damon Arthur welcomes story tips at 530-338-8834, by email at damon.arthur@redding.com and on Twitter at @damonarthur_RS. Help local journalism thrive by subscribing today!

This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Election next after Gateway school district fails to appoint a trustee