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The Mountain View Los Altos High School District’s board has unanimously selected a map that divides the district into voting areas from which to elect future trustees.
MVLA is in the process of switching from an at-large system, where all five board members are elected by voters throughout the district, to an area-based system, where the district is split into five areas that each pick one trustee.
The board voted 5-0 at a Monday, April 21, meeting to select the map dubbed “C1” out of six proposed options. The new map will take effect in time for the November 2026 election.
MVLA decided last September to switch to area-based elections to avoid a potential lawsuit under the California Voting Rights Act. The district had received a demand letter from an attorney on behalf of a district resident. Many government entities throughout California have received similar letters, often prompting switches to area-based elections.
In picking a map, the board looked at criteria including city boundaries, school attendance areas, Mountain View neighborhood groups and the racial demographics of the proposed trustee areas.
At Monday’s meeting, the board members asked several clarifying questions, but didn’t discuss the maps themselves. No members of the public came to provide feedback on the options.
Board member Catherine Vonnegut made a motion to adopt map C1, which all four of her colleagues supported.
After the vote, several board members told the Voice that they felt the map they chose best reflected the spirit of the California Voting Rights Act. That law is meant to ensure that the voting power of minority groups isn’t diluted, board President Esmeralda Ortiz said.
Map C1 includes one trustee area with the highest percentage of Asian voters of any of the maps that the board considered, and another that’s tied for the highest percentage of Hispanic voters.
In trustee area two, 39.08% of the residents are Asian, according to census data. Over in area one, census data shows that 23.53% of the residents are Hispanic.
“It’s not a majority, (but) it’s at least more concentrated than in the other maps,” board member Thida Cornes said.
Board members said that it wasn’t possible to create a map with a “majority-minority” district, because of the way that MVLA’s demographics are geographically distributed.
In approving the map on Monday, the board decided on the sequence by which the trustee areas would come up for election. The board voted to have areas one, two and three up for election in 2026 and areas four and five in 2028.
Among the current board members, Ortiz lives in area two, Cornes and Vonnegut live in area three, Vadim Katz lives in area four and Alex Levich lives in area five. No trustee lives in area one, which covers the area north of U.S. Highway 101, as well as the Monta Loma and part of the San Antonio neighborhoods.
The election sequence matches up with when the current terms of the existing trustees expire. Ortiz, Cornes and Vonnegut are seated through 2026, while Katz and Levich’s terms run through 2028.
The board’s vote on Monday wasn’t technically the final step in the process of moving to area-based elections. On a formal level, the board was recommending map C1 to the Santa Clara County Committee on School District Organization, which will now consider it for approval and then establish the trustee areas.
David Soldani, MVLA’s attorney, told the board that he’s never seen a county committee outright oppose a map that a school board recommends.
“I anticipate that they’ll sign off on whatever this board selects – any of these options,” Soldani said.
