If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

It’s not automatic.

Twice this past week and once the week before I heard someone say that if the school board doesn’t fill a board vacancy within 30 days, the court steps in and appoints someone.

That’s not so. It isn’t automatic. It isn’t as if the McKean County Court of Common Pleas is watching the calendar, and on the 31st. day after when Gary A. Hardes’ resignation was effective, they double check to make sure the board has got together and filled the vacancy, and if this has not occurred, they convene and give the jury pool thingy a spin and pluck out names until they find a qualified elector of our school district. Or use whatever method they think best.

No, nothing like that happens just because the clock, or the calendar, has run. The court gets involved only if the 30 days has passed without an appointment having been made, and “…a petition of the ten or more resident taxpayers” is filed with the court.

The petition does not dictate the court’s choice. The appointee would have to have the same qualifications as anyone who runs for school board: being a qualified elector of the district, meaning a person who is entitled to vote in the school district.

The court could announce that it is preparing to fill the vacancy, and invite qualified electors to apply. Or it could look at the results of the last election and see who came close. Or it could come up with another approach. I was kidding about using a lottery similar to one used for picking jury pools.

When I refer to “the court,” I mean the whole court of common pleas. We might think there would be two courts to pick from, since our school district is in two counties, and both counties have Courts of Common Pleas. But the major portion of the Port Allegany School District lies in McKean County, so that’s where the vacancy-filling jurisdiction lies.

However, the appointee chosen by the McKean Court of Common Pleas, if it comes to that, could come from anywhere in the school district, including Roulette or Pleasant Valley Township, just as the school board can pick from among folks anywhere in the district.

Our Court of Common Pleas has two judges. But it is not “the judge” or “a judge” of the Court of Common Pleas who would do the appointing, if petitioned. It is the Court. In McKean County, that court consists of two judges, the President Judge and an Associate Judge. For this duty both would convene and they would act together to fill the vacancy, both of their honors, John Pavlock and Chris Hauser. What if they did not agree? I don’t know! But surely, that is unthinkable.

In a recent discussion I heard someone say a person has to be a property owner to petition the court. She had read something in a news story about another school board, with a reference to a “resident taxpayer” of the school district.

Taxpayers are those who pay per capita tax, earned income tax or property taxes. Some adult residents pay all three, but most pay at least one. Adult non-property owners who live here are still resident taxpayers, or should be.

As for who is eligible for appointment, that would be a qualified elector. That means someone qualified to vote in the district, whether or not that person has registered to vote.

People are qualified to vote if they are citizens and reside in the district and are 18 years of age or older and have not had their franchise (voting privilege) revoked. Those are the qualifications for running for office, too.

Another school board in the area, working to fill a vacancy, has tasked its Human Resources Committee with sorting things out. But it is not a personnel matter in the usual sense, for school board members are officials of the school district, not employees.

Meetings of a district’s Human Resources Committee dealing with the school board vacancy should hold public meetings, because there is no Open Meetings exception that covers it, allowing them to meet in executive (closed) session. Our district doesn’t have such a committee.

If you are reading this Wednesday or Thursday, and you want to be considered for the school board appointment, get your resume right up to the central office of the school district, in the high school. It should be addressed to the board. No, president Dave Mensch doesn’t hang around up there a lot, but the board does have a secretary (Judy Bodamer), and she does. (Well, she doesn’t just hang around, I should say, but works busily all day and sometimes much of the night.)

Speaking of voting, you probably saw that Judge Bernard McGinley of the Commonwealth Court has struck down the voter ID law. He found that the law violated the state constitution because “hundreds of thousands of electors in Pennsylvania lack compliant ID.

“Enforcement of the Voter ID Law as to these electors has the effect of disenfranchising them through no fault of their own. Inescapably, the Voter ID Law infringes upon qualified electors’ right to vote.”

For those who say it’s just a simple matter of going to a DMV office, required documents in hand, and getting a photo taken and put into a sealed ID badge, please note that there are 9,300 polling places in Pennsylvania, but only 71 DMV offices. Out here in the sticks they are not right next door, either.

I don’t have ID that would be acceptable. Even my photo ID issued for ATA purposes is not acceptable, because it lacks an expiration date. (It doesn’t even have a best-used-by date!) So, if push came to shove at my local polling place, here in District II where I have been voting for umpty years, under the Voter ID Law, the local election officials would have to let me vote only provisionally. If I failed to come back with proper ID or a court order in a few days, they’d discard my vote.

Blind or otherwise handicapped people, non-drivers and the poor are among those who find compliance burdensome. Meanwhile, there has not been a problem with voter fraud anyway.

The state is expected to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. Here’s one potentially disenfranchised citizen who hopes this partisan, unnecessary, repressive law is not revived.

Peace.