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State Sen. Scott Jenkins is proposing to give each of the state's 15 largest school districts their own seat on the state school board, and make all the other smaller districts share four to six other seats among them.
"What drives voting is interest," he said, adding that people in a local district would have more interest in state school-board elections if they essentially had their own seat to represent local interests.
"No one knows who's on the school board now."
The Government Operations Interim Committee discussed the idea on Wednesday, without voting on it. Several members praised the general idea, but pointed out potential problems. Jenkins, R-Plain City, said he believes he can resolve them.
The biggest problem is that state law requires that school board districts each have roughly the same number of voters, to uphold the principle of one person, one vote. The 15 largest school districts vary greatly in population.
Jenkins said boundaries might be drawn so that the 15 largest districts would have most of a state school board seat, and could add in voters from other areas as needed to equalize population. The current school board has 15 districts, and would need to be expanded for Jenkins' proposal.
Law also requires that districts be one geographic whole, without containing distant non-connected areas. Jenkins said his idea, as now formulated, might require non-contiguous areas in the same district. He said he would see what is possible.
The 15 largest school districts in the state are: Alpine, Box Elder, Cache, Canyons, Davis, Granite, Iron, Jordan, Nebo, Ogden, Provo, Salt Lake City, Tooele, Washington and Weber.
The move comes as legislators also are debating how school-board members should be elected or appointed, and whether seats should be partisan or nonpartisan.
The state's current method of filtering school-board candidates through an appointed committee and the governor — before final election by voters — was effectively struck down by a federal judge in September.