The Higley Unified School District Governing Board has selected three nominees to submit to Maricopa County School Superintendent Shelli Boggs for consideration in filling the vacancy left by Scott Glover, who resigned abruptly last month.
Voting 3-1, the board selected Brooke Garrett, Kimberly Jackson and Travis White from a pool of 12 applicants during its Aug. 11 meeting.
Boggs will now interview applicants and make the appointment in the coming weeks. The law allows her to pick someone other than the district’s three nominees.
Before the vote, Higley Board members discussed how they should use the results of a community survey gauging public sentiment on the applicants.
They debated between looking at one set of results tallying all survey submissions with duplicates removed, or a second set narrowed down to in-boundary respondents with duplicates removed.
Board member Anna Van Hoek raised concerns about the survey’s integrity, noting the district’s duplicate-removal method – flagging IP addresses with five or more submissions – could still allow someone to submit two, three, or four times without detection.
She said the district had already removed 31 duplicate submissions tied to White, 23 tied to Kathleen Richards, and 27 tied to Garrett.
“What I find sad is the fact that we can’t count on adults not to cheat the system,” Van Hoek said.
Board President Amanda Wade acknowledged that the process was imperfect, and agreed that five duplicate submissions from one individual is an abuse of the process. However, she also noted the possibility of a household having multiple voting adults.
Without collecting identifying information from respondents, Wade said, the district had no practical way to determine who voted.
She added that the district did not have the time or resources to develop a system that thorough in such a short amount of time.
Board members Sara Jarman and Tiffany Shultz both said they favored using the survey totals of respondents who identified as living within the district.
Jarman acknowledged the survey’s limitations but said she appreciated that the district removed duplicate submissions. She said she favored the in-boundary results because they more closely represented the residents the future board member would serve.
