Board discusses plan for two Wilsonville, two West Linn and one at-large seats

The board considered a proposal to create representative seats that would assign two board seats to Wilsonville, two to West Linn and a fifth at-large seat covering the entire West Linn-Wilsonville School District.

The chair opened the discussion by framing Goal #5 as an exploratory effort with assistance from the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA) and county elections staff. “We did reach out to OSBA,” a staff member said, adding material and a map for the board to review. Staff noted the maps use city boundaries so that “it’s not like one person would have this portion of West Linn and the other person would have this portion of West Linn,” but rather the city boundary proper would define the seat.

Board members pressed staff for population and voter data to test whether the partitions would be balanced. Staff reported city population figures taken from municipal websites: Wilsonville 27,634 and West Linn 27,601, and later provided a district population figure of 57,076. A board member asked for precinct- or ZIP-level resident counts to understand where the remaining residents live and how the at-large seat would cover unincorporated areas.

Directors emphasized that the at-large seat would not confer extra authority: “the at large does not indicate that that person becomes the chair or carries any more... position credibility,” one director said, while another urged that every voter should be able to vote for every position. The board asked staff to return with maps overlaying high-school boundaries and ZIP codes and to consult the county clerk about legal and technical constraints before the next work session.