[KHTS] – Hart School District officials announced their intent Wednesday to scrap the current at-large voting system, where each voter gets to decide on all school board seats, and adopt districted elections, where each voter gets to decide only one seat.

The move comes just days after the district was put on notice by a voting-rights attorney who alleges that the at-large system disenfranchies minority voters, in contravention to the California Voting Rights Act.

The report out of a closed-door session Wednesday indicated the high school district will take the necessary steps to make the switch.

Officials will draft a resolution for the board members’ review at their next board meeting, a Hart district spokesperson said.

The Hart district was one of four school districts to receive letters from the law firm. The Newhall, Saugus Union and Castaic Union school districts received similar letters regarding their at-large election systems.

“It also appears that voting within the (Hart School District) is racially polarized, resulting in minority vote dilution, and therefore (the district’s)’s at-large elections are violative of the California Voting Rights Act,” according to a letter from Shenkman & Hughes, a Malibu law firm.

The Hart district oversees about 22,000 public junior high and high school students in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Shenkman’s letter offered a July 2 deadline by which district officials were to let the firm know whether it would voluntarily seek a remedy.

Shenkman & Hughes is one of the firms representing the plaintiffs who recently sued three Santa Clarita Valley agencies.

The city of Santa Clarita, the Sulphur Springs School District and the Santa Clarita Community College Districts were served lawsuits last June alleging a similar violation.

All settled similar lawsuits to different ends.

No California Voting Rights Act lawsuit has been successfully defended, according to officials.

Palmdale recently chose to seek a state Supreme Court appeal of its thus-far unsuccessful fight against a CVRA lawsuit.

The city was ordered to pay $3.5 million earlier this month to settle a lawsuit over an alleged CVRA violation, which is also being litigated by Shenkman & Hughes.