Sole candidate for Vallejo school board seat may be ineligible

VALLEJO – The sole candidate who registered to run for a Vallejo school board seat to represent North Vallejo in November may be ineligible for the position as he said he lives outside of the area.

Dean Hodges is slated to serve as the next representative of Trustee Area 2, as he was the only person who registered to run. He would replace Trustee Christy Gardner, who declined to seek reelection. 

But following an interview with the Vallejo Sun, Hodges said in a text message that he lives in South Vallejo, miles from the area he’s seeking to represent.

“I’m in South Vallejo,” Hodges said. “I actually live on Sonoma Boulevard. I’m right across the street from Grace Patterson Elementary.”

Hodges provided two addresses to the Solano County Registrar of Voters, which manages local elections, and it’s unclear where he lives.

Superintendent Rubén Aurelio told the Vallejo Sun in an email that he “can confirm that to serve as a VCUSD trustee, an individual must reside within the trustee area they are representing.” In light of information that the Vallejo Sun shared about Hodges, Aurelio said, the district plans to look into the matter.

“We will be following up with county officials to better understand the status and eligibility of the candidate and determine what the district’s rights and obligations are to ensure that we are following the law,” Aurelio wrote in an email.

The Vallejo Sun had interviewed Hodges as a routine interview with candidates for elected office. According to his LinkedIn page, Hodges is a crisis counselor with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he was born in Detroit but grew up in Vallejo and went to Vallejo public schools in the 1970s and 80s. 

After graduating from Hogan High School, which is now Hogan Middle School, Hodges said he went to the University of Nevada in Reno, then served in the U.S. Army. He said he came back to Vallejo after active duty in the 1990s, but left again in the early 2000s, and lived in Hawaii, Washington, D.C., Sacramento, and Los Angeles, where he worked in military law enforcement and federal law enforcement. In 2017, he moved back to Vallejo again.

The Vallejo school board switched to district-based elections starting with the 2020 school board election. The five member board began requiring that its body have one trustee serving for each of five trustee areas. Under the current system, each Trustee Area has its own elections where only voters living in that Trustee Area can vote, and trustees are legally required to live in the Trustee Area that they represent.

Solano County Assistant Registrar of Voters John Gardner said that Hodges told the registrar he lives in a different address than the location he described to the Vallejo Sun. Gardner said Hodges told the registrar he lives in a multi-unit residence on Frisbie Street, which is located in Trustee Area 2. 

Registrar records also show that Hodges has been registered to vote at the Frisbie Street address since 2017. In 2022, Gardner said, Hodges added the Sonoma Boulevard address to his voter registration, but it’s listed as his mailing address, not his residential address.

City of Vallejo records list Hodges as owning a condominium at the Sonoma Boulevard address.

Following inquiries from the Vallejo Sun, Hodges has amended forms he submitted to the registrar. In California, almost all candidates for public office are required to turn in a candidate intention statement. On Hodges’s original form, which he turned in on Aug 8, he didn’t write an address down.

California candidates are also required to send contact information to the registrar to compile a candidate information list for members of the media. Both addresses are listed, the Sonoma Boulevard address as his mailing address and Frisbie Street as his business address.

Gardner said the registrar asked Hodges about him writing down both addresses, and Hodges told them that he made a mistake filling out the form. “He said he had criss-crossed the addresses and his residence address had been put in the business address section,” Gardner said.

Gardner said Hodges told the registrar he plans to alter the form to fix the mistake.

“The legal documents that we have which he signed makes it look like he lives in the correct district,” Gardner said. “Everything that we have from him shows he lives on Frisbie Street, which is in Trustee Area 2.”

After talking with Gardner, the Vallejo Sun asked Hodges by phone and email whether he lives on the Sonoma Boulevard address or the Frisbie Street address, but he did not respond. 

Gardner told the Vallejo Sun that the registrar doesn’t do investigations into where candidates live. He said that if the location of Hodges residency is an issue, “it’s really a school board issue, because you are required to live in the area that you represent.”

If Hodges is deemed ineligible due to his place of residence, it won’t be the first time Vallejo’s school board will have selected a trustee. In 2022, the board selected Carlos Flores as a trustee when no one registered to run in the Trustee Area 1 election. Christy Gardner, who won a four year term in 2020, was first appointed to the board in 2019 to represent Trustee Area 2 after Trustee Marianne Kearney-Brown resigned in 2018.

If Hodges remains eligible, he’ll take office after being sworn in in December. Hodges told the Vallejo Sun that the most important thing he wants to focus on after he takes office is “improving the image and reputation of the district,” as a way of mitigating the long standing problem of declining enrollment.

“If you improve the reputation of a school district, you’ll improve class size,” said Hodges, “which will increase your available funds. VCUSD has just been treading water. With more money we could really improve the schools.”

Hodges said he’s never served in public office before. His immediate goal after taking office will be to “acclimate myself to this type of work, find out what I can and what I can’t do, and find out how the process works.”

Hodges said he wants to learn about programs that other schools are offering that could be pulling students away from the school district, so that the district could consider offering those programs as well.

The district has repeatedly faced budget cuts in recent years largely in response to diminishing state funds as a result of declining enrollment. In positive budget news for the district, it just finished paying off its over $60 million dollar debt to the state which it’s owed since 2004. Hodges said he thinks it’s still important to “keep the belt tight” when it comes to district spending and called having a sound budget “the most important thing.”

But Hodges also said that keeping the belt tight is difficult, because Vallejo educators still need to be paid a living wage.

Since 2004, the district has closed eight schools to save money, according to district spokesperson Celina Baguiao. Looking forward, Hodges said that he feels closing more schools “would be more harmful than helpful,” and that he’d “want to figure out another way to save money” because closing schools could drive students out of the district.

Some teachers have pushed back against charter school expansion, saying they siphon funds away from public schools, while some have advocated for charter schools, saying they offer unique qualities. It’s become a contentious issue, and school boards have the power to approve or deny petitions for charter schools to be opened and, every five years, for them to be renewed, depending on if the board determines they are fulfilling certain legal obligations. Hodges said he wants “to learn more about the matter.”

“I just don’t know enough to give a good opinion yet. If it’s to a point where they’re siphoning funds from the district then that’s all bad,” Hodges said. “But I don’t understand enough about how charter schools are run to understand if it would affect the VCUSD budget.”

Hodges added that he has noticed charters “tend to move into buildings that are vacated by public schools pretty quick” and noted that an elementary school he attended, Elsa Widenmann Elementary, moved out of its former campus and was replaced by a charter school. This happened in 2019, when ELITE took over the Widenmann campus.

Hodges said that trainings for the school board are set to start for him in November, and he’s eager to begin.

“The sooner I get started the quicker I can learn things and make a difference,” he said.