The Law Was There Before the Vacancy: What Detroit's School-Board Appointment Teaches Us About Local Democracy

There is an understandable temptation to begin this story with Jeremiah Steen.

I think Detroit should begin somewhere else.

Begin with the rule.

Before the vacancy. Before the applications. Before the interviews. Before anyone knew who would ultimately sit in the chair, a governance structure already existed for answering a basic but consequential question: what happens when a seat on a public school board unexpectedly becomes vacant?

That may sound procedural. It is. It is also democracy.

Local democracy is often described through elections, candidates, and campaigns. But elections are only one part of democratic government. Local democracy also depends upon the less dramatic architecture surrounding elections: bylaws, statutes, meeting requirements, public records, predetermined procedures, and institutional rules that tell public officials what happens when something goes wrong.

For the purposes of this analysis, I use a working definition — not a statutory one — of local democracy: self-government at the level closest to residents, exercised through elected institutions, lawful governmental processes, public participation, transparency, accountability, and opportunities for residents to shape public life.

How did we get here?

That is the question I keep returning to. How does a public institution experience a vacancy and continue governing? How do remaining board members exercise authority without converting an unexpected opening into an improvised political contest? How does the public know what process should follow? And perhaps most importantly: how do we design institutions so that the rules exist before we know who will benefit from them?

Those are governance questions, not partisan ones.

Michigan's legal framework distinguishes election to a school board from appointment to fill a vacancy. Michigan Election Law establishes qualifications for election to a school board, while the Revised School Code supplies the broader statutory architecture governing public-school districts. The distinction matters because democratic legitimacy does not arise exclusively from holding an election every time something unexpected occurs. It also arises from elected institutions exercising authority according to law and rules established in advance.

A vacancy policy — in DPSCD's numbering, Policy 0142.5 — does something deceptively important: it identifies circumstances under which a board office becomes vacant and provides an institutional framework for what happens next. Death, resignation, and legal ineligibility are among the events traditionally recognized in such provisions. That means the institution does not have to invent the meaning of a vacancy after a tragedy occurs. The rule came first. Readers should confirm the current text of the policy and the district's meeting record themselves; I describe the function of such provisions rather than paraphrasing operative language I cannot quote here.

The value of boring rules

Good governance can be remarkably boring. That is often a compliment.

We understandably celebrate charismatic leadership, innovative programs, and dramatic policy changes. But some of the most important work a board ever performs happens years before anybody knows why a rule will matter. Someone drafts a bylaw. Someone reviews it. Someone asks what happens if a member resigns, dies, becomes legally ineligible, or otherwise leaves office. Someone determines who has authority. The board adopts the rule. Then everyone goes home. Years later, something happens, and now the rule matters.

The rule does not need to know whether the eventual applicant is young or old, progressive or conservative, famous or unknown. It should not know. Part of its legitimacy comes from its indifference to the identity of the eventual beneficiary. The question becomes: did we follow the process we said we would follow?

A necessary caution, which I want to state rather than bury: lawful procedure is not the same thing as good procedure. A predetermined process can be followed faithfully and still be too narrow, too fast, or too closed to public participation. Describing a process as orderly is not the same as calling it admirable, and residents remain entitled to argue that a valid appointment process should have been better.

Institutional peace is not agreement

My professional work has repeatedly brought me back to organizational leadership, institutional design, principal-agent problems, and the question of how organizations behave when multiple stakeholders hold different interests, incentives, and information. Those are the reasons I ask these particular questions; they are not evidence that my answers are right.

There is another influence on how I think about this. During my years at North Park University, my work intersected with the scholarship and community work of Dr. Peter St. Jean, whose TEDxNorthParkUniversity talk, Making Peace Profitable, asks us to reconsider peace not merely as the absence of violence but as something societies can intentionally incentivize and produce. I am extending that idea as an analytical lens. Dr. St. Jean has not reviewed this article, has not evaluated this appointment, has not characterized any district policy as an application of his work, and endorses no person named here.

Applied carefully to governance, the lens produces a different question. Instead of asking only what happens when institutions become unstable, we can also ask what had already been designed that allowed this institution to remain stable.

Peace in democratic institutions does not mean agreement. It does not mean the absence of disagreement. It certainly does not mean that citizens should stop scrutinizing public officials. Institutional peace can mean something much simpler: we know what happens next. There is a rule. There is a process. There is a meeting. There is a record. There is a decision. And afterward, there remains a mechanism for public accountability.

Appointment is not election

The distinction deserves repetition because our political vocabulary can flatten everything into campaigning. An election asks voters to choose among candidates. An appointment asks an authorized public body to fill an office according to the authority and procedures governing that body. Those mechanisms produce different forms of authority.

Michigan's election framework requires school-board candidates to satisfy statutory eligibility requirements, and school-board elections give voters the ultimate choice among candidates. Appointment does something narrower: it keeps the institution functioning when a vacancy interrupts the ordinary electoral calendar.

The public should therefore evaluate an appointment as an appointment:

• Was the vacancy properly recognized?
• Was the governing procedure followed?
• Were applicants evaluated according to an identifiable process?
• Was the decision made through the appropriate public body?
• Can residents examine what happened?

Those questions do not require us to like or dislike the person selected. That is precisely their value. The Open Meetings Act is what makes most of them answerable at all: notice, an open meeting, public comment, and minutes are the reason a resident can reconstruct a decision after the fact.

Two things I do not establish here, and will not assert: the duration of this appointment and the date of the next election for the seat. Both are governed by statute and by the district's own record, and both should be read from those sources rather than from me.

And now, Jeremiah Steen

Only after understanding the institution would I turn to the individual. Steen is 25 and brings a documented background in youth philanthropy, nonprofit leadership, and education-to-workforce issues.

He is also not entirely new to DPSCD electoral politics. Official results from the 2024 DPSCD board election list Jeremiah Steen as a nonpartisan candidate who received 9,036 votes. That context is useful because appointment and election are different mechanisms, and Steen had previously presented himself to Detroit voters as a school-board candidate. That history neither validates nor invalidates his appointment. It simply belongs in the record.

The more useful question now is what happens after appointment. A résumé can help someone obtain consideration. An interview can help someone obtain an appointment. Governance produces something different: a record. Votes. Questions. Attendance. Budget decisions. Policy positions. Disclosures. Minutes. Public meetings. Over time, those become considerably more informative than an application.

Michigan law also imposes conflict-of-interest obligations on school-board members regarding contracts and financial transactions. A member who believes a qualifying conflict exists must disclose it and abstain under the circumstances prescribed by law; readers can examine MCL 380.1203 themselves. Democracy does not depend upon assuming that public officials will never encounter competing interests. It builds rules for what should happen when they do.

Youth leadership meets public governance

Youth leadership is often discussed as representation. Public governance adds responsibility. Those are related, but they are not identical. A young person occupying a consequential seat can symbolize generational inclusion. But the democratic test is the same test applied to everybody else: what does the member do with the authority?

At 25, Steen will participate in decisions involving a major urban school system, public resources, executive oversight, policy, and the educational experiences of Detroit children. Age neither answers those questions nor disqualifies someone from answering them. Governance will. And governance leaves receipts.

Local democracy happens between elections

We tend to experience democracy episodically. Election Day arrives. Signs appear. Candidates make arguments. Votes are counted. Then public attention moves somewhere else.

But local democracy spends most of its life between elections. It happens when boards approve agendas. When residents make public comments. When committees meet. When policies are revised. When budgets are examined. When conflicts are disclosed. When minutes are published. And, occasionally, when an unexpected vacancy must be filled. The district's published board calendar illustrates that ordinary rhythm: regular meetings, study sessions, and committee meetings continue whether or not an election dominates public attention.

A functioning democracy should not have to rediscover its operating system every time something unexpected happens.

Why this belongs in the Herald

DPSCD and Hamtramck Public Schools are separate districts, and I will not manufacture a connection that does not exist. The link is regional rather than jurisdictional. Families move across these borders; students enroll across them; workforce programs, transit, and philanthropy operate across them; and institutional trust in one district's governance travels quickly into the next. Southeast Michigan's civic ecosystem is interconnected enough that how one board handles a vacancy is instructive for every board nearby.

The nonpartisan boundary

I am currently a candidate for the Detroit Public Schools Community District Board of Education. That makes one boundary especially important. I am not using this appointment to tell anyone how to vote, whom to support, or whether Steen should seek office in the future. Those are electoral questions. This is an institutional one.

A fair reader may still ask whether a candidate benefits strategically from writing approvingly about a process at the board he seeks to join. I cannot fully answer that from inside my own interest. I can disclose the interest, apply the same standard I would apply if someone I disagreed with had been appointed, and invite readers to test the analysis against the primary sources rather than against my byline.

My interest is in the architecture: how did we get here without having to invent the process once we arrived? Part of the answer is law. Part is policy. Part is institutional memory. Part is the willingness of public officials to submit themselves to procedures that existed before the immediate outcome was known.

What peaceful democracy might look like

Democracy is not peaceful because everyone agrees. It is peaceful when disagreement has somewhere legitimate to go. A ballot. A public meeting. A board table. A written policy. A recorded vote. A court, when necessary. And eventually another election.

Perhaps one way to make peace "profitable" in public institutions is to make orderly governance more valuable than improvisation. Write the rules before knowing who wins. Make them public. Follow them when they become inconvenient. Preserve disagreement. Document the decision. Then let citizens judge the record.

The appointment of one 25-year-old board member will eventually become another entry in Detroit's long educational history. The process that put an appointee in that chair deserves attention for a different reason. Sometimes democracy works not because somebody brilliantly solved a crisis. Sometimes it works because somebody had the foresight to write down what we would do before the crisis ever arrived.

And that may be one of the quietest forms of peace a public institution can produce.