You need to know who’s running for your community’s school board.
It isn’t easy, because these elections are officially non-partisan, so there’s no party labels to help you identify toxic candidates.
You have to dig through voter pamphlets, look up endorsements, and search through news stories to ferret them out. But you have to do that, and vote in off-year elections, to keep the wrong people off your school boards. Because they’re trying to take over your schools.
This isn’t strictly about ideology, although that plays a prominent role. It’s really about ignorance: People angrily yelling about the teaching of subjects that aren’t taught, wanting to ban books they haven’t read, screaming about biology they don’t understand, and so on.
An NBC News story (here) quoted a campaign manager for a slate of Colorado conservatives running in a local school board election as saying, “I think I voted once for a school board candidate because I liked the way their name sounded.” To me that sounds, well, typically conservative. And while the story doesn’t say so, I’d guess she voted for that candidate because their name sounded white.
NBC News also quoted Richard Martyr, president-elect of the Colorado Association of School Boards, who said, “The race has been difficult from the perspective of hearing so much misinformation in our community. And I feel like many people in our community are fighting and arguing over some things that don’t even exist.” Which, again, is typical of the rightwing rabble who’ve turned school board meetings across the country into near-riots.
It isn’t so much what they want; it’s what they don’t want. They don’t want their kids to wear masks to protect other parents’ kids from what their kids might be spreading. They don’t want any mention of racism or discrimination in classrooms, because that might make white kids feel bad. (If that sounds stupendously incomprehensible, keep in mind these parents think white people are the true victims of America’s racial problems.)
As a result, we have people who don’t have kids showing up at school board meetings in places where they don’t live disrupting the meetings to make demands (see story here).
This isn’t a world of neutrals and equals. Some ideas are better than others. Some people are better than others. There are people who want to turn our schools into partisan and ideological battlegrounds. It has become very important to keep them from taking over school boards, and by extension, the education system and public schools.
The kids, who are far wiser than many of the adults, aren’t having it. (See story here.) Don’t let them down. Vote in school board races, and know who you’re voting for, and why. Figure out who the freak candidates are, and don’t let them get elected.
Photo: Cops are now needed at school board meetings because of disruptive rightwingers, some of whom aren’t parents or from the local community.