WHAT DO ICE-HOCKEY, reality-television shows and school-board meetings have in common? Lately people have been watching them for the fights. School-board meetings, once boring affairs, have turned into political cage-matches.
School boards are the governing body of local school systems. They usually consist of several unpaid elected officials. Before covid-19, elections typically had low turnout (often between 5% and 10%). Attendance at meetings tended to be sparse.
Loudoun County’s board in Virginia was one of the first to get attention last summer. Videos show attendees screaming about critical race theory (CRT) and transgender policies. During one meeting a parent was arrested.
Commotion has spread across the country. In San Francisco the fight was intense but conventional, through a recall vote. Elsewhere, board members have been threatened. Some have behaved badly themselves: four in California resigned last year after mocking parents on a public live-stream. In September the National School Boards Association called on the federal government to intervene, accusing parents of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes”. Its letter sparked a backlash and an apology from the association.
The pandemic and its restrictions brought more families to meetings. Valerie Shannon in Scottsdale, near Phoenix, Arizona, began to attend school-board meetings when she noticed that her son was struggling academically during the pandemic. “None of us paid attention to the school board,” she says. “We first started with, let’s just get these schools reopened.” Her interest then spread to other concerns.
In May 2021, a board meeting in Scottsdale was shut down after attendees refused to wear masks despite a mandate to do so indoors. In August there were protests outside a closed-door meeting to discuss the school district’s mask mandate. A week later Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist with 1.7m Twitter followers, spoke up at a public session of the board. “I am a new resident of Scottsdale,” he said. “It kind of feels like I am living in San Francisco because of all of you and your self-righteous measures that you’re putting to abuse the children of this wonderful state.” Yet masks were mandated for pupils from August 2021 until January. An attempt to recall four of the five elected officials has failed.
In November an online dossier came to light, allegedly compiled by Mark Greenburg, whose son, Jann-Michael, was president of the school board at the time. Reports have suggested it focused on nearly 50 parents who opposed school-board policies, and included photos of the parents and their children, social-security numbers, divorce decrees and other private information. (The Scottsdale Police Department has concluded that it included only publicly available information.)
At a meeting last month Ron Watkins, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and congressional candidate, shouted that “communist school boards are now indoctrinating our children with transsexual propaganda.” Many parents dislike the diversions from school policies. Amy Bean, a conservative Scottsdale parent, spoke at the meeting about a passage in a novel assigned to her fourth-grade daughter that seems to imply that police officers are racist. “I actually want to get things done,” she says. “I’m not here to make a scene.”
In Chandler, 20 miles south of Scottsdale, Lindsay Love, a board member, says she has received racist messages and death threats. She is the only black member. The threats started when she joined the board, but some were in response to her support for racial justice and remote learning early in the pandemic. Others fear for their physical well-being. “I want to be more involved as a counterpoint to those messages,” explains Laura Lawless, a parent in Chandler. “But I’m literally scared for my safety and the safety of my children.”
Some boards are sacking teachers over CRT. The school board in Sullivan County, Tennessee, fired Matthew Hawn for assigning an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer on race relations, and showing pupils a performance about the idea of white privilege. Boards are also banning books: McMinn County in Tennessee removed “Maus”, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its middle-school curriculum.
School-board battles are nothing new, says Jonathan Collins, a professor of education at Brown University. But their intensity is unusual. Typically meetings cover pedestrian local matters, such as facilities upgrades or school budgets. Things began to change during the Trump administration and its “1776 Project”, created in response to “The 1619 Project”, a New York Times project that puts slavery and racial oppression at the core of American history. Now meetings focus on national issues, such as policies on handling transgender athletes and the teaching of CRT—which might not even occur in the local district.
Brandy Reese, a parent in Chandler, says that there is a stark contrast between board meetings now and those in past years. “It’s amazing to me,” she says. “It seems like a totally different place.” Once mundane, school-board meetings have become political sideshows with real consequences for families and educators. ■
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