Progressives Try To Counter Right-Wing School Board Anger : NPR
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Many people running for school boards are parents or teachers; Neither does 19-year-old Maryam Zafar.
“I have a lot of experience really being close to a large segment of the people that we are supposed to serve as the school board,” she said. “And just because of my age, people automatically know that I have a unique point of view, whether they hear it or not.”
Zafar is a student at the University of Texas-Austin, and also a 2020 graduate of McNeil High School, in Austin, Texas, a suburb of Round Rock.
“I’m really honored to be here; it has given me a lot of opportunities, but it hasn’t always been a healthy or safe space for me and my friends, especially in regards to harassment and sexual assault,” she said on the field. of Round Rock High School on a recent spring afternoon, when students were dismissed for the day. “I attended ROTC, my Air Force program in high school. And a big part of the job I take on as my responsibility, is to try to handle any kind of harassment case. What trouble happens?”
She said that experience made her want to be a school board member in that school district. To prepare for his run, Zafar did training sessions with the Run for Something progressive group.
Over the years, the group has recruited staff to run for various offices, but co-founder Amanda Litman says it’s making a new push into school boards.
“One of the things we realized after 2020 was that we had to focus on local positions like the school board,” said Litman. “Such broad progress is needed, focusing on these local positions. There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions around the country. About 21,000 of them were appointed this year. .”
Attention spikes on school boards
Interest in running for school boards is growing nationally. According to Ballotpedia, only 25% of school board races have not applied this year, down from 35% last year and 40% in 2018.
Because school board elections are overwhelmingly nonpartisan, it is difficult to quantify who or what is behind all that energy.
But then there’s an undeniable base of conservative enthusiasm around school politics in the last few years, most notably around national issues like race, LGBTQ issues and COVID. Groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education are among those working to reduce parental frustration.
Progressives like Litman, at Run for Something, are hoping to make sure they have their own organizational resources – not to mention funding – to counter the enthusiasm from the right.
“The far right is investing heavily in spending outside of the PAC. We’ve seen that the Leadership Institute, a Koch Brothers-funded nonprofit, specializes in conservative training for executives and executives. activist, has run the program for the school board throughout the year,” said Litman. “Moms for Liberty is focusing heavily on school board positions and candidate support. So they are doubling and tripling. We have to do the same here.”
The school’s political council is more partisan
It’s not entirely new for national politics to be part of school board elections – in the ’90s conservative parents targeted sex education teaching and parenting. evolution. Likewise, opposition to the No Child Left Behind policy excited some parents during the George W. Bush presidency.
But the political landscape has changed a lot.
“What’s different this time is that coordination, funding, and then social media can actually spread a consistent message,” said Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University. to many school districts quickly. era, before the internet and social media, these things happened, but at a much slower rate. And in a way, that slower pace has given rise to alternative voices, voices that can moderate the discussion. “
And she says she fears that kind of polarization at the local level could have worrying long-term effects for the public school system.
“Schools are really the last resort in our support of a great public institution,” says Jacobsen. “And so I think that’s likely to be the more important impact of this than anything else, whether the policy becomes X or Y. I think whether we should continue to believe that local schools. Is ours good for all children and I want to continue to send my kids there and support money. That, for me, is the bigger question.”
Round Rock has seen national tension unfold locally – a turbulent September meeting where parents and board members clashed over mask wearing, culminating in point is two arrests.
Zafar says she worries about the meetings being politicized.
“I’ve definitely seen that here,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of turmoil in the school board around the masking mandate, and there’s been a lot of legal action taken about that, and that’s the disruption in focusing on results. of students as well as the health and well-being of students.”
At this spring’s Board meeting, Christy Slape said social media and YouTube have helped motivate parents in the area like her. She comes to the meeting to talk about books she thinks are too sexually suggestive. She first heard about these books when a fellow parent complained to the school.
“That just gives an overview that is basically like a snowball when parents want to know more about the books in the classroom, and then the other books available in the library,” she said. . “And so across the country, there’s only been a snowball effect of parents wanting to check out their libraries and see what books are available in their libraries.”
Fierce local combat
Slape had said, but the book was not on the agenda that night. Surprisingly, this board meeting was not about cultural highlights but instead, district concerns like student recognition and staff pay increases. It’s a point that can be obscured by viral video clips of rowdy board meetings: local school board politics often don’t revolve around conversations about national culture but instead are more mundane but more important local topics, like the bond issue.
With that, Litman says she advises candidates to stick to local specific fixes, as opposed to debates over things like critical race theory.
“You want to, like, really get to the heart of the problem, which is that people are worried about the quality of the school. What can you do to address that?” she speaks. “And often it’s pretty boring. But it’s also very concrete and tangible things that you can fix.”
But then school board members may run into problems they cannot fix. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, brought gun violence to the fore for Zafar, who grew up during the school embargo.
“It’s been a really important issue for me since I was a kid – I used to have nightmares about getting shot,” she said.
But she’s also realistic about how much a school board member can do about shootings.
“I don’t think we can do much about guns,” she said. “I think all we do is have safety policies and lock people down and make sure people are educated on what to do when it’s locked down.”
Meanwhile, Litman says she hopes members can have influence beyond their schools.
“I really think that in many cases the position for school board members is what can they do to promote state legislators? How can school board members be of use? their political platform and bully podium to help campaign for change more broadly across the state?” she speaks.
In other words, while national politics is filtered down to school boards, in other words, she hopes that the political views of some members will be filtered up.