When Politics Enter the School Board
Estimated Read Time: 11 minutes
The National Scene
Recently, contentious school board races have become the norm across the U.S.
“Between 2006 and 2020, Ballotpedia covered an average of 23 recall efforts against an average of 52 school board members each year. Ballotpedia tracked 92 school board recall efforts against 237 board members in 2021.”
The most widely visible conversations are taking place in Tennessee and Texas. In fact, NBC produced a podcast series on Southlake, a town in Texas. Fueled by misinformation, pandemic responses and moral panic campaigns, school board candidates and directors across the country have needed to consider their physical safety, even when during board meetings. Board of Education (BoE) directors have endured personal threats as well as bomb threats. With a list of headlines from around the nation and heated public commenters even here in DCSD, extra security has been the new norm. What used to be an election that most local voters paid little attention to is now the focus of national think tanks and influential money from right-wing activists. The conservative takeover of the DCSD BoE in 2021 was orchestrated and partially funded by the same people who worked to influence many other school board races around the U.S. The postcards were the same, the false narrative was the same, and the dark money flowed.
Why School Boards?
Well, let’s be honest. There has been an ongoing push to reform the public education system for decades. In fact, the push appears to be spearheaded by those who believe public monies should be able to be used for private secular schools. In fact, there is a clear effort nationwide to back conservatives in local elections in order to advance the GOP’s extremist agenda.
Local Control
To this point, school boards have been locally controlled by the people who live and have children in those schools. This is why some states, Colorado, for example, have school districts with NO charter schools and some have multiple charter schools. The community (or those elected by the community) are the ones who decide what is best for their constituents.
For DCSD, this poses several issues. First, DCSD is very large, covering 865.9 square miles, and is the largest in the metro area. This runs from the typical suburban neighborhood to rural ranches. With 64,000 students enrolled, DCSD serves a wide range of families who do not always see eye-to-eye. Therefore, local control isn’t really all that local. We’d venture to say, the district might be too large for it to effectively serve its local communities.
Second, DCSD is made up of seven voting districts. A BoE Director needs to live in the district they represent, but for an election, the entire voting population of the school district gets to vote for all director positions. If we are really looking for representation, then only those living in a district should vote for that candidate. That is local control. We digress...
Nonpartisan Elections
Back in 2009, the Douglas County GOP endorsed several school board director candidates. This was the first time any political party had endorsed a DCSD school board candidate, as school boards and school board elections are supposed to be nonpartisan.
In a deep-red county like ours, this endorsement was powerful. School board elections weren’t exactly high-profile races and were typically ignored for the most part, so when the DC GOP put its stamp of approval on these candidates, they were all easily elected. The result was the start of the “reformer years.”
As the community started to catch on to these new school board directors' deliberate dismantling of DCSD as a public school system, there were grassroots efforts to try to help elect pro-public education candidates, but they couldn’t compete with the powerful financial resources that the DC GOP and other outside interests were pouring into the school board elections. In 2013, a group of pro-public education candidates pooled together to share resources (fundraising and volunteers) and ran as a slate as a reaction to this GOP intervention, believing this could make them competitive against the reformers. It took several election cycles before this tactic was effective enough to elect a new majority of pro-public education candidates (2019).
The new BoE directors were nonpartisan and represented a variety of party affiliations and political leanings, but what they all had in common was a commitment to support public education. Their policies brought stability back to the district, academic performance improved, teacher retention was on the rise, an MLO/Bond was passed for the first time in over a decade, and the district was trending toward the destination district status it had held for so long before the reformers tore it apart. Then COVID hit, and an unprecedented global pandemic turned political.
In 2021, the pro-public education candidates again ran as a slate, politically diverse and supportive of public education, as they had successfully done in the past. This time, the DC GOP-backed slate doubled down. For the pro-public education slate, what started as a pooled resources strategy to keep school board elections nonpartisan, was turned inside out. Taking advantage of mask-fatigue in the middle of a global pandemic, the DC GOP-backed slate used misinformation as a launching pad for its campaign. Unprecedented amounts of money from national conservative activist organizations and wealthy individuals were flooding their campaign. They stoked fear about an imaginary boogeyman (CRT) and promised to remove CDC recommendations for pandemic protocols. Right-wing conspiracies and mistruths from Fox News headlines were mirrored on the postcards mailed to homes across the district. What was billed as a nonpartisan election became strictly partisan for one slate.
Partisan politics can swing the pendulum in a district from election to election. What the BoE supported one term can be fair game for the chopping block the next. This ricocheting of policies is destabilizing to the entire public education system. Superintendents are changed, district “directions” are altered, and teachers and parents are tensely awaiting the next fluctuation in angst. This is no way to function as a large system. In fact, it’s a horrible idea altogether. Gone are the days of moving steadily in the direction of student achievement, staff retention and community support. Now anxiety is peaked, fear is stoked and the ability for drastic change is on the doorstep.
These issues that divide our stakeholders and stoke division mean that progress is stalled or even regressed. One shining example is that DCSD needs MLO/Bond funding to continue to meet the needs of the students in its district. There is no question about the validity of these claims, but if the division is great enough, the community cannot come together to do what is best for the future. Those who have campaigned for funding in the past don’t trust the new political actors with additional money. They worry the new BoE majority will follow all the Fox News headlines (as they did while campaigning) and make decisions that will set back public education for decades to come. On the flip side, the supporters of the new BoE feel that with the political leanings of the new BoE, DCSD can pass their funding measures. Sadly, funding public education is now a political issue. Based on polling, the funding issues are not likely to pass.
It’s a shame, we truly believe, but it is the consequence of partisan politics infiltrating our school board. If the funding measures fail, and the current makeup of the BoE stays the same, DCSD continues to face the same challenges it’s facing today. If the new BoE majority is recalled and another MLO/Bond is put on the ballot in 2023, there is the issue of the angst from a recall poisoning the well of the voters. This is why partisan politics do not belong in school boards. Funding and student needs must be prioritized first and foremost, no matter the makeup of the BoE.
What to do?
Many attempts to bring the community together have been offered to the DCSD BoE majority. So far, we have yet to see them take up any offers. Director David Ray urged the BoE majority to hire Danny Winsor for Superintendent to calm the waters and reduce the controversial nature of both the hiring process and the shoe-in candidate. Ahead of the MLO/Bond, Director Susan Meek suggested polling the DCSD staff on its concerns so the BoE would know where it needed to focus efforts to rebuild trust and relieve the anxiety that teachers are feeling, particularly since BoE President Peterson, in particular, has repeatedly villainized teachers and the teachers union. Directors Meek and Ray recently proposed removing the Resolution to the Equity Policy in favor of following policy governance by using Monitoring Reports, a best practice for policy monitoring and adjustments.
A most interesting suggestion at the last BoE Study Session was made by Director Ray. He proposed that the BoE alter a few policies to demonstrate its intentions to build trust in the community. Ray asked for two things: 1. To add language to the DCSD Public Funding policy, stating that public school funding will not be directed to private schools or homeschools. 2. That policy adoptions, changes or deletions must be approved by a supermajority vote (2/3 of the BoE) versus a simple majority.
The first policy change explicitly says public funds will only be used for public schools as defined in the policy. This may seem outlandish, but remember just a few years back, the Reformer Boards attempted to route public money to private schools. This has been a real threat here in DCSD and is also part of the national push of our BoE majority’s political leanings. So far they have followed suit with the national rhetoric, so protecting against the community’s fears seems like a reasonable olive branch they could provide.
The second policy change has two parts, in our opinion. First, policy matters will have to include enough compromise that five of the seven BoE Directors are willing to vote for it. That means it isn’t enough for a BoE majority to railroad new policies through and alter existing ones to fit its narrative; it would mean that collaboration and compromise must occur to convince at least one more person on the BoE to vote in favor. Regardless of the outcome of the MLO/Bond measure in November, the concern for sweeping changes from the BoE majority continues; a supermajority requirement for policy decisions would force them to include more of what most public education advocates can see as positive. Secondly, there are valid concerns within the DCSD community that the arming of staff and/or teachers is on the agenda of this BoE majority. The subject has come up, minimally discussed on the dais, but this majority campaigned on security. From a previous DougCo Collective Blog:
“As a school board candidate, Director Mike Peterson expressed interest in partnering with private businesses for school security issues. He specifically identified Able Shepherd as a potential partner, a self-described ‘self-defense program utilizing armed and unarmed tactics,’ during the context of a candidate forum (39:40) on October 13, 2021 at Castle View High School. His statement included:
“You need planning, partnership, and proficiency, before events happen. That’s partnering with our law enforcement experts, partnering with our other folks in the community. Groups like Able Shepherd’.”
In addition, Peterson openly invited a currently “armed” (3:48.47) school back into DCSD. In order to allow this school to return to the district, DCSD policy would have to be altered (discussion begins 3:54.35) to allow this school to retain its armed staff. And BoE President Peterson recently disclosed that one of his kids was enrolled at that school since last year. If this isn’t a conflict of interest, at the very least he is likely now pandering to a good portion of his supporters.
It is a tall order to bring together a divided community, and one that has been repeatedly rebuffed thus far. The current BoE majority seems to think that, because they were elected, they do not represent the part of the community that did not vote for them. We challenge them to think first of the students and the viability and strength of the district before considering what’s best for them politically. Changing policy approval to a supermajority may just be what DCSD needs to slow down the current partisan-nature of the BoE now and in the future. Serving all constituents is difficult, but it is the job of an elected official, which is what every one of our school board directors is.