Across Texas this year, school board meetings have burst into heated ideological fights over mask mandates, vaccines, and lessons on racism labeled as “critical race theory,” bringing a new level of rancor to volunteer boards chosen in nonpartisan elections.
Just north of Houston, Ginger Russell took a turn at the mic in July at a Conroe ISD school board meeting. Before she started on her speech, she said it “wouldn’t be loving to you” to not tell the previous speaker he was living in sin as a gay person.
She turned from there to critical race theory, saying the superintendent was lying when he denied that the district teaches it. She described the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as “Marxism.”
Russell is not a parent of a child in the district. She homeschooled her two daughters years earlier. A right-leaning Montgomery County online publication that has has promoted her speeches at Conroe ISD meetings throughout this year described Russell as “a conservative Republican political leader.”
In late August, high emotions were in evidence when trustees of the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District in northeast San Antonio met to decide whether masks should be mandatory or optional in schools.
As they debated, trustees were heckled by members of the audience, some of whom were removed by security officers after ignoring warnings not to interrupt the discussion.
“I think we’ve lost some civility here. This has become so contentious and so polarizing in this district, it’s crazy,” said trustee Robert Westbrook, who joined a 6-1 majority that voted to make masks optional.
[…]
“We certainly have seen the board room becoming kind of the center of the culture wars, right?” said Dax Gonzalez, spokesperson for the Texas Association of School Boards. “Really just a lot of really hyperbolic discussion, not even discussion just hyperbolic accusations and statements are being made. What’s funny is that behavior we wouldn’t tolerate in the classroom is now happening in the board room.”
The newfound politicization and hostility of school boards seems to be an extension of heightened polarization over the last decade in the federal government and state governments. Even on a personal level, recent research suggests Americans are more unwilling than in the past to date those who do not share their political beliefs.
National groups such as the 1776 Project are raising money to organize conservatives against lessons labeled as critical race theory in school districts, and Turning Point USA is maintaining a “school board watchlist” to fight against “leftist indoctrination.” Included on the list are Forth Worth and Houston ISDs.
Across Texas, conservative Facebook groups and blogs are cropping up for school board issues. Local parties have weighed in, such as when the Travis County GOP accused Round Rock ISD of violating the Open Meetings Act after a contentious board meeting. And in El Paso, local groups have paid for activists to travel around to different board meetings to speak out against critical race theory, often in vitriolic and angry terms, Spectrum News reported.
Conservative activists have been targeting school boards, for electoral takeover and other chaos, since at least the 70s and probably well before that. I’m old enough to have attended a talk by some progressive activist speaker in the 90s about the conservative “stealth” candidates running for and winning school board seats around the country, as part of a larger effort to build a bench for higher offices. I’m not trying to dismiss or minimize any of this, just noting that it’s a tale as old as time. The particulars of what is being shouted about this time are different, and the threats of violence are more credible and fearsome (mostly because there are so many more guns out there), but the basics are the same. I think the best things we can do in response are take the threats seriously and support efforts to hold miscreants accountable, and to be engaged with and participate in every election. We still have the electoral advantage in a lot of these places, we need to make sure we use it.
9:52 p.m. and Harris County has not even reported the early vote results yet. This new Election Administrator crap is a disaster.