PUNTA GORDA, Fla.– Local school board races have never been more prominent than in this election cycle because parents are “reacting strongly to what is being taught in classrooms,” according to a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation says there is “renewed interest” in school board elections because parents are having “strong reactions” to what is being taught in the classrooms and believe that the schools should be “representative of their values … and of their community.”
When they see something that runs afoul of their beliefs, “they’ll speak up and say, ‘hey this doesn’t represent me, this is not what I want for my kids’,” he said.
“I think that parents have always been interested in what’s going on in K12 schools,” Butcher told The Epoch Times. “There’s always been something in which parents have wanted to voice their opinions on.”
Bridget Ziegler was recently reelected to her Sarasota County school board seat and agrees that since she initially “got into politics” in 2014, she has seen the interest in school board races increase.
“In my race in 2014, we had 50,001 total voters in the August election,” Ziegler told The Epoch Times. “I went to a runoff and then it went up to 137,369 [voters].”
She went on to say that the 2020 turnout was even better as a record 230,000 turned out to vote in local elections. She said she believes it is because people are tired of schools interfering with moral issues that should be taught in the home that has driven the rise in voter turnout and the results of the elections leaning more to the conservative side.
Ziegler said that along with historic record voter turnouts, political action committees have pumped a lot of money into local elections because local elections affect “people’s everyday lives,” coupled with conservative candidates having to “fight a media machine and a liberal teachers union.”
“In my race, I was just combating a media machine and the [teachers] union so I had to raise more money, but I never saw any kind of national interest,” she explained. “This is the first time in the election cycle I have seen that now. Unions in the past would take national money and bring it to their local state or local chapter.”
The reality, she said, is that conservatives are “taking the gloves off and we’re gonna play ball.”
Ziegler said that sticking to policy issues will win conservative seats on school boards and will catapult conservative candidates to state and federal posts because people are now motivated to stop a WOKE agenda, especially in schools.
“That’s how they saw what was happening,” she said. “They were activated because when you mess with someone’s kids, you’re dealing with a whole different level.”
She added that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has for the “first time ever,” endorsed local school board candidates and most of them have won their races as a result.
Butcher explained that from education issues dating back to the 1950s’ “Johnny can’t read” to the social studies wars of the 1990s and today’s Common Core and gender ideology, parents have always wanted to voice their concerns, he said.
Today, however, families are facing issues that are “evoking very strong opposition,” such as the “radical gender theory” and “critical race theory,” he continued.
Both topics are moral issues and that is why parents are reacting in “such a strong way” and “drawing so much attention to it” when they see it in their schools, he said.
Butcher surmises that the COVID lockdowns and investigative journalists exposing “shocking material” of what is being taught in schools have propelled renewed interest in local school board races.
Parents have more power than they think, he said. Once the material has been exposed parents tend to get more involved.
“We see over and over again, once you expose both what Critical Race Theory is and what it is really trying to say about race, and what queer theory is …really trying to push when it comes to so-called gender,” he explained. “[School boards] will either try to hide it or they will actually reverse course.”
Butcher’s theory was recently put to the test as the Duval County Public School District pulled an item from its Sept. 12 agenda because of parental concerns over a reproductive health curriculum the board had planned to pass. Parents were upset about the contents of the kits, which included a seven-inch wooden “condom demonstrator” in the shape of male genitalia, along with colorful condoms. The kits are intended for use by students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.
Parents were outraged and showed up at the meeting only to find the item had been removed from the agenda, and the board president announced they would “write their own curriculum” for reproductive education.
The Heritage Foundation has been presenting training sessions that encourage parents to become more involved by running for local school board seats. The sessions teach basic budgeting practices and topics such as critical race theory and gender identity theory.
A New York Times poll conducted in mid-September showed that parents overwhelmingly objected to teachers instructing their children on sexual orientation and gender identity. When asked if teachers should be able to “provide instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools,” 70 percent were opposed, while only 27 percent were in favor.
Two conservative governors have made parents’ rights in education a priority and pushed their legislators to pass bills that support parents.
Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin won his race based on support for parental rights. He decried in his speeches that, “the progressive left Democrats are trying to put politicians and bureaucrats between parents and their children.”
Since being elected, Youngkin has signed bills that allow parents to see the school’s curriculum.
“It’s a parent’s child. Not the state, not the government’s child,” Youngkin said after signing the legislation.
In Florida, DeSantis has come under fire for his legislative efforts to make sure parents have rights and that indoctrination stays out of schools.
The governor signed the Parental Rights in Education bill in March. Dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it blocks classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
DeSantis told The National Desk in September that, regardless of party affiliation, parents do not believe it is appropriate to be “injecting matters of sexuality and gender ideology” to elementary school students.
