School board voters choose moderates, liberals to fill seats
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Voters across the U.S. largely rebuked conservative candidates in local school board elections who want to ban books and restrict classroom conversations on race and gender.
In recent years, downballot elections have become proxy votes for polarizing national issues. Liberal and moderate candidates took control in high-profile races Tuesday in conservative Iowa and the swing states of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The American Federation of Teachers said candidates endorsed by conservative groups such as Moms For Liberty and the 1776 Project lost about 80% of their races nationally in elections this week.
“They don’t want to engage in this banning of books or censoring of honest history or undermining who kids are,” Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president told The Associated Press on Wednesday, characterizing the candidates who won as “propublic school.”
Conservative groups weren’t totally shut out though. In Pennsylvania’s York County, for instance, the 1776 Project’s political action committee said on social media that 36 of the 37 candidates they endorsed had won. Conservatives took control of the board in Texas’ thirdlargest district, CypressFairbanks, in the Houston suburbs, and made gains in Minnesota’s largest district, Anoka-Hennepin.
Tina Descovich, a Moms for Liberty founder, said that 40% of the candidates endorsed by the group won in Tuesday’s elections, bringing to 365 the number of its candidates who have won races in the past two years.
“We have to work harder and we have to figure out how to invest in our candidates,” Descovich said, noting teachers unions — a frequent foe — have decades-old political operations.
School boards, usually nonpartisan, deal with the nitty-gritty of running a key community institution that decides curriculum standards and discipline policies for students, negotiates contracts with teachers unions and sets property tax rates for homeowners.
But they also deal with some of the most divisive issues.
Pennsylvania saw a number of Democratic victories in school boards, particularly in districts that have recently seen GOP-led school boards adopt policies targeting transgender students, as well as reading materials and curriculum on LGBTQ+ history.
Turn PA Blue, a partisan political organization, said Democrats gained control of at least seven school boards and gained ground in a half-dozen others in Pennsylvania.
In the Central Bucks School District north of Philadelphia, Democrats flipped three seats, ousting the incumbent school board president, and retained two others, giving the party majority control. Democrats also wrested control of two other Bucks County boards.
At contentious school board meetings in Central Bucks in the past year, students who spoke out at meetings said they’d hear slurs and hate speech and seen violence at school — a problem they called on the board to address.
Many students felt more isolated after the board barred school staff from using students’ chosen names and pronouns without parental permission. The board also enforced policies of “neutrality,” which prohibited classroom discussions that opponents say targeted LGBTQ+ students.
But strong opinions about those policies are precisely what drove people to the polls, said Bonnie Chang, the chair for Turn Bucks Blue.
“I think all of that made people understand that this has to change,” she said.