Read This: What’s Happening With Our School Boards?!

Something strange is happening with our school boards. In the past few years, local school board elections went from being low-funded, grassroots campaigns to becoming battlegrounds for extremist takeovers. National conservative political groups are pouring excessive amounts of money into these races to get extremists elected to school boards all across America. And it’s happening in your district too. 

In 2021, school board races started getting more attention as extremists began manipulating the frustration parents were feeling about COVID-era school closures (You might have even had conversations with parents in your community who were extremely upset over school closures and mask mandates). That frustration created an opening for outside groups. They latched on to that anger and used it to turn those parentsquote: the far right takover of our public schools is one of the sinlge biggest threats to our democracy against public schools. And then suddenly, we had a loud, vocal minority of parents disrupting school board meetings, demanding that schools re-open and that mask mandates stop.

In the midst of this chaos, Moms for Liberty was founded, and those same parents who were angry about masks started speaking up at school board meetings about other things – wanting to ban books, attacking school curriculum, and gutting diversity and equity policies. And these attacks didn’t just happen at school board meetings. They started targeting school board members at their homes. Suddenly being a school board member, or even an advocate for public education, could result in personal attacks. 

What’s even more disturbing is that these school board fights are meant to look like grassroots efforts, but in reality they’re actually part of a larger attempt by extremist groups to take over school boards and eventually dismantle public education. If that sounds pretty extreme, it’s because it is. And many extremist politicians are actually saying it out loud. And that’s really the bottom line here: public education benefits all of our kids, but extremists want to take it away.

These attacks are hurting our public schools, our teachers and most importantly our kids. Children shouldn’t be paying the price for extremism – but they are.  And that’s why we–as parents, educators, and community members–need to know what’s going on.

Recent Posts

Watch This: TroubleNation Women Organizing for Good

Last week, we shined a spotlight on nine women throughout American history who have organized in their communities to help others. There are countless examples of women seeing a problem and taking action to fix it, because that’s what we do! And not just in history —...

Read This: A Seriously Brief Timeline of Women Organizing for Good

Throughout history, women have organized and fought for the greater good. Right now, as we witness great injustices and many of our freedoms are at stake, let’s recognize and celebrate some of the American women who showed us what’s possible through local organizing....

Do This: Fight the Climate Crisis

Remember learning about the hole in the ozone layer back when we were in school? And that to fix it, we had to stop using aerosol hairspray? We also learned the importance of recycling to preserve natural resources. And none of us will ever forget to cut through...

Watch This: The Climate Crisis Is a Health Crisis

We’re not doomed yet, but we’ve wasted a lot of time. That’s one of the takeaways we learned from meteorologist and climate change communicator, Chris Edwards, when he joined us recently for our virtual event, Climate Change 101: What You Need to Know. Chris talked...

Read This: The Climate Crisis Is a Health Crisis

Thank you to our guest author this week, Dr. Alice Chen! Learn more about Dr. Chen below and follow her on Bluesky here. When I was a kid, summers meant riding our bikes around the neighborhood, lazing around outside watching clouds and ladybugs, and generally...