Turnout surges for school races
More than half of local “parental rights” candidates lost; not all results reported
Voters turned out in force in many Capital Region school districts Tuesday — and it appears many showed up to reject a new movement that vowed to “take back our schools,” a national phenomenon that saw at least 35 such candidates on local school board ballots.
The turnout delayed many results, but by 11 p.m. Tuesday more than half of those candidates had lost, with more districts yet to report their results. In many cases, the members of the movement — who often were pushing back against diversity training, pandemic protocols and education on sex and gender — were the lowest vote-getters.
Among those who lost was Doug Lloyd, who ran a campaign in Bethlehem
that was supported by the town GOP committee; he came in a distant fourth in a race for two seats. Other members of the movement lost — often by wide margins — in Averill Park, Ballston Spa, Burnt Hills-ballston Lake, South Colonie, North Colonie, Voorheesville, Shenendehowa, Scotia-glenville, Mohonasen, Schalmont, Lan
singburgh and Lake George.
However in Schenectady, Vivian Parsons, who is open to book banning and opposes “critical race theory,” won. That race was also controversial because of a plan to add more police officers in the schools, a move Parsons supports.
A candidate with those conservative views at Ichabod Crane schools also won.
Such candidates also described themselves as for “parents’ rights” or “parent choice,” though there was little agreement on what those terms mean. Meet-the-candidate events have included vehement debates about banning books, “critical race theory” and social-emotional learning.
Many districts said they had twice as many voters as normal, and some reported hundreds of voters who had never participated in a school election before.
Averill Park had so many voters that it ran out of ballots Tuesday night — it had 2,000 computer-readable ballots — and had to take further votes on pieces of paper that had to be counted by hand.
Some voters said they came out because they wanted to stop the candidates who represented the movement.
“We haven’t voted since our kids graduated from high school,” said Kathy Condon of Schenectady.
But this year, that calculation changed.
“We don’t want any books banned from the library. And we don’t want religion in the schools,” she said. “We need people to be educated. We need it for our democracy.”
In Bethlehem, many voters did not mince words over how they felt about Lloyd, saying they felt he was “dangerous” and being deliberately untruthful to sow fear.
“We came out predominantly to address that in our votes,” said Bethlehem resident Barbara Devore.
In North Colonie, some voters said they agree with the “parents rights” movement, though they declined to give their names.
“Things are going on the parents aren’t aware of,” said one North Colonie voter. “Things are being said in the name of equity.”
School budgets throughout the region passed. This was expected because none of the local school boards proposed trying to exceed the tax cap.