Quitting a school board over ‘misogyny and racism’
For Rebekah Harriman, it came down to this: Life is too short.
It’s too short to deal with intransigent ideologies and systemic dismantling of hard-fought gains. It’s too short to give up 25 hours a week in a volunteer position in which you don’t feel valued. When she resigned from Newtown’s Board of Education earlier this month, it was only after much discussion with friends and family.
“Usually, it’s good to have different perspectives and healthy debate, but when debates are disrespectful and include misogyny and racism, these kinds of things make the work really draining and exhausting,” Harriman said.
Consider this collateral damage from our culture wars. Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the legal standard for women’s reproductive rights and health for nearly a half-century. In front of the Jan. 6 select committee, we heard testimony from Wandrea Moss, a young woman who described the threats and worse faced by her family when she insisted on doing her job as a Georgia election worker. A Rhode Island police officer running for state Senate recently dropped out of the race after allegations that he punched his Democratic challenger — a woman — in the face at a Roe v. Wade protest in Providence.
Here in Connecticut, female candidates and office-holders have been the targets of death threats, attempts at intimidation, and nasty name-calling.
This ugly pattern should not be lost on anyone.
How that plays out locally is that members of Boards of Education — roughly half of whom are women — have often found themselves the targets of neighbors who don’t share their politics. Last year, it was parents behaving badly over masks in schools, vaccine mandates, how to teach U.S. history, and discussions around LGBTQ rights. Things got so ugly nationally that leaders of the National School Boards Association wrote to ask President Joe Biden for help and called some of the more outlandish behavior “domestic terrorism.” Even that request became controversial, and the association later apologized after boards in conservative states withdrew their memberships because of it.
You wouldn’t think protecting volunteer board members would be controversial, but here we are.
Bipartisan boards of education
“I think as much as I have enjoyed my time on the board previously, things came to a point where basically being in an abusive environment as a volunteer was not something that’s worth it.” Rebekah Harriman on resigning from the Newtown Board of Education
once were able to rise above the fray to prioritize students’ education. In her public statement of resignation after seven years on the board, Harriman listed some accomplishments of her board. The Democrats and Republicans there created a policy to protect transgender students, and “developed and funded new positions that moved the district forward by leaps and bounds,” including a grant writer, a teaching and learning director, and a diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator. The board, Harriman said, worked to reduce the district’s carbon footprint, negotiated “countless” equitable contracts, and unanimously passed a DEI resolution that Harriman said serves as a model for other districts.
“We worked in collaboration, not just with each other, but with the incredible staff we are fortunate enough to employ,” Harriman said in her statement. She said she saw herself as part of a team, but that changed roughly six months ago.
“I think as much as I have enjoyed my time on the board previously, things came to a point where basically being in an abusive environment as a volunteer was not something that’s worth it,” she said.
Female office-holders around the world have reported being targeted — so much so that the The Campaign School at Yale recently added a session about campaign trail security, said Executive Director Patricia Russo. The session included Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton, who is the first transgender person to serve as one of California’s mayors, and state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest (D-West Hartford), a graduate of the campaign school who has been the target of death threats and vulgar online memes.
“Candidates — and disproportionately women — impacted both online and live is something that has become a reality,” Russo said. “Staying safe for candidates has become more than a full-time job. It’s heart-crushing, losing so many amazing women.”
Political gains made by women are threatened when women resign over threats. And if you’re thinking that a candidate or officeholder should be able to withstand such attacks, whyever would you accept such bad behavior?
Harriman, who ran for state representative in 2018 and again in ’20, said she noticed a sea change in those two short years.
“In ’20, there really was this wave of negativity and misogyny, a really nasty tone in politics that had changed so much,” Harriman said. “I really see it getting worse and worse, particularly on the Boards of Education, and the board should never be political. It should truly be what’s best for kids. It’s been turned into this highly politicized environment, and it is scary and it’s something that everyone should take notice of.”
Where do you think this ends? What is the end game here? In the short term, we lose decent public servants such as Harriman. But in the long term? We stand to lose so much more.