Texas school board politics gets ugly

Trump-era rancor roils over masks, vaccines and critical race theory

Across Texas this year, school board meetings have burst into heated ideological fights over mask mandates, vaccines and lessons on racism labeled as “critical race theory,” bringing a new level of rancor to volunteer boards chosen in nonpartisan elections.

Just north of Houston, Ginger Russell took a turn at the mic in July at a Conroe ISD school board meeting. Before she started on her speech, she said it “wouldn’t be loving to you” to not tell the previous speaker he was living in sin as a gay person.

She turned from there to critical race theory, saying the superintendent was lying when he denied that the district teaches it. She described the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as “Marxism.”

Russell is not a parent of a child in the district. She homeschooled her two daughters years earlier. A rightleaning Montgomery County online publication that has promoted her speeches at Conroe ISD meetings throughout this year described Russell as “a conservative Republican political leader.”

At Carroll ISD in Southlake, a Dallas suburb, parents and community members organized to oppose diversity and inclusion efforts that began after a video went viral in 2018 of high school students chanting the nword. The parents formed a Facebook group, created a political action committee and ran a slate of conservative candidates. They raised more than $200,000 and were swept into office this year.

Last week, the board voted 3-2 to reprimand a fourth grade teacher for keeping an anti-racism book in her classroom after parents complained.

And Thursday, NBC News reported that an employee for Carroll ISD instructed teachers to make books available to students presenting “opposing” views on the Holocaust. The

district said that this was done in order to comply with a new state law requiring “balanced perspectives” on controversial political issues.

“We certainly have seen the board room becoming kind of the center of the culture wars, right?” said Dax Gonzalez, spokesperson for the Texas Association of School Boards. “Really just a lot of really hyperbolic discussion, not even discussion just hyperbolic accusations and statements are being made. What’s funny is that behavior we wouldn’t tolerate in the classroom is now happening in the board room.”

The newfound politicization and hostility of school boards seems to be an extension of heightened polarization over the last decade in the federal and state governments. Even on a personal level, recent research suggests Americans are more unwilling than in the past to date those who do not share their political beliefs.

National groups such as the 1776 Project are raising money to organize conservatives against lessons labeled as critical race theory in school districts, and Turning Point USA is maintaining a “school board watchlist” to fight against “leftist indoctrination.” Included on the list are Forth Worth and Houston ISDs.

Across Texas, conservative Facebook groups and blogs are cropping up for school board issues. Local parties have weighed in, such as when the Travis County GOP accused Round Rock ISD of violating the Open Meetings Act after a contentious board meeting. And in El Paso, local groups have paid for activists to travel around to different board meetings to speak out against critical race theory, often in vitriolic and angry terms, Spectrum News reported.

Nationally, conservatives were outraged when the Department of Justice announced last month a series of steps designed to address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation's public schools.” One early step federal authorities outlined is creating training and guidance for local school boards to identify, document and report threats made against them.

“We’re seeing a weaponization of the federal government against normal, concerned citizens,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, which maintains the school board watchlist.

“An organic grassroots movement of concerned parents seeing their children are being taught about an America they don’t recognize, where everything is being racialized, where everyone is being divided upon victims and oppressors and oppressed narratives,” Kolvet said. “Nobody is saying America hasn’t made mistakes, but show me a country that doesn’t have a little — that doesn’t have mistakes in its past.”

Anti-racism teachings

Critics on the left charge that conservatives have coopted the term “critical race theory” into a buzzword as an attempt to close-off discussion of historical racism , lingering systemic racism and, more generally, anti-discrimination lessons and policies. Such policies aren’t necessarily Critical Race Theory, which refers to a specific strain of academic work that began in the 1970s identifying discrimination in the legal system in the wake of the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s.

Those who disagree with the theory and associated teachings call them efforts to rewrite history and teach white children they are to blame for historical ills.

The state Legislature this year passed two bills to ban critical race theory lessons from public schools, both signed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Education experts and those opposed to the bills retort that critical race theory isn’t taught in Texas schools anyway.

But the legislation is a rallying cry for foes of critical race theory.

Last month, former Katy ISD school board candidate Bonnie Anderson started a petition that led to removal of an award-winning children’s book about racism from the school library and cancellation of a planned event with the author, Jerry Craft. Anderson said she watched interviews with Craft in which he discussed microaggressions — remarks or actions that subtly or inadvertently demonstrate bias or discrimination.

In an interview, Anderson called it a “racial term coined by the conceptual founders of critical race theory. That let me know the ideology of these books.”

Craft’s visit was rescheduled and his books reinstated Thursday after the district ruled that they did not contain subversive or offensive material.

Conservatives cast the increase in school board activism as a grassroots response to long-running overreach in schools, where leftist ideas about race, gender identity and “perverse sexual content” are embraced in public school curriculums, said James Quintero of the rightleaning Texas Public Policy Foundation.

School boards have also come to accept as given a certain leftist “big government” mindset that includes mask mandates, taxand-spend approaches and policies that allow schools to manage more in the lives of children, he said.

In Austin ISD in 2019, the board voted to expand its sex education to teach kids in the sixth grade what it means to be transgender, gay or bisexual. Drag Queen Story Hours for children have been hosted at Texas schools and libraries, outraging social conservatives.

“Most parents send their kids to school to read, write and do math, but instead they’re being taught these far-left concepts,” Quintero said. “I’m very encouraged by what’s happening in school boards not only in Texas but across the nation. I want to see a high level of citizen engagement in the process, even when that process is ugly.”

Fighting for his job

In the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD outside of Dallas, parents used the state’s open records laws to review the emails of James Whitfield, a high school principal. Whitfield is Black. The parents found he had used the term “structural racism” in an email sent in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year and demanded his ouster, claiming he’s pushing critical race theory.

Whitfield said community members and outside agitators with hateful beliefs have organized in a Facebook group and are weaponizing critical race theory in a bad faith effort to get him fired. It’s not the first time he’s felt racism directed at him from some in the district, he said.

In 2019, the district asked him to remove a photo he posted on Facebook of himself lying on the beach with his wife, who is white, after a parent complained. He said a parent had scrolled back 10 years through his Facebook posts to find the photo. Whitfield said in a phone interview that a deputy superintendent remarked at that time that he should take the photo down because “we just don’t want to stir stuff up,” and Whitfield went along, making his account private. The district has denied that its handling of the matter had anything to do with race.

Whitfield now wishes he hadn’t gone along with making the photos private.

“Time and time again we heard from people in upper levels of the district leadership that would say, point blank, quote: ‘We are too afraid of the political ramifications of this group,’ ” Whitfield said. “When someone is silent in the face of such silence and hate and bigotry, you’re almost complicit in that, in the way that I see it.”

In July of this year, despite rules against directly attacking school employees, a former conservative school board candidate spoke during a board meeting and accused Whitfield of teaching critical race theory, asking what the district would do about it. The man ignored requests from the board not to criticize an employee by name, instead repeatedly calling for Whitfield’s firing.

In its September meeting, the school board moved toward ousting

Whitfield by declining to renew his employment contract, although they say he’s losing his job for poor performance and speaking inaccurately to the press. Whitfield was placed on leave last month, and he intends to appeal the board’s decision to let his employment lapse, a legal process that will take time to play out. After that, his lawyer said he plans to “litigate this as fully as possible.”

Colleyville is less than 10 miles away from Southlake, the most successful anticritical race theory school board movement in Texas so far, and Whitfield believes those calling for his firing have learned from the activists down the road.

“This playbook has started to spread like wildfire. People running for these board seats in different districts, using that as a fear tactic against people,” Whitfield said. “Anything you say that is about inclusivity or diversity or being against racism, they kind of lump that into the CRT package.”

“I don’t think there’s any coincidence that all this is brewing in the background, and me being the first African American principal of my school in its 25-year history. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this CRT bogeyman landed on me.”

“This playbook has started to spread like wildfire. … I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this CRT bogeyman landed on me.”

James Whitfield,

Colleyville Heritage High School’s first Black principal