COVID educates voters on why school races matter

It used to be tough to get the crowd fired up for school board elections.

But that was before the COVID-19 year, when everybody with kids in school shared in the classroom fun, at least for a while. That exercise in infection control left a great deal of parents feeling indebted to — or infuriated with — those who have chosen to make their living teaching our children literary analysis or how to calculate compound interest. (Many of us also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the guy from Khan Academy.)

That was before those teachers were charged with leading a classroom of mask-wearing kids and disinfecting surfaces every 30 minutes while simultaneously educating distance learners through Zoom or Google Meets — kids who won’t necessarily turn on their cameras because it is painfully uncool.

The challenges of getting through a class without a technical glitch were many, but nothing compared with the challenges of impressing on students the importance of turning in their work as if everyone were sitting in the same room. And that’s just counting the kids who bothered to show up.

That was before school cafeteria workers headed to work to pack little cartons of milk in the breakfasts and lunches to distribute, drive-thru style, to students when campuses closed. Or before the men and women who usually empty wastebaskets, change light fixtures and mop floors had to increase their efforts to keep schools pandemicproof when schools reopened. Or before bus drivers had to navigate new routes with seats full of riders with the afterschool wiggles, with or without face masks.

It might not have been everyone, and it might not have been every day. But in every one of those instances, someone surely shook their fists in frustration and huffed under a stuffy face mask, “Whose idea was this?”

In part, it came from the school boards. Sure, the state had a big hand in it, but every local school district is led by a school board. The people who sit on those boards are charged with managing the schools; they decide where to put resources, where to build or shut down schools and the specifics of the school calendar, such as whether to observe a day off during the Battle of Flowers parade or Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Parents chasing good schools buy houses based on where their kids will be spending their days; high schools drive the identity of many communities because everybody was on the same team. Often, the district is a major public employer. In short, the public trusts those trustees with a lot of power.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted inequities within the school system in administration, staff and infrastructure. The boards had some tough decisions to make about closures, reopenings, attendance and athletics. In a few cases, decisions made because of the pandemic also brought to light how the political climate can trickle down and affect even the wee ones in pre-K classrooms.

In the past few years, residents in San Antonio and the surrounding areas have seen school boards open and close schools against the advice of the superintendent. One board was almost taken over by the state because of iffy business dealings; another district just emerged from state control after the Texas education commissioner stepped in because its board was hopelessly split. One school board asked taxpayers to approve the largest bond issue in the city’s history. Another considered a plan to authorize certain staffers to have firearms. Still another dropped the district’s mandatory mask mandate despite continuing COVID-19 concerns.

That’s the kind of stuff that gets voters riled, and rightfully so. Thing is, school board elections don’t seem as important as the others when things are running smoothly at the district’s central offices. School board elections generally don’t divide families the way presidential elections do; they’re often the furthest down of the downballot elections. Still, they affect most of us more than we might realize.

Sometimes, we need something to wake us up.