School Board Members Quitting Over Hostile Meetings With Parents About CRT and Masks
“toxic and impossible to do”
This is not a bad thing. Lots of people need to quit or be replaced. Parents across the country have expressed outrage about Critical Race Theory and mask mandates in schools and many of these boards just didn’t listen.
The Associated Press reports:
Hostile school board meetings have members calling it quits
A Nevada school board member said he had thoughts of suicide before stepping down amid threats and harassment. In Virginia, a board member resigned over what she saw as politics driving decisions on masks. The vitriol at board meetings in Wisconsin had one member fearing he would find his tires slashed.
School board members are largely unpaid volunteers, traditionally former educators and parents who step forward to shape school policy, choose a superintendent and review the budget. But a growing number are resigning or questioning their willingness to serve as meetings have devolved into shouting contests between deeply political constituencies over how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements.
In his letter of resignation from Wisconsin’s Oconomowoc Area School Board, Rick Grothaus said its work had become “toxic and impossible to do.”
“When I got on, I knew it would be difficult,” Grothaus, a retired educator, said by phone. “But I wasn’t ready or prepared for the vitriolic response that would occur, especially now that the pandemic seemed to just bring everything out in a very, very harsh way. It made it impossible to really do any kind of meaningful work.”
He resigned Aug. 15 along with two other members, including Dan Raasch, who wondered if his car and windshield would be intact after meetings.
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“… deeply political constituencies over how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements.”
This is telling.
Parents trying to protect their kids don’t see what they are doing as political. They mostly don’t even think in those terms.
But to the left, everything is political. So in most cases I would say that the parents are not the ones who are “deeply political.”
This is a shame. It’s what happens when you have your schools run by a government monopoly bureaucracy.
Many (I won’t say most) school board members are not bad people, and are doing their best with the situation they are in. The situation they are in is intolerable. It’s The One Best System which people think should satisfy all of our needs.
The problem is that people have needs which are incompatible with each other. There will be winners, and there will be losers.
The original losers were the Catholics, whose children were being indoctrinated with Protestantism at the expense of their parents tax money. The current losers are Christians and conservatives, whose children are being indoctrinated with materialism and CRT.
Some Christians and conservatives want to “take back” the government schools. This would make us no better than the leftists who are currently in charge.
It’s a wonderful thing that leftist indoctrination in the government schools is being exposed, but Christians and conservatives should be devoting our energies to getting our children out of the government schools, creating our own schools, homeschooling, advocating for school choice, and keeping the government out of controlling school curricula. In most circumstances, we should not be attacking school board members.
It’s parents trying to protect their kids from having politically-driven indoctrination. “…shouting contests … over how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements” tells you volumes. “Teaching” social issues screams that the teachers are taking sides, which means indoctrination. Go back to actual Civics classes instead of Social Studies, and you’ll have less indoctrination and better educated students.
When it comes to masks in schools, let the parents decide for their own kids. In general, school-age kids are among those least at-risk for COVID anyway. Are some young kids more at-risk than others? Of course, and they can wear masks if they want to.
Vaccines? Same thing. I don’t think any vaccine should be “mandatory” unless it actually prevents contracting the disease. None of the current COVID vaccines actually even claim to prevent a person from contracting COVID. The best they claim is “reduce the risk” and “reduce the severity.”
The same goes for testing. The current test that the CDC spent the better part of a year and a half telling us was the gold standard can’t differentiate between COVID-19 and the seasonal flu, so what’s the point? “But the new test is reliable” they say. That’s what they said about the last one so why should we believe them about this one?
Any time you have “former educators” on the school board, you have to wonder if they are interested in actually educating the kids or in advancing the teachers union agenda. The teachers union agenda is what’s good for the union, not necessarily what’s good for the teachers, and certainly not what’s good for the kids.
How odd. In Florida, the board & super all stand for election and subject to unelection.
I am in Florida (Brevard County) and the while the school board is elected, the superintendent is not.
If you want to “unelect” someone ie “recall” them in Florida, it is very difficult and expensive to do. There are only certain reasons that a person can be recalled and disagreeing with them is not on the list.
With terms of 4 years, a person on a board can do a lot of “damage” one way or the other before facing election again.
CRT and masks….one of these things is not like the other.
Stop trying to play dictator over the curriculum.
Maybe, it is time school teachers weren’t on the school Board.
I completely disagree with the author’s last paragraph. School boards are EXACTLY who parents need to “go after” and force them to be accountable for the garbage they’re introducing to our children! School boards have nearly all of the authority over curriculum – getting responsible (i.e., non-communist) replacements on these boards to get schools back to teaching what’s important for children to learn instead of woke BS, etc., is the first step in taking back the education of our young people from the communists that have infiltrated American schools since John Dewey and his cohorts introduced it back in the early 1920s.
There is a difference between “going after” people through ideas and the ballot box and “going after” people with veiled threats, and actions designed to have the person fear for their safety.
A group here in my county staged a loud, boisterous protest at the home of a School Board member. The member’s kids were subjected to all sorts of vile comments about their mother (the comments are legal but inadvisable as they aren’t going to win friends and change minds.)
Neighbors were subjected to the same level of vitriol and so they pulled their kids inside as well. So the screaming, yelling, beating of drums, etc, had the opposite effect; it entrenched the person into their views and allowed them to play the victim.
If you notice, the videos of meetings that get coverage have snippets of people screaming, but not full comments. The comments that are calm and rational get onto the news and go viral.
There are lots of ways to “go after” someone.
Threats and making board members fear for their safety should not be on that list.