How to Make School Board Culture Wars Even Worse

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — “What happens when a child sounds out the word ‘lesbian’ and turns to their teacher and asks, ‘What is a lesbian?’”

Trisha Lucente, the mom of a local kindergartner, has come before the Williamson County school board to voice her distress over the district’s continued use of Epic, a digital library app containing more than 40,000 children’s books and videos. Ms. Lucente and like-minded parents have complained about several titles that they consider inappropriate. Anything touching on race, gender or sexuality can set off alarms in conservative circles here. (A book on sea horses came under fire recently. The fact that male sea horses get pregnant was seen as promoting the idea of gender fluidity.)

In response, the school system temporarily shut down access to the library to conduct a review — prompting an outcry from supporters of the app — then reinstated it while allowing parents to opt out their kids.

Ms. Lucente finds the compromise unacceptable. What happens when a child who has been opted out overhears the lesbian question, she demands. “What position does that put our teachers in? What are they supposed to say to that?” The Epic situation, she contends, is just another example of how the board and administration are dividing the community and “failing our children and our teachers.”

Ms. Lucente is not the only one with strong feelings on the matter. Multiple parents and teachers at the meeting rise to praise Epic. One teenager, a junior at Franklin High School, asserts that “censorship is stupid” andscolds adults who would “shield” students from learning about racism, antisemitism and other uncomfortable aspects of history and humanity.

Welcome to Williamson County, a hot spot in the ongoing culture war engulfing America’s public schools. An affluent, highly educated, politically conservative enclave just south of Nashville, Williamson has seen its share of school-related drama over the years. In 2015, for instance, conservatives here were fired up about a seventh-grade social studies unit that some viewed as Islamic indoctrination.

The trauma of the Covid pandemic has driven tensions to a new level. Last August, the district drew national attention after a mob of parents, protesting the board’s vote to impose a temporary mask mandate, turned feral. One pro-mask dad was swarmed, cursed at and threatened as he made his way from the meeting back to his car. “You can leave freely, but we will find you!” a protester raged in a video that went viral.

The district has since sought to curtail the hostilities. The 25 residents who signed up to speak at this month’s meeting were allowed precisely one minute each, with a timer keeping everyone on track. Officials warned at the outset that disruptive speakers would have their remarks terminated and that those who felt unsafe could have a sheriff’s deputy escort them to their vehicles.

Williamson County is obviously not the only community dealing with such frictions. School boards across the nation are being dragged onto the front lines of partisan battles. Vaccination requirements, diversity and inclusion efforts, books that make certain people feel icky — these issues and more have prompted ugly, overheated confrontations, some of them violent. Outside groups are fanning the flames, as are cynical politicians looking to juice their careers. (See: DeSantis, Ron, governor of Florida.) The day-to-day concerns of running a school district (boring stuff like budgeting and approving contracts for vendors) are increasingly being overshadowed by partisan agendas.

Many people would look at the spiraling circus and think: This is bad. Low-level, nonpartisan school boards are not where these radioactive political issues should be hashed out. Someone should find a way to reduce the heat on these public servants.

Instead, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature went the other way: passing a law last fall that allows for partisan school board elections, setting up a system that not only codifies the existing toxicity but also promises to exacerbate it. So much for putting students first.

The overwhelming majority of school board races around the country are nonpartisan. This was the case in Tennessee until Republican lawmakers, during an emergency session called to deal with Covid-related issues, rammed through legislation permitting county parties to hold primary elections to select school board nominees, who can then list their party affiliations on the general election ballots. It was a controversial move, and the opposition included state Democrats, droves of educators and school board officials and even some Republicans.

The law’s supporters insist that partisan contests will give voters a clearer sense of school board candidates and their values and, more broadly, that they will increase involvement and public interest in what are typically low-profile races.

Critics of the new system counter that the law will change the fundamental nature of the position — and not in a good way. Among their biggest fears: To win their party’s primaries, candidates will need to focus more on hot-button issues that appeal to base voters, leading to more and fiercer culture clashes. Campaigns will require more money and more partisan brawling, discouraging many people from running. Those who skip the primaries and run in general elections as independents will be at a disadvantage. (America’s two-party system is not kind to independent candidates at any political level.) And as time goes on, the pool of people who choose to run will be composed less of civic-minded parents than of partisan warriors and careerist politicians.

Not all of the county parties opted to hold school board primaries this cycle, and many voters are likely not yet aware of the change. But even at this early stage, there are signs that the new law’s supporters and its detractors are both right.

Pretty much everyone plugged into this drama acknowledges that the newly partisan contests have increased interest and participation in school board races.

Jim Garrett is the chair of the Davidson County Republican Party, which is holding primaries for its candidates running for the Metropolitan Nashville school board. Nashville is among Tennessee’s bluer regions, where Democrats have an electoral edge. Even so, with the new system, he says, more Republicans are running, and they are raising more money. “It looks like the cost of a campaign is going to be about double what it used to be,” he estimates.

The local G.O.P. is also investing more in these races. For the first time, Davidson Republicans are arranging training sessions for school board candidates. These races weren’t a focus in previous elections, says Mr. Garrett. “They are a focus now.”

There hasn’t yet been special training on the Democratic side. But the county party is happy to connect candidates to campaign vendors and other resources, says its chairwoman, Tara Houston. The party has also tasked a special committee to come up with a platform outlining its basic values on public education, which Democratic school board hopefuls will be expected to support.

In Williamson County, where having a D next to one’s name is a scarlet letter of sorts, most of the primary action has been on the Republican side. In multiple districts, more conventional conservatives are facing off against contenders from the party’s Trumpier wing. Outside groups have lined up behind their champions, providing financial and other support. The most prominent of these is Williamson Families, a political action committee dedicated to protecting the county’s “conservative roots” and “Judeo-Christian values.” The PAC is led by Robin Steenman, who also heads the local branch of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit based in Florida that champions parental rights and “liberty-minded” leaders nationwide. Williamson Families has endorsed a slate of superconservatives — after weeding out the RINOs, of course.

Multiple parents and teachers in Williamson complain that, as predicted, some of the campaigns and contenders seem focused less on concrete education issues than on culture-war talking points. One middle-school teacher vents to me that some candidates are bragging about their love of Donald Trump and decrying the decline of traditional families and the godlessness of today’s youth.

Meagan Gillis, whose two young daughters attend county schools, says the whole situation has turned to “chaos.” She points to a social media post by a conservative candidate promoting the child furries myth: the wacky online claim that teachers are being forced to cater to students who identify as cats, to the point of putting litter boxes in classrooms and meowing at the children. “I’m like, are you kidding me?” Ms. Gillis marvels. Things are getting so absurd, she says, that her family is seriously considering moving out of the area.

Similar concerns and complaints can be heard from other corners of the state. Virginia Babb has loved her time on the Knox County school board and was planning to run for re-election — until the shift to partisan races. Now she will step down at the end of her term rather than get sucked into the slime. She initially ran for the board as “a very involved parent” without strong partisan leanings, she tells me, noting: “I don’t like either party. They are too much controlled by their extremes.”

So down the partisan rabbit hole Tennessee school boards are being nudged — with other states possibly to follow. Missouri, Arizona, Florida and South Carolina are among the states where lawmakers toyed less successfully with similar legislation this year. Some bills made it farther than others, and the idea is likely to keep popping up. The conservative American Enterprise Institute favors listing school board candidates’ party affiliations on ballots. A collection of conservative leaders has been exploring other ways to bring school board races more into line with other types of elections, according to Politico.

All of which would indeed most likely earn school board campaigns more attention and resources and make candidates easier to ideologically sort. But at what cost to America’s children?

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