Over the last year or so school board meetings have become an unlikely battleground for partisan politics. Understandably a lot of people are not happy about that, especially those who feel like the politics being pushed don’t align with their own. It’s easy to sympathize with that sentiment; however, it is important to remember one key thing: You can show up at these meetings, too.
It’s not that schoolboard meetings were never political in the past … they were. However, the degree to which schoolboard meetings have dominated headlines and political discourse is virtually unprecedented in the modern era. “Critical Race Theory,” mask mandates, and LGBTQ+ issues in schools have quite literally swung elections. Not since desegregation have these meetings been so intense. There has been yelling and screaming at these meetings. There have been fights and arrests. Some people have even brought guns. Some of the visceral reactions have actually prompted boards to get rid of public comment altogether. That did not go over well and places like Indiana have already adopted laws requiring public comment to be heard, and people should not operate under the assumption that opinions they dislike will be barred from the school board meetings.
Your only recourse if you want an issue to go a different way is to match the energy of the people you are criticizing. As a public employee, it never ceases to amaze me how little people will do relative to the amount they complain. There is quite literally no barrier to entry to attending a school board meeting if you can find the time.
During the height of the schoolboard clashes I saw tons of people post about how “crazy” these parents were or how out of touch these board members had gotten, but I never saw any of those people at the meetings. It struck me as kind of odd, because what exactly is it that people think will happen? Who do you think the school board members are more likely to listen to: The people yelling in their face every Tuesday night or the people tweeting to their 57 followers?
I have to be honest and say that as a teacher I didn’t agree with a lot of the concerns that were being raised at these meetings. After all, many of the suggestions to “fix” said concerns would have created substantially more work for me. But I have to concede that even as an opponent to some of these vocal parents, they were simply exercising their right to comment on their children’s education which is not inherently wrong. And if all the people on the opposite side cared as much as they claimed, the meetings wouldn’t sound so one-sided.
I have heard some people say in reference to recent issues that a minority of parents have school districts and state governments bending to their will. My response to that is how can a “minority” of anything do something in a democracy unless you let them? I could wax poetic about this. But the old saying will suffice: “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.” (Especially when you are more than capable of playing the game yourself.)