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Donnelly: Boards, parent movements have homework to do
By Ann Donnelly
Published: November 7, 2021, 6:01am
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Our just-concluded general election featured contested school board races in all Clark County school districts. Though most of the incumbents appear headed for reelection, challengers and their revved-up supporters are not likely to fade away.
Nor should they. Indeed, they should organize to present their concerns factually and effectively.
No less than the future of the nation and free world are at stake. In a decade, today’s elementary school kids will be voters, volunteers for the military, police officers, skilled workers, teachers and school board members. They will face unknown challenges, including from China. Its totalitarian government is bent on competing economically with our freedoms, while expanding militarily in Asia, the Pacific, in space, and in the Arctic. Will today’s kids have the skills or the will to compete?
Which brings us to this year’s school board races. Challenger candidate statements generally showed they understood that the stakes are high for K-12. Their supporters are passionate, and sometimes fall short of courteous behavior or speech. Some school board meetings have been raucous, at times alarming and occasionally deplorable, but they are inherently substantive.
Among the big issues, the most substantive concern involves federal and state government overreach into the schools, challenging the local school boards as well as parents. With COVID providing a compelling emergency, local schools and parents saw their authority swept aside by government mandates to close schools, and later to impose rigid masking and vaccination policies. European schools, recognizing the harm of closures, remained open throughout the pandemic.
Parents felt powerless. Their fears seemed justified when, in October, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the FBI to form a task force to address parent threats against school officials, responding with uncharacteristic speed to a request from the National School Boards Association.
Faced with a backlash, the NSBA apologized for its letter, interpreted to compare parents to “domestic terrorists.” Garland has yet to retract his order to the FBI, nor has he identified the specific threats. The implications of an FBI with a murky mission are chilling.
Second, parents are concerned that far-reaching theories regarding the role of race in our country’s history and current systems — aka critical race theory — are percolating into Washington’s diversity and equity training. Some local school board directors passionately deny that CRT, emanating decades ago from strongly left-leaning university professors and supported by committed followers, is being taught. Yet advocates from beyond our region appear determined. The National Education Association, for example, supports “curriculum … informed by academic frameworks including critical race theory.”
Fuzzy wording, but a dozen states aren’t taking chances. Idaho was the first to sign into law a measure to withhold funding from schools incorporating lessons, for example, “that individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin.”
Added to the turbulence are concerns over school performance. Challenger school board candidate Jorge Bailey, for example, campaigned on the assertion Vancouver schools had low levels of students testing at grade levels, including only 42 percent in math, and 44 percent in science as of 2018-2019. A worthy concern.
Both sides — the elected school boards and the parent-driven challenger movements — have homework to do. Today’s school board members must acknowledge that parents’ concerns are valid, even if derived from outside our region. Parent groups must hone to high standards of discourse, both written and spoken, so that their statements are effectively conveyed. Any threats should be documented by the recipients and handled first by local and state authorities.
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