Consider This from NPR - School Boards: A New Front Line In The Culture Wars

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

School board members across the country are being intimidated and threatened. Now the National School Boards Association wants the federal government to step in. The group said in a recent letter to President Biden that acts of school board harassment and confrontations seem to be coordinated. The online newsletter Popular Information has written about national groups targeting school boards. NPR Ed correspondent Anya Kamenetz travelled to Gwinnett County, Georgia, where school board members have been targeted with threats. Read more in her story, What it's like to be on the front lines of the school board culture war.NPR White House Correspondent Tamara Keith has also reported on why school board elections will be an early test of what issues motivate voters.Anya and Tamara recently discussed their reporting on school boards on the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen via Apple, Spotify, or Google. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. All right, at this time, we will take five minutes and clear the room. Take five minutes and... At this time, we will take five minutes to clear the room. So is this just how school board meetings go now? This is what it sounded like at a meeting of the Fresno Unified School Board in California earlier this month. And here's another one recently in Loudoun County, Virginia.

Who pays your salary? Shame on you. And here's Williamson County, Virginia. Who pays your salary? Shame on you. And here's Williamson County, Tennessee. You can leave freely, but we will remind you that we know who you are. You will never be allowed in public again. Now, anger from parents directed at school officials is not a new thing in the pandemic. But it's different now. Confrontations are increasingly hostile.

They are about mask mandates, sure, but also about stuff like critical race theory, which has become shorthand for the idea that kids are taught about the legacy of racism in America. Here's what one school board member in Centerville, Ohio, Megan Murray-Sparks, told NPR about a recent meeting. Every entrance, we had security. They had a safe room that they were going to put us in, that they had planned out if anything was to happen. I was so scared before the meeting, I was physically ill in the bathroom texting my priest. Consider this.

School districts became ideological battlegrounds during the pandemic, and now those battles are being fueled by outside groups. And school leaders are growing more worried about threats and intimidation. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, October 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR.

Increasing violence is a clear and present danger to civic participation. That's what the National School Boards Association wrote in a letter to President Biden last month. The greatest number and the biggest concern that we have are the threats of violence, the coordinated efforts that we seem to see because of the similarities across the state lines. The group's president, Viola Garcia, told CNN the association is asking for federal assistance to keep school board members safe. And about those coordinated efforts? My child's brain is a blank slate with unlimited potential, and I want it to develop in a healthy way, not by force or shame. This is a video from Parents Defending Education, a Virginia-based organization whose

president, Nicole Neely, has a long history in right-wing political organizations, including some funded by the conservative Koch brothers. Parents Defending Education tells parents that their kids are under assault from activists at school. In K-12 schools today, activists are pushing a radical new agenda, turning blank slates into members of racial, ethnic, or gender groups in conflict with each other. On its website, Parents Defending Education has plenty of resources for parents. They can browse a national indoctrination map to find schools that are doing things like committing to anti-racism or developing gender support plans for students. We empower parents with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to fight back. Other resources include a parent engagement field guide and instructions for how to create an anonymous Instagram account targeting a specific school.

The group calls these woke at accounts, like woke at Brentwood School. They instruct parents how to use the account, what sorts of things to post. They even recommend parents look for material, quote, on the social media pages of teachers and administrators at your school. To be fair, the group also advises, quote, no doxing, no posting names of students, and where possible, avoid posting names of teachers. Parents defending education is not the only group of its kind. Others include

No Left Turn in Education and the 1776 Project. The online newsletter Popular Information wrote about these groups recently, and we'll link to their piece in our episode notes. They tend to be run by people from the Trump-slash-Fox News ecosystem, and they accept donations. According to FEC filings cited by Popular Information, one of the groups, the 1776 Project, has raised almost half a million dollars since April of this year. Of course, all of this is not making things any easier for the people trying to run school districts in a pandemic. From NPR's education team, correspondent Anya Kamenetz traveled to Gwinnett County, Georgia,

to meet one school board member who's worried and afraid. Karen Watkins works in supply chain management and has two children in the public schools. She says she was one of those moms who was always very involved in her kids' education, so much so that local officials urged her to run for school board last year. They said, this is probably going to be a good thing for you, and you could probably make a difference on here. But didn't realize it came with a package, a big package. The package, meaning the blowback Watkins started getting, as soon as she put up her Facebook page to announce her campaign.

Even before I actually took office and took seat, I would get, I was getting hundreds of messages, hundreds. They would send via Facebook, via my website, whatever means they could reach me, right? Calling. Oh goodness, I used to, I was called a demon. I was Satan spawn. Some of the messages use similar language to this online video ad from last fall. And here in Gwinnett County, our kids face a grave threat. A ticket of radical liberalism is running for school board. The ad connects Watkins and the other school board challenger candidates to teen pregnancy, Marxism, and, because of their position on school resource officers, the Parkland school shooting in 2018. And the root of their ideas helped lead to the

Nicholas Cruz shooting in Florida. What a disaster. The Family Policy Alliance, a right-wing Christian lobbying group, produced the ad. Family Policy Alliance is now called Frontline Policy Action, and its leader, Cole Muzio, told NPR, We saw a tremendous need to step in and protect the kids of Gwinnett County and protect the parents of Gwinnett County. This northeastern Atlanta suburb is the 13th largest public school district in the country. The schools have a solid reputation here. The county and its politics have changed rapidly over the past two decades, and it's now one of the most diverse in the United States. Over 100 different languages are spoken here. How do you know it's

beautiful? I think that's beautiful. You pretty much get the globe in one county. When Watkins, who is Black and Filipina, and Therese Johnson, who is Black and Jewish, were elected last November, they flipped their school board to be majority Democrat and majority people of color. And when they took office, disgruntled protesters who are overwhelmingly white started showing up at school board meetings. Dozens of Gwinnett County parents caused a stir at last night's board meeting when they wouldn't back down about masking up. Nearly 100 parents, many donning unmasked. Here's Watkins in a clip from Atlanta's local TV news channel, 11 Alive, at their meeting in May, facing down an unmasked crowd. In an effort to proceed with our meeting this evening, we ask everyone wear a mask as that is the policy.

If you are unable to comply, please leave the premises. It got a little testy in there. People saying, stand your ground. They can't remove all of us. Literally, stand your ground. That's enough for me. When you're saying things like that, they trigger things in my brain. Watkins and Johnson felt so personally threatened that they left the room and watched

the public comments on the live stream. So two cowards left the building. A man who gave his name as Steve Smith called them cowards. There were almost 60 people signed up to comment that night, and many of them, like Smith, sounded really angry. He was protesting the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And anyone who supports this poisonous ideological cult, we the parents of Gwinnett County are coming for you. We are coming for you. That's not the first time Watkins had heard that kind of language. You know, I had a parent call me, call me and told me that, you know, they're coming for me. How am I supposed to take that? You know, we are coming for you. We are coming for you.

She's been followed to the parking lot after a board meeting. There's a person just lurking, videotaping you. But why are you videotaping my car? And it's not just Gwinnett County. Incidents like these have gotten so widespread that Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to address threats against school personnel. There's been a lot of growing anger over the past couple of years just over COVID in the schools. Melissa Ryan consults with organizations on combating right-wing misinformation and extremism. She compares the upheaval at school boards to the early days of the Tea Party movement.

Everyone has been pushed to the brink. Parents in particular have been pushed to the brink. And the same bad actors that are always there to exploit anger have really tapped into something. But what Muzio at Frontline Policy Action in Georgia sees is the federal government trying to silence parents. No way do we encourage attacks on school board members. I think there's a rhetoric and tone that needs to sometimes be dialed down. But what these kids are facing in schools is a direct attack on what parents have worked to instill in them. Michigan and Pennsylvania. They told similar stories to Watkins and Johnson, being yelled at in meetings that are sometimes brought to a halt entirely, being threatened by letter or over the phone, followed to their car, trashed on social media, photographed and filmed.

I think in the beginning, I was honestly just really shocked. Like I've never received anything like this before. Nikki Hudson, who is white, is a nonpartisan school board member in the small district of Worthington, Ohio, outside Columbus. Last month, she received a letter that read in part, you become our enemies and you will be removed one way or the other. The letter was also sent to the boards of four surrounding school districts with language implying that she, Hudson, would be made an example of for all of them. Hudson dates the personal ire to her 2020 vote to remove police officers from high schools, as well as the district's policies on masks

and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hudson went public with the letter, and she's running for re-election. You know, I have a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old, and my husband and I feel very passionately about modeling the behavior. And you don't back down to bullies. And you do what's right, even when it's hard. Watkins in Georgia is starting to feel paranoid, she says. There's been people showing up in her

neighborhood. Recently, a car pulled up at a stop sign. Yeah, I was jogging. And the man asked me, he's like, is your husband home? Watkins took that as a threat. She feels like she's being targeted as a woman and as a Black woman. The thought brings her to tears. I don't want our kids to get hurt or other people to get hurt because of me. Because of a thought of me. Because I didn't sign up for that. I signed up to, you know, protect these kids, make sure that they're nurtured,

make sure that they are in a happy, healthy environment that allows them to achieve no matter what they do. She says she just wants to get back to what her focus was intended to be all along. The kids. Anya Kamenetz is a correspondent with the NPR Ed team. Additional reporting you heard in this episode came from NPR's Tamara Keith. A link to her recent story about the school board in Centerville, Ohio is in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.