The Daily - The School Board Wars, Part 2

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

This episode contains strong language.In Bucks County, Pa., what started out as a group of frustrated parents pushing for schools to reopen devolved over the course of a year and half into partisan disputes about America’s most divisive cultural issues.But those arguments have caused many to overlook a central role of the Central Bucks School District’s board: providing quality education.In Part 2 of our series on school board wars in the U.S., we look beyond the fighting and examine the pandemic’s harsh effects on teachers and pupils.Guest: Campbell Robertson, a national correspondent for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Republicans are heading into the 2022 midterm elections aiming to capitalize on the frustrations of suburban parents still reeling from the devastating fallout of pandemic-era schooling.The F.B.I. has begun to track threats against school administrators, teachers and board members to assess the extent of the problem.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we would like school reopened on time with as few safety measures as possible. What started as a group of frustrated parents organizing to push the district to reopen schools devolved over the course of a year and a half into partisan fighting over the country's most divisive cultural issues. The treatment of our children during this pandemic

has been an eye-opening to deception and lies perpetrated by the people in this room. Yesterday on The Daily. COVID has broken you people, and it's disgusting. My colleague Campbell Robertson traced the history of that battle in Bucks County. I watch how you treat each other in here. It's disgusting. Culminating with the resignation of the school board's only swing vote.

Common decency. You all need to find it real fast. Today, in part two, as the school board elections near, what is actually happening inside the schools in Bucks? And where is all of this headed? It's Wednesday, November 17th. Okay, Campbell, welcome back. Good to be back. When we left off last, John Gamble, the school board's most moderate figure, had just resigned out of frustration with how ugly things had gotten in Bucks County. And he used this metaphor with you to describe what the school board and parents were focused on when it came to problems facing the district. He said, it's like arguing over putting new tires on a car but forgetting to put any gas in it.

And what he seemed to mean was, you all are fighting about all this stuff, but you're ignoring the essentials. Yeah, and it's, I don't know if you want to say funny. Maybe it's embarrassing. You know, you realize with all the talk and attention there is right now on schools, how little the actual day-to-day situation inside the schools is coming up. It's like, oh, yeah, school, education, what's going on there? And what do you find in Central Bucks? find in Central Bucks? Well, everyone's back in the building. The schools opened this year full time in person when students came back end of August, early September. But among the people

working in the schools, morale appears to be pretty low. I mean, in a lot of ways, this isn't surprising, right? I mean, all over the country, We're in year two of COVID. Schools have borne the brunt of a lot of this. They've been having to balance health risks with taking care and educating children. This is really, really hard. But it did seem like people were surprised that it had gotten this bad in Central Bucks because historically, the district had been really well resourced, really well functioning. It was a place where teachers really wanted to work. So I started reaching out to nurses, custodians, teachers, education assistants, staff all over the district to just ask, what's school like these days? And I found a lot of people who were eager to talk with me about what was happening. But very few of them wanted to go on the record. I mean, they're seeing what's happening at the meetings. They're seeing how polarized the board's gotten. They know the political atmosphere. They're scared for their

jobs and they don't want to get dragged into all this. But there was a feeling that this was something they really wanted people to hear about and understand. Hey, Betsy, we've talked. We haven't seen each other. Hi, how are you? How are you? So Betsy Coyne teaches family and consumer sciences at one of the secondary schools in Central Bucks. And she's been working in the district for almost 20 years.

When you first got the offer that you were accepted over position at Central Box, what was going through your head? I thought I had won the jackpot. I had secured an amazing job. CB teachers were the best of the best and they were exceptional. It was like winning the lottery to have a job in Central Box. And I thought that teaching was like my destiny. And you felt that for a long time, it sounds like. I did. I was exactly where I was meant to be. And then the pandemic hit, to be. And then the pandemic hit and you felt like you could never be successful. And it was defeating. There was the whiplash, all this back and forth from virtual to hybrid to full in-person, which left so many teachers feeling like they weren't doing their jobs as well as they wanted to. And that was compounded by so many other teachers deciding their hearts were no longer in it at all. And this is pretty much at the core of

what schools in Central Bucks and really schools all over the country are dealing with, major staffing shortages. My coworker went out on maternity leave. The baby came a week early. And not one certified family consumer science teacher applied for the job. Not one. So what are you doing? The school hired a building sub. And I had a brand new building sub come in. And a building sub, by the way, might not necessarily be certified in the

stuff you're teaching, right? Correct. Yes. They are covering classes and helping out where needed. So they hired a building sub to fill her position. And for the first month of school, I was not only writing lesson plans and planning lessons for my classes, but I was planning lessons and teaching him how to teach FCS classes so that he could teach her classes. A lot of the other staff I talked to described their own versions of this story. They laid out a series of problems that, in their minds, are the kinds of issues that everybody concerned with schools and central bucks should be focused on. So, for instance, the school staff, right, the custodians, some of the nurses, the educational assistants, personal care assistants, they're working without a labor contract.

They're negotiating it, but they haven't reached a deal. So that's been a big source of stress for those workers who were there the whole time last year during COVID. And all of these workers described feeling overstretched and basically at a breaking point. Because, of course, the pandemic has triggered a lot of behavioral problems in the classroom, which are bumping into the staff shortages, which is a rough combination. Right. So you have education assistants. They're in the classrooms to help students who need special attention, you know, to deal with these students when the teacher's trying to teach the class, but they're being shuffled around to fill in the gaps created by staffing shortages. And so those students just disrupt the class to get the attention they need. staffing shortages. And so those students just disrupt the class to get the attention they need.

Then there are these broader behavioral issues. So nationally, there's this TikTok challenge. This trend got far. Where kids are filming themselves going into bathrooms. Man, y'all gotta stop this demon sledge shit. Just committing crazy acts of vandalism. They don't smell both Both are toilet seats. We're not even in high school. You know, breaking soap dispensers, breaking sinks,

going to the bathroom all over the floor. Right now, we are about 15 students that we have already caught. And we will do everything we can to track you down, find you, and punish you as much as we can. In Central Bucks, it got so bad they had to shut down all but one bathroom in some of the schools. And students just had to wait in line, and somebody from the school staff would sit at a desk and let the students in one by one.

And obviously, all this trashing of the bathrooms was something that the custodians had to deal with. Wow. Yeah, and everybody is just having to do much, much more work. I mean, for example, just look at nurses. So remember how as the school year was getting started, the board narrowly passed a version of a mask requirement that made it pretty easy for parents who oppose masks to file for an exemption. who oppose masks to file for an exemption. Right. These are the waiver request forms that give parents, as you told us, Campbell, the option to request that their kids not wear masks based on the idea that masks might make their children's mental health worse, which it turns out is exactly what many anti-mask people

think is wrong with masks. Right. So what happens is after that version of the mask mandate passes, parents apply for something like 1,500 mask exemptions for their kids. That's around 8% of the student population. And from what I can tell, they're pretty much always granted. But they require paperwork. And the nurses typically have to process a lot of that paperwork for hundreds of waivers. And at the same time, they're doing contract tracing for COVID outbreaks that are actually breaking out in the schools. Last month, there were more than two dozen kids at one elementary school in the district who tested positive. And there was a big back and forth about it. You know, there were some parents of kids at the school

who said this is exactly what's wrong with the district's COVID plan, with the mask exemptions, all that. But the anti-mask mandate parents came out and said, this outbreak is being overblown to justify more COVID restrictions. And so while that back and forth is going on, the school nurses still have to deal with it.

Right. And in some schools, nurses have been so busy with this kind of thing that they've had to limit student visits in certain hours to emergencies only. So like a kid who just doesn't feel great might have to wait. I mean, being short staff affects everyone. It affects students. It affects teachers. It affects the principals. It affects every person that walks into that building that day. So what's it like in your classroom right now, this year? This year has been difficult. I would say that I'm seeing significant delays. Students are behind. They are a year and

a half behind socially and emotionally. And I can give a great example that I teach students how to cook. And I teach cooking labs. And the first time we did a lab, we had gone through all of our prep work, we had jobs assigned, and all of a sudden I look around and everybody's just standing in the classroom and they don't know what to do. In that moment that I looked around and I saw all of the students just standing there,

I think what truly hit me was, this is real. These delays, the social, emotional, the not knowing how to do cooperative work, how to work with others, all of those things became real in that moment. They don't know how to lead. They don't know how to work together as a group. And all of a sudden, I realized that what I had seen or heard or when we talk about, you know,

students and what gaps are they going to have, it was happening to me in my classroom. to me in my classroom. But what I'm most concerned about is what I am hearing being discussed at the school board meetings isn't ways to help us solve our school problems. So you've listened to some of these meetings at least? I have listened to some of the meetings. I have followed some of the public comments. They were really defeating as an educator to watch. I got to the point where I would become so upset I would end up with migraines for two days. And you're saying that what you hear being discussed at these meetings is not what your understanding of what their urgent needs are in a lot of cases. I mean, what's going on at the school board when we're fighting about politics and theory, like none of that has a place in my classroom. And my biggest fear is that this is our new normal.

That we're not going to have teachers, that we're not going to have staff. That our school board meetings are not helping what's going on in our classrooms. And that this is just how it's going to be. And this is how it's going to be, our new normal. We'll be right back. Campbell, Betsy's concern is that the school board meetings are not paying attention to her new normal, the day-to-day problems of educating during the pandemic. And so as the school board elections near, I'm curious if there's any attention being

paid to those issues, or is the election being waged along the same battle lines as we've been seeing in the school board meetings, which is to say, polarizing social issues, dominating? I mean, the technical answer is yes. There is some talk about these other issues. If you went to some of the candidate pages, certainly some candidates more than others, you'll find things like support for the district's overstretched staff,

things they would do about mental health programs. But in so much of the campaigning and the flyers and the attack ads, the issue at stake in the election is clear. Parental authority over what goes on in schools, above all when it comes to masks and curriculum. And are those materials focusing on these other issues? No. That's kind of John Gamble's whole point.

As the school board fights have been heating up, there's very much a sense that control of the board means control over the future of these more divisive issues that the board and parents have been fighting over for the past year or so. Control over COVID policies, control over school curriculum. And remember, at this point, the board is basically split, right? They keep having all of these five to four decisions.

And with five of the nine seats up for election this year, that means control of the board. So everyone involved in these battles is feeling like there's a lot riding on the outcome. And it would seem that there is in this environment. For sure. So there's way more attention on these races than ever before. And what we start to see around this time

in this year's school board campaign is something very new for local school board races, which is huge injections of personal cash into the races. Actually, one person in particular. Are we all good? We're all good. Okay, we're gonna give it a go. Paul Martino. And who is Paul Martino? Paul Martino is a venture capitalist. He's known in part for investing big time in sports betting, and he's also a self-described hardcore Republican. His past political spending is reflective of that. He's given money to GOP candidates.

He's given money to Project Veritas. He actually described himself as a mentor figure to its founder, James O'Keefe. Who is a very provocative figure in the right-wing video world. Oh, sure. But what's fascinating about him is that he kind of bridges these two worlds,

big-m money national politics and Central Bucks schools, because he's also a parent with two kids in the district. And over the past few months, that's where he started to put his focus. Thanks for doing this. So I was in Central Bucks last week. Obviously, elections are going up there. And I was interested in just the whole dynamics. I mean, it's pretty unprecedented. The campaign, the movement that y'all were doing there. And wanted to get a sense of what's behind it. So, you're a venture capitalist. You have been politically involved in the past, donating money to national figures and national issues. Why are you doing

this in local school board races now? The prior experience in national donating, I think, is largely red herring to this, meaning that, yes, I've been involved in national causes in the past, but my involvement here at the school board level was just a pissed off parent. I mean, we're not afraid to admit that. We just thought our local school boards and administrators dropped the ball, getting our kids back to school, and there was something that we needed to do about it. So by Martino's account, this didn't start as the latest political opportunity. It started with him being incredibly frustrated with the administration at his kid's school. And so it became clear that by applying political pressure to the school administrators

and to the school board members, that they couldn't hide and go, oh, this is scary. Oh, I don't know how to open the schools. And once we did that and saw that it worked and we got Central Bucks open in just a couple of weeks where other school stays closed the entire calendar year, we said, wow, let's go teach some other people across the state how to do this. So in July of this year, he starts a PAC. He calls it Back to School PA. He calls it a single-issue PAC. And that single issue is keeping schools open. And how it works is his PAC gives money to other PACs at the district level,

and he tells those other PACs, I want this money to go to school board candidates who will support my issue and keep the schools open. And then those PACs are supposed to donate to candidates who will do just that. So this PAC, back to school PA, starts giving out money all over the state, around the Philly suburbs, around Pittsburgh, all these places in between. And by October, it's given out around $700,000 statewide. Wow, that's real money. And I'm guessing that is a lot more money than we're used to seeing in local school board campaigns.

It's a lot of money. And I'm guessing that is a lot more money than we're used to seeing in local school board campaigns. It's a lot of money. But what may be most new and noteworthy is that so much of the money sloshing around in these races is coming from one guy. Typically, a lot of the money in school board races comes from small donors, though, you know, the local party will give some money, the teachers union sometimes. Well, this year in Bucks County, just one local PAC had put $50,000 into the races in the county by mid-October. And almost all of that came from Martino. Wow. Yeah. In another district in the Philly suburbs that I looked at, Martino donates $10,000 to the local PAC supporting his candidates. The total sum that PAC raised was something like $10,420. So in some cases, Martino is essentially the sole funder of the PAC. As of mid-October, yeah, that seemed to be true. And in that one donation he made in the district I was just talking about,

in one fell swoop, he doubled what the opposing candidates raised altogether with mostly smaller donations. So all told, Martino puts half a million dollars of his own money into that $700,000 pool of money that his PAC gives out. So it totally remakes a lot of these local elections,

where in the past, very little money might have been spent by any candidates. Now, for these suburban school board races, you have professional campaign flyers, negative mailers,

these sleek attack ad websites. Right. The best local school board campaign that money can possibly buy. Right. And of course, when these well-financed campaigns wage their attacks, the other side fights back. And so these anonymous attack sites start spouting up on the other side. And it all just ramps up very fast. And it all just ramps up very fast. And Campbell, what is the criteria to get this Paul Martino funding? Is it really as simple as whether or not the candidate supports reopenings?

Well, here's where it gets fascinating. The short answer is yes, that really does appear to be it. But of course, as we've been talking about, as the school board fight has become polarized and politicized, we've seen the reopening battles evolve into something more symbolic. And so what you see is that often a candidate supporting reopenings is now synonymous with a candidate who opposes mask mandates or is running on an anti-CRT platform. Right. These all kind of get linked. So there's often a kind of shared platform that unites

the reopening candidates, and it's not just about reopening. Right. So in Central Box, all of the candidates Martino ended up supporting ran on a platform against mask requirements, really parental choice, which is mask optional. That was the party line. And when I looked at other candidates that Martino was supporting in the Philly suburbs outside of Bucks, they were really emphasizing the same themes. But what's interesting is how Martino talks about his feelings on these other issues. Hmm. Mask mandates.

What's your thinking on mask mandates? If we need masks for in-person education, great. If your local administrator says that you don't need masks, that's fine. I don't have an opinion on the matter. I think the mask discussion has become completely overblown. It's some sort of weird litmus test. Are you anti-science or are you not? Whereas I don't think that's what the key issue is. If the local school administrators and or local health directors say we don't need a mask because this metric, this metric, and this metric are where

they are, great. If they say we do, no problem. I'm not anti-mask. I'm not pro-mask though. I think there is a group out there that is pro-mask. Like, I need to have a mask on no matter what I do at all times, even if the case counts are zero. And so I'm neither pro nor anti, and I think this has really become a complete red herring in the discussion. Well, I see what you're saying, that, focus is in-person education, whatever it takes to get that, right? Agnostic on what it takes, but that's what it takes. The candidates you're bankrolling, particularly in the Philadelphia region, North Penn, Bucks in Montgomery, are almost all anti-mask mandate. So it's one thing to say that masks aren't important to me,

they're a distraction, but these are the candidates you're giving money to, right? Again, I truly feel that this is the secondary issue. There's a group of people on one side that want to be in person, and there's a group of people on the other side that are cautious to a fault. And I think that safety to a fault, cautious to a fault, has become the kind of primary thinking as opposed to, this is a hard problem, what onus do we need to put back on us as administrators to solve the problem? And so I want to have people on our school boards who want to solve problems, not who want safety to a fault. That has really, I think, been the wrong kind of ideology to have. And that's the break between the two sides on this issue. I see what you're saying, but this is sort of the trick here, right? That you're talking

about that you want a very practical, cold-eyed take on how can we get people back in schools. You know, under modified quarantine, part of it's based on can we get people back in schools. Under modified quarantine, part of it's based on the fact that people are wearing masks, right? That's correct. So this is not ideological. Let's just get kids back in school. The candidates you're bankrolling are both almost universally, at least in the Philadelphia region, strongly against mask mandates. I mean, you see many, many flyers about get critical race theory out of our schools. Is it impossible to be against school closures

and not be also against critical race theory and mask mandates and other things? I mean, why are those things aligned? That is absolutely the case. And look, I can run you through some of the numbers, Campbell. About a third of our candidates we estimate are actually on the Democrat side of the fence, less so in Philadelphia. I must admit that is a true statement, that in Montgomery and Bucks County, it's turned out that the candidates we have backed have been more Republican than statewide. Statewide, though, looks like it's about 30-35% are Democrats, and they have an eclectic set of views on those issues. Some of our groups are highly progressive groups in inner cities that are pro-CRT. We are not making a statement about those issues. We're showing up

to those districts that other people didn't pay attention to saying, your schools need to be open because guess what? Your kids are falling even further behind. How can I help you? And so, no, I don't think that there needs to be a lockstep. You're anti-mask, you are anti-CRT, and you are blank. I don't think that needs to be the case at all. And if it turns out that in Bucks and Montgomery County, it lined up that way more often than not, that is a coincidence as opposed to a design goal. A coincidence as opposed to a design goal. Yeah. And again, to a degree, this may be true in the sense that as we've talked about, the reopening issue has always had this sort of natural conservative bent. And it's true that Martino's given funding

to PACs that support some Democrats, including a PAC in Harrisburg called Black Wall PA, which says it fights against racism, injustice, and voter suppression. But even he says that only about a third of the candidates he's supporting are Democrats. And some surveys that news outlets in Pennsylvania have done have found the number significantly lower than even that. I mean, the candidates in Central Bucks who were funded by Martino's PAC were Republicans. I reached out to PACs in other districts in Bucks County to see where their money was going,

and the ones I found were backing almost all Republicans too. So whether it's a coincidence, who's to say? But I think the more interesting question is, why is Paul Martino putting half a million dollars into school board races if all he cares about is reopening and the schools have reopened. So you don't feel yourself aligned that way on those cultural issues? I mean, I know you've been, I think you described yourself in the Bucks County paper as a, quote, hardcore Republican. Yes.

But again, that is, you consider that completely divorced from the mission of this particular movement? Absolutely. And I get a lot of flack for this, but I can explain it to you quite simply. I have donated to causes in the past. If I wanted to create an anti-CRT pack, I would have created the anti-CRT pack and we'd be on the phone talking about that. I created Back to School because that was the issue that I thought was most important to my kids, maybe your kids, other kids throughout the state of Pennsylvania. We created it bipartisan. I've got four employees on staff. Two of them are Democrats,

two of them are Republicans. I didn't go and hire those people because I was really closetedly doing an anti-CRT PAC. If I wanted to do an anti-CRT PAC, and maybe one day I will, I'll fund it and I'll come on your podcast and tell you why I did that. I mean, the goal of this one's pretty clear, even though people think I got some other ulterior motive. So schools and BUCs have been open to some degree for a year, and they're open this year. Yes. There was some talk, you know, about potential closures, but it seems like the salience of the school closures is fading. Do you have higher aspirations with this? Like, do you see further goals of keeping this going beyond school openings? So, I did not. Again, not the plan. It was make sure that the schools stay open. And so that was why we started.

But now that we've actually got a statewide, we packed packs in, I think, 25 of the 64 counties. We got submissions from 200 packs across the entire Commonwealth. What do we do next? We almost by accident built a completely bottom-up grassroots parents-based organization in six months. That is not an easy thing to do. So no, I don't know what we're going to do next. But Campbell, I promise you there will be something next because this is a very interesting asset we've built. We need to figure out how to empower these parents forward. And I don't know what that answer is yet. Happy to come on your podcast next time when I do know. So Paul is saying he does have further political aspirations for this movement he's

helped start in finance. He just doesn't know what those are yet. Yeah, that's what he's saying. And I kept trying. Where are you in discussions of where to take this next? Oh, we got a lot of ideas. So what are some of your ideas? So Campbell, sorry, I'm going to have to politely decline on that one. I'm happy to get a hold of you soon enough. Do have a lot of ideas, though. And again, I'm not trying to be cute. I'll tell it to you as the venture capitalist in me.

The companies I've started that have been successful have usually been successful when you go swim in the right pond. You don't really know how to swim, but you know you're in the right pond. You know you've got the right idea. And so it turned out, I think, this is the happy accident here as well. It turned out that activating a grassroots set of parents would be a potentially new powerful political force. I had no idea that that was going to be the case.

And so now I got to go play the game the way I do as a startup. I now have this interesting asset. What would be a great way to deploy that? And that's the question I'm now working with. And that's quite frankly how we've scaled startups in the past. And I feel bizarrely qualified to try and answer this question. And you'll hear from us soon. But the basic mission that I'm hearing, in other words, the thing that keeps it going beyond school closures, is greater parental power in schools?

I think so. I think the core of this is that we woke up parents who were apolitical in the past to that the school boards were very fundamentally important to their family because it was their kids' education. And so certainly that would then mean other things like curriculum, et cetera, downstream. But having a network of activated, previously apolitical parents, that's a pretty interesting group of people who didn't used to show up. These aren't your every two-year voters.

These aren't people who probably even knew there were odd-year elections. And it's exciting to see those kinds of people be active for the first time. Okay, well, this is where you started your reporting, right? This idea that in an important political state like Pennsylvania, a swing state, if you can really find a way to mobilize a large group of voters or potential voters, that can make a very big difference at both the local and the national level. And to be honest, it can make or break a presidential campaign. And what I hear Paul saying is, I found those voters. And it turns out that what motivates them is schools. Yeah. So the kind of essential question here, the one that we've been kind of circling around this whole conversation

is, is the whole reopening issue a Republican Trojan horse? Have people like Martino seized on genuine concerns that parents have about school closures and used that to build a political movement that's about all this other stuff? And could it become a playbook for winning all kinds of elections, whether that's across Bucks County, across the state of Pennsylvania, even across the country? But then meanwhile, as we've talked about, the schools have real issues that need addressing, like practical issues that some people like John Gamble and some of the teachers and staff are worried are getting totally overshadowed by these battles over COVID policy and cultural stuff. So I wanted to know what Martino thought about these other school issues that don't lend themselves so readily to politics.

So at the same time that there is, I think, a very valid debate over the COVID mitigation procedures, you know, in Central Bucks as well as districts nationwide. I mean, there are a lot of issues, right? There's very severe staffing shortages. Can't get substitutes. There are very few education aides per student to the degree that they want them. Do you see those as big issues too? Are those part of what your movement is addressing? So we are a single issue pack focused exclusively on the schools being open. Those issues related to staffing levels are of course related to our primary purpose, but we are related to our primary purpose.

But we are not making statements about curriculum. We're not getting involved in the school bus shortage. That's not the kind of stuff that we're focused on. To the extent they make it impossible to have in-person education, those are things we focused on. The staff shortages in particular. Over in the Pittsburgh districts, that led to a delayed opening here in 2021, for example. We paid a lot of attention to that, supported a lot of groups in the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County areas that really said, look, enough is enough. You not only weren't open last year, we got a whole year to get ready for this. Let's solve the problem. Is it frustrating? I mean,

we talked a little bit about the challenges that schools are facing that are not locked down, not even COVID related, you know, staffing shortages. Is it frustrating that as someone who wants good schools for your kids and who has the will to spend a lot of money on it, that the only outlet to do that that you see right now is funding school board races? Is it frustrating that there are these resources and it's hard to figure out a way to use them to make schools better outside of politics? We have a very blunt instrument, which is every two years about half the school board seats are up. And it turns out in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, school boards are remarkably

powerful. And so like a presidential election in the U.S., it's a blunt instrument. And every couple of years you get to show up. I'd be all for a more direct version of democracy where there could be oversight, balance, checks, et cetera. But right now, this is what we got. We got school boards every two years. So Martino's response is the way school boards work and the way schools work, we can't just directly fund the schools. Private citizens can't just give them the resources that they need. And in terms of the mental health issues that the students are battling, the thing that Betsy Coyne was talking about, the behavioral issues,

that, he would say, is exactly what motivated him to create this single issue pack. That the damage done to kids by closing schools was so great that anyone involved should be out of their seat on a board. And right now, all that should matter is that a candidate wouldn't let that happen again. Again, though, the central question is, when you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on school board candidates and your litmus test is one issue, what else is that money supporting? Who is that money supporting when you focus on just that one issue? I mean, one of the candidates in Central Bucks who got Martino's PAC support, she was at one meeting and was talking about demonic adults brainwashing and recruiting children. But she had the right stance on reopening, so she got the backing. It's complicated. So now you have this slate across the commonwealth of candidates.

Moving on to other fights in the future, do you see this as a source of Republican strength in future elections? I don't think I've ever thought about that that way. But given that there are more Republicans than Democrats, you're going to have to imagine that the issues are going to be more right-aligned in the future. I would love it if we could get to a spot where we didn't have to pick left-right issues with a statewide bipartisan group. Again, if I wanted to start a Republican PAC, I'd go start a Republican PAC. I've got this unique amalgam of people who wouldn't otherwise be on the same team. It seems like there's something good we can do with that. And if all

it does is now devolve into a single Republican issue, haven't I squandered an opportunity, Campbell? Well, I think that depends on how you view the opportunity, because a Republican PAC would get the same old Republican activists, where getting apolitical people involved with pursuing Republican goals, even if it is Republican PAC, that seems like a pretty big victory politically, no? As I said, and I got to tell you, that's more accident than genius, right? And so we've got that group of people, apolitical people who decided that their kids' education was time for them to step up. And again, turning that just into a recruiting zone for Republican candidates strikes me as a misuse of the asset. But the actual use of the asset is still under discussion at the moment.

That's what we've got to figure out. I mean, we've got a big election on Tuesday. We've got a lot of races to win. And we now know that there's probably going to be life after this. And it's my job to figure that out. Mr. Martino, I appreciate you giving me a few minutes of your time. Very good, Campbell. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On Tuesday, November 2nd, Republicans won three out of the five open seats in the central school board elections, cementing their control of the board. in the central Bucks school board elections,

cementing their control of the board. And across Bucks County, Republicans won race after race for local office, an outcome that many observers attributed to the turnout of voters motivated by the races for school board. On the same night, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, won his race by making schools and what he called the empowerment of parents central to his campaign.

We proved in Virginia that the people can stand up and vote for someone who stands up for us. People are attending the school boards. Last week, the Central Bucks school board met for the first time since the election. Oh, diversity, education. Oh, transgender. He has the right to go into the woman's bathroom and rape her. Then they send the student to another school. That's enough. That's enough. And we need their addresses. You need to stop.

I'm going to have to have you removed if you cannot be respectful. I'm a little shaken right now with everything that's just taken place. I came here to actually say thank you. But, my God, where did I move? Where did I move? This is horrendous. I'm going to raise my children here. Are you kidding me? We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

The Times reports that federal regulators plan to authorize booster shots of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine for all adults as early as today. as early as today. That would expand the number of Americans eligible for a third shot by tens of millions and begin making a booster shot a standard part of vaccinations. Because regulators allow Americans to mix and match boosters, every adult could get a Pfizer booster, no matter which original vaccine they used. Moderna is expected to seek a similar authorization for its booster in the coming weeks. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Lisa Tobin, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Rochelle Bonja

Corey Schreppel and Dan Powell And engineered by Chris Wood Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg Of Wonderly That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilbaro. See you tomorrow.