Another Good Night for School Boards? Well ...
Another Good Night for School Boards? Well ...
It's more complicated than that.
I can tell we all need good news, so I’m going to start by framing Tuesday’s school board elections across the state in the most positive light possible: Most book banners who ran for trustee in Texas this cycle lost, and voters decided again to reject some of the worst, most anti-book candidates. Moms for Liberty-backed candidates fared especially poorly. And, what’s more, these results continued a clear pattern, stretching back through four election cycles to November 2022, of voters successfully organizing to resist extremist takeovers of their school boards.
In my Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the November School Board Elections, I tracked races in six districts and rated 15 candidates as either “red” or “orange.” Nine of those candidates lost on Tuesday. The losers included Brandi Burkman in Leander Independent School District, who called filed a police report on school libraries in 2022 over the book Lawn Boy, and Samuel Aundra Fryer in Corpus Christi, who attacked teachers and librarians for books "push[ing] this whole LGBTQ mindset.”
DETAILS: THE GOOD
The best results of the night came from Central Texas, where groups in both Leander ISD and Round Rock ISD were once again able to defend their districts from slates of extremists. In Leander, Burkman and another candidate endorsed by Moms for Liberty, Gerald Prater, lost to incumbents Anna Smith and Sade Fashokun, and newcomer Nekosi Nelson was able to beat out conservative former trustee Jim Sneeringer. Burkman has dedicated herself to removing books from the district for years, and Prater has been a constant presence at school board meetings. The current board calmly and effectively stood up to a media stunt about “obscene” books this summer, so it is a great thing that the district will continue to have courageous and reasonable leaders. This is especially notable in a fairly conservative district in a county that swung hard to the right this year.
Round Rock ISD was the scene of a high-profile, nasty election fight two years ago. Moms for Liberty and affiliated groups hoped to take over the board and followed the Southlake playbook to the letter. They were rebuffed by voters and out-organized by an incredible pro-public-education group called Access Education Round Rock ISD. This year, two candidates with ties to Moms for Liberty and Citizens Defending Freedom ran for spots on the board, but they were once again defeated.
Corpus Christi ISD was another bright spot. Eight candidates ran for three open at-large places on the board. The Nueces County branch of Moms for Liberty had officially endorsed Fryer, who railed against “pornographic” books and argued that both the separation of church and state and “this concept of democracy” are not Constitutional. Another candidate, Michael Bergsma, was affiliated with the group and donated to Fryer’s campaign. Both candidates came in last in the polling, garnering less than 10% of the vote.
THE CONROE EXCEPTION
But the huge exception to the night’s good school board news came in Conroe ISD. I’ve written about Conroe and Montgomery County extensively, because it has been an epicenter of book-banning—both in schools and in the public library. According to some reporting, Conroe ISD has removed more books than any other district in the Houston area. Those removals really picked up after November of 2022, when three new trustees backed by Cassandra Crowe, a staffer for state legislator Steve Toth, swept onto the board after a campaign focused on "protecting childhood innocence” and removing books. The new trustees organized in a Facebook group called “Mama Bears Rising,” in which members often attacked teachers.
But those Mama Bears didn’t have a board majority and, though the board as a whole was conservative, they didn’t win every fight. And when the consequences of the Mama Bears’ zeal brought embarrassment to the district, sane voices on the board pushed back. Earlier this school year, trustee Stacey Chase proposed revisions to the district’s book policies that would have walked back some of their worst excesses.
But Chase lost on Tuesday night, as did her board ally Datren Williams. They and two reasonable conservative candidates lost the board’s four open spaces to a new slate of “Mama Bears”: Nicole May, Melissa Semmler, Lindsay Dawson, and Marianne Horton. The Mama Bear faction now has a 7-0 lock on the board, and an increasingly diverse district will be represented by these trustees:
This result will be catastrophic for the district. Not only does it squelch hope of undoing the past two years’ damage; with no voices of restraint (let alone dissent) the board will now be empowered to expand the Mama Bears’ book removals and attacks on educators and LGBTQ kids.
In fact, part of what stings about this race is that, like national Republicans, the Mama Bear candidates and their allies turned this race into a referendum on LGBTQ students, attacking Chase and Williams for “letting boys into girls’ bathrooms” and accepting the endorsement of anti-trans influencer Riley Gaines. And things got ugly, with Mama Bear leader Crowe threatening teachers who expressed disapproval of the Mama Bear slate.
Unfortunately, Conroe ISD represents the continuation of another pattern in post-2022 school board races: Despite strong, organized opposition, the Mama Bears won with the backing of big-money, anti-public education strategists who activated partisan instincts in a Republican area by deceptively painting the Mama Bears’ opponents as wild-eyed liberals. Mama Bear candidates paid consulting fees to CAZ Consulting, a group run by the head of anti-public-ed group Texans for Educational Freedom. In previous campaigns that involved CAZ and Texans for Educational Freedom, deceptive texts have been sent to conservative voters purporting to be from progressive organizations that label non-partisan candidates as progressives. That happened again this cycle in Conroe ISD.
THE BROADER CONTEXT
So that’s three districts where book banners lost big, and one district where they won handily. The results in Tomball and Granbury ISD were mixed. In Tomball ISD, very good candidates Amanda Bass and Coco White won seats on the board, but so did Jennifer Kratky, who reportedly carried so-called “pornographic” books door to door in an attempt to shock voters while canvassing in her failed 2022 campaign.
In Granbury, anti-public school extremist Tim Bolton won his race against less extreme conservative Brett Deason. But incumbent Courtney Gore easily defeated extremist Jaci Lopez, who earlier this year tweeted, “Stop sending your children to Caesar. The government schools do not care about your children the way you care about your children. Homeschool your kids.” Gore herself is no liberal and, in fact, was part of the original, damaging push to remove books from the district. Mendi Tackett, an expert on Granbury whom I respect very much, has described the election as a lose-lose situation. Gore has had a high-profile conversion, though: after joining the board and finding out that teachers aren’t indoctrinating students with CRT and SEL, she has spoken out against the cynical attempts to use culture war bullshit to attack public schools and educators.1
`The bigger context, though, is that after Tuesday all Texas school boards—even where good trustees won—will now operate in an environment that is much less amenable to books, learning, teachers, librarians, and students from marginalized communities. We are in a bad place. We are in trouble. That has been true for a while, but it is compounded after this week’s statewide and national results.
In Texas, we will face a hurricane of awful bills in the next legislative session, and it will be harder than ever to stop those bills or mitigate their harm. Trans kids (and adults) are going to be targeted—more than they already are. Gay kids and adults will be, too. Young people are going to lose access to lots of books. School libraries and curricula are going to become less representative, less honest, more in line with government (read: Christian Nationalist) orthodoxy. The idea of libraries as spaces for free inquiry will be contested. Public school itself is going to be damaged, if not gutted, by vouchers.
And part of the reason it will be hard to fight these bills is that their authors and proponents will be buoyed by this week’s results. They’re gaining not only political allies (between this year’s primaries and last night’s results, the Texas legislature has become more conservative than it was even in 2023), but also a sense (hard to dispute!) they have the nation’s will behind them. And a concomitant sense (also hard to dispute!) that they cannot lose. And now, as challenges to their bad bills work their way through the courts, those authors and proponents going to be more likely to encounter judges and justices who share their premises and wink at their pretexts.
That’s where we are. There were some lights in the sky on Tuesday night, but things have been dark for some time, and this week’s results deepened that darkness.
I highly recommend listening Gore’s interview with Jessica Goudeau and Christine Renee Miller on The Beautiful and Banned podcast.