Let's Take Our School Boards Back

Early voting for the May 2025 school board elections starts Tuesday, 4/22. Use this guide to fight the book banners and Christian Nationalists.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2025 School Board Elections is live and ready for you to use to keep book banners and Christian Nationalists off of your local district’s board of trustees. As always, this is a living document—I’ll keep updating it all the way until Election Day, so keep checking back until May 3, and please reach out if you know something you think needs to be on the doc.

Early voting runs from April 22 to April 29. Election Day is May 3. Yes, that’s a Saturday. Turnout will be low, so you can make a big difference just by talking to people you know. Share this guide. Make some phone calls. Text your friends.

This is the seventh edition of the BLT Guide. I started the project in 2022, the year slates of extremist candidates swept onto boards across the state, often powered by big money and dirty strategies from PACs and organizations like Patriot Mobile.

Those extremists had a head start, much more money than their opponents, and lots of organizational advantages. But they haven’t been able to sustain the success they found that year. In board elections after 2022, Texans have more often than not rejected scaremongering and censoriousness.

This year voters have the chance to do something different: to reverse that first wave of extremism by voting out many of the trustees elected in 2022. Grapevine-Colleyville ISD’s Tammy Nakamura, who boasted about having a list of “poison” teachers she wanted to get out of the district? She’s up for re-election this go-round. So is Victor Perez, the board president in Katy ISD, who led a movement to toss books from his district that might “white kids feel guilty about their so-called privilege.” So are Craig Tipping, Keziah Valdez Farrar, and Bianca Benavides Anderson, who cruised into office in Mansfield ISD on Patriot Mobile money.

All of these trustees have been disastrous for their districts. It’s not just the books, or the attacks on LGBTQ students—though those things are bad enough. It’s also that these trustees have been focusing on those things when they should have been paying attention to the real needs of their districts. This year, Texans have a chance to hold them accountable, and send a clear message that extremist culture warriors are bad for Texas schools.

One more time, here’s the link.

Let’s go.