How to Retake the School Board

We’ve had some trouble here with our local school board. Among other things, the main current issue is the infiltration of Critical Race Theory into what’s being taught to our children. Last fall our entire school board signed a document that reaffirms their support of CRT.  It’s subtle. It says things like promoting “the tenet prescribed in the Declaration of Independence, being, ‘all men are created equal.’” We all agree with that.

CFISD's Resolution Condemning Racism

Then, it refers to recent events in the country that have revealed racism. Except that they’re referring to the George Floyd death and subsequent riots claiming his death was caused by racism—but the trials of the police officers involved do not include any charges of racism, nor do the prosecutors bring in any evidence of racism, because there wasn’t any. So that’s a problem. We can all agree with the statement that racism will not be tolerated in our schools. But we can’t agree that it’s suddenly an overwhelming, invasive problem. The Board doesn’t provide a single local incident as evidence of any problem here.

Then there’s a claim that, despite it being nearly 6 decades since the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “racism, systemic racism, discrimination, prejudice, injustice and inequality continue to exist.” Do they? As though no progress had been made? Is there evidence of this actually being the case in our school district? Because otherwise this is just parroting the CRT mantra that racism is everywhere.

The Board members call for a change in the teaching of history in our schools. Based on the above, we can only assume they will be promoting some distorted version approved by Critical Race Theorists, rather than real history.

Most troubling is their call for an “equity audit.” Equity doesn’t mean equality. In CRT language it doesn’t mean “all men are created equal”; it means equal outcomes—and if you don’t have equal outcomes, that means you have a systemic racism problem. And who do you hire to do an equity audit? A promoter of CRT. There is no other option. The money for that audit is already spent, by the way; now they’re ready to spend money on implementing the recommendations of the auditors, all while telling us "There's no Critical Race Theory in Cy-Fair."

They add one more thing in the resolution:

FURTHER, we resolve to encourage our district to be a place for transparent dialogue among our board, staff, school personnel, students and parents on the issue of race and racism, and there be no retribution for individuals or groups for sharing what is perceived, believed or experienced.

So when we try to have “transparent dialogue” at a school board meeting, they relegate us to a small “community comment” part of the meeting, after the part of the meeting where board members tell us we’re wrong and they won’t be listening to us. And during our time, we get a total of ten people to speak for no longer than two minutes each. Any “dialogue” is quickly squelched with a threat of kicking us out of the meeting—while scolding us for not being nice little compliant citizens.

So we need a better school board. This is true in many places across the country. Parents and citizens need to take back control of school boards, to make them answer to us. Maybe it will be instructive to look at what we will need to accomplish here to make that happen.

The Plan 

Three board members are up for election this November. And they will be the only races on this ballot; the only other items will be propositions for state constitutional amendments that came out of the legislative session and must now go before the people of Texas.

That means we can concentrate all our efforts between now and November on these three races.

The group that got us together to attend that school board meeting in June, FACT—Freedom to Act—held a planning meeting last week that I attended. The main speaker was a woman running for State Board of Education in her area, who is a former school board member in the south end of the county and therefore knows what it takes to get elected. Her mentoring will be helpful. But it’s going to be a big challenge. A lot of it comes down to block walking and talking to parents.

Eventually we got to the details of our district. One of our people, Bill Ely (he’s on the board of our Tea Party with me, and is a precinct chair, working on a couple of committees for the Harris County Republican Party), had worked out the numbers, by looking at turnout and votes in school board races in 2019, 2017, 2015, and 2013.He dug through the numbers and figured out how many votes we need to accomplish this effort, based on the most challenging goal—the highest vote getter during those years. So we know how many voters we need to get out to the polls and what percentage we want of those voters.

There are 76 precincts in the school district, so that gives us a pretty good map of the territory to cover, and a logical way to divide it up. There’s a 51.89% Republican majority, which is narrower than you would expect for NW Harris County, but it’s better than the county as a whole. If every precinct gets their voters educated and out to vote, we can accomplish this feat.

We have data showing us what kinds of voters there are, coming from whether people vote in a primary or not. A person who never votes in a primary is called a swing voter, because we don’t know their affiliation from the voting record. A person moves up in tiers depending on how many times, and how consistently, they’ve voted Republican in primary elections. I have this information on every registered voter in my precinct. It’s public record, although I appreciate the help in making it easily accessible for me as a precinct chair.

We think we'll find many of the voters we need with the middle tier and up, who are likely to feel strongly against anti-Americanism and divisiveness being taught in our schools. So those are the people we need to get out to vote in this crucial election that so many people don’t bother with. And in addition we need to educate and recruit those Republicans who’ve only voted once in a primary, and identify some of the swing voters who agree with us. (We’d be glad to take Democrats who agree with us too, but with limited resources, we probably won’t spend our time searching for them.) The added bonus is, we can use the information we get now to bring those identified voters back to the polls in the 2022 midterm election.

So, what does it take to get these votes secured? There will be social media, yard signs, meet-and-greet events, etc., as you’d expect. We plan to have a candidate forum at our Tea Party meeting next month, for example. But the real nitty-gritty—the part I’m not good at—is block walking and phone banking.

We have an estimate of what will be needed for each week of the 11 weeks of campaigning between the end of signups (August 16^th) and the election (November 2^nd). A rough estimate for me, as a precinct chair, is to recruit one or two volunteers from my precinct every single week for 11 weeks. To me that sounds daunting, but not impossible.

I should note that school board trustee is a nonpartisan position—no party affiliation is shown on the ballot. We’re using Republican Party data, because that is more likely to get us the opposition to CRT that we need. It’s important to note that, of the three incumbents we’ll be campaigning against this November, two claim to be Republicans and call themselves conservative. Since this hasn’t translated into the representation we need, we’ll have to be very careful about who we support.

There's a recruitment effort underway. I understand some possible candidates are praying about it and making their decision. I hope we can find three candidates who are conservative anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ-agenda (not to be confused with being against individuals and their citizen rights), and pro-parental rights, while having the skills in administration and accounting that are needed for the job, which is unpaid, by the way. So I don't know yet who the candidates will be.

At Saturday’s Tea Party there was a woman who announced herself as a candidate. She said, “I stand unequivocally against everything that we have been proposing. And so I ask for your support.” Um, maybe she meant she was against the things we were against—CRT and gender theory, mainly—but it doesn’t bode well that she couldn’t say that clearly. Unless she brings herself up to speed on the issues, and finds a way to express herself more clearly, she’s not going to be one we're inspired to block walk for.

Organize to Mobilize

Dr. Richard Johnson
at Cypress Texas Tea Party on July 24, 2021

At our Tea Party this past Saturday, our main speaker was Dr. Richard Johnson, Director of the Booker T. Washington Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Forum. His credentials are impeccable, and his experience both broad and deep. Oh, and he happens to be black. (The legacy media would be surprised how many conservative blacks join us regularly. There are quite a lot of them, and they have learned to be strong in expressing their beliefs. We love them.) I thought he would be getting into more detail about what CRT is, how to identify it, and why it needs to be rooted out. But he assumed we, in that very full room, already knew why it was bad.

He had come to inspire us to mobilize. He’s a military man. And a lot of us in that room were military or related to military. So he said, what we need to do is translate the things we learned in the military to fight this new battle. We need to "organize to mobilize."

What he does at the TPPF is to gather the information for us to use, and to work with lawmakers to create good policy. But we need to be a movement that holds our local school boards accountable—where we are connected to the results of the policy, and where we have the best chance of affecting policy. Near the end of his speech he quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.—MLK

And then Dr. Johnson finished with this call to all of us, because this is an American movement:

To you my fellow Texans, and my fellow Americans, we have a responsibility to every man and woman who have laid down their lives, their convenience, their comfort for the ideas of the American flag. And we cannot tolerate individuals or groups who tarnish the blood-stained banner of the American flag.

It’s a call to arms—not munitions in this fight, but ideas spread person-to-person, to effect the change we need in order to preserve our nation and our civilization.

I don’t mean to be alarmist. But the dangerous materials are already in our schools and have buy-in from our current school board—most of them elected by telling us they were conservative. Now is the time to fight, because waiting any longer is way too late.

If you’re in Cy-Fair ISD and want to volunteer for this campaign, sign up with freedomtoact.org. If you’re in another school district, know that you’ve got this problem already, so find the people taking action—or become the people taking action.