In Part I we talked about what we’re fighting in our current school board races, and also who we’re fighting. Today we’ll talk more about who we’re fighting with—who are the candidates to vote for.
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| Where the school board meetings are held image from Google maps |
A bit of background. I pulled my kids out of this school
district, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, 21 years ago to
homeschool. We had a 9th grader, 7th grader, and 2nd
grader at that point. This means we’d been parents of public school students
for 10 years (kindergarten plus 9 grades), so we hadn’t been against all public
schooling. We had, in fact, had some very good public school experiences—before
moving here. By spring of our second school year here we’d had enough. Despite
a few teachers who meant well and tried hard, and a music teacher we felt
honored to have experienced, the schools at all three levels did not meet the
needs of our kids, all of whom qualified as gifted, which by the way is a form
of special education that often gets overlooked. You need to teach these kids
not only more, but in a different way. Our previous school district had done
that very well, so we knew what that looked like.
We chose this district because of its high rating—it still
has a high rating. But by comparison it felt backward, stodgy, and, well,
stupid. Some infuriating rules made me think, No one this stupid should be
allowed anywhere near the education of students.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of decent teachers
trying to do a good job for the students they love. And for many families that
is enough. But it does mean the leadership overall isn’t what it ought to be.
So we pulled our children out—and educated them at our own
expense and effort, which meant limiting the income of our family. We had
to pay tax money for the schools that had failed our kids. And I’m telling you
it still infuriates me when someone says, “I believe in public schools,” as if
it’s a religion. Or, “Our tax money is for public school students only; if
someone chooses something else, fine, but this is where the tax money goes.”
After pulling our kids out, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to our school district, except to try to be an informed voter on school board races. But this year has gotten my attention.
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| screenshot from a recent school board meeting |
Last spring people started asking the school board why
certain things were being taught—things that could fit under the ideological
umbrella of Critical Race Theory. I don’t care whose kids are being educated; I
don’t want my tax dollars to go toward inculcating that divisive and
America-hating ideology.
So that meant looking at changing out the school board. The
district uses a nonpartisan no-runoff ballot; whoever gets the most votes wins.
That favors the incumbent. The timing is in an off year. This year on our
ballot there is nothing but school board and the state propositions. It’s
traditionally very low turnout. But the incumbents can put out student and
teacher handouts reminding them to go vote in the school board election. So the people most likely to
vote for an incumbent—because they’ve heard of them—are more likely to vote.
That’s a lot to go up against.
But we’ve had some energetic people working to find
candidates, vet them, and campaign for them. I’ve been joining in that effort.
I’m pleased with our choices. Now we just have to get people who care about
kids and our country to get out and vote.
The Endorsements
OK. So, who should we vote for?
There are three races, positions 5, 6, and 7. These are all
at-large. In other words, everyone in the district votes for all of the
positions. While this is nonpartisan, voting history as well as actions can tell
us something about the candidates and incumbents. The precinct chairs doing the
vetting only considered Republicans, because that at least gives us a common
starting place.
Last night the Harris County Republican Party voted to
endorse:
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Dr. Natalie Blasingame for position 5.
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Scott Henry for position 6.
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Luke Scanlon for position 7.
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| image from campaign literature |
That’s kind of a big deal. And it wasn’t easy to accomplish. Normally that body doesn’t endorse during primaries. But this doesn’t have a primary. And in our district it doesn’t have a runoff. So the Local Government Committee did their vetting and interviewing of candidates (this is in addition to the vetting we precinct chairs in the district had been doing). The Republican incumbents in positions 6 and 7 didn’t show, so it was easy to endorse the challengers. I told a little about these two in Part I. I've got some yard signs for Scott Henry in my car if you want one.
But position 5 was harder. For position 5 there are actually six candidates, 2-3 of them are Republican (depending on how you read their voting history). The incumbent is the divisive ultra-Democrat we talked about in the last post, the one who tweeted out racist anti-white, anti-any-religion-but-his, tweets pretty regularly. (There's a sampling in Part I.) So he’s the biggest target. The LG Committee knew that, but didn’t want to set up a situation where they endorsed a candidate and then a different candidate got traction in the race. I also hope that doesn’t happen. But if we didn’t act, it was very unlikely we could coalesce around a candidate to beat the incumbent.
So we had to amend their recommendation and make the case
for endorsing Natalie Blasingame. I had my 1 minute of fame giving one of the
speeches. A friend, Bill Ely, had done the work of getting a whip count of the
precinct chairs in our school district:
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76 precincts, 74 precinct chairs
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4 Abstain
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3 for Courtney Spradley
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50 for Natalie Blasingame
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17 not reported
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68% of all precinct chairs support Blasingame
o
94% of reporting precinct chairs support
Blasingame
Add to that, we got an additional short speech from a member of
the LG Committee, from outside our district, who said Natalie Blasingame was the most impressive and
prepared school board candidate he had ever met. By far.
There’s another election for CFISD Board Trustees in two years, where four positions will be on the ballot. I hope some of the candidates who didn’t get our full support this time will consider running then.
Natalie Blasingame has run before. More than once. I voted for her in 2015, 2017, and 2019. This is the first time she has run with grassroots support, and that's happening because of the attention to CRT in our schools—a topic she not only opposes but can recognize. It's about time we elected her.
The Stakeholders Question
There’s a question I like to ask school board candidates,
about the priority of stakeholders. Dr. Blasingame is the first one who really
seemed to understand. Her answer, paraphrased from my notes: Parents are the first stakeholders, including community
members who are not currently parents of our students.
Students are not stakeholders; students are the why,
the reason we have schools. Our school board doesn’t take orders from students,
although it should listen to them to find out how well our schools are doing. We
need to meet each child’s individual needs.
She didn’t mention teachers as stakeholders either. They’re
not; they are the employees we hire to accomplish our mission to “produce
graduates who have skills, knowledge and attitudes to become accomplished
citizens.*” The district words their stated vision
and mission this way:
Our vision at
CFISD is formed by the acronym LEAD: to learn, empower, achieve, dream. LEAD.
Our mission is
to maximize every student’s potential through rigorous and relevant learning
experiences, preparing students to be 21st Century global leaders.
I'm not sure every student ought to be a world leader; an accomplished citizen will do. Anyway, as I ask the priorities question, it’s amazing to me how many school board candidates think they should do what the teachers want—not realizing that often means the teachers’ unions, or maybe some pressure group selling something or promoting an ideology. Often candidates think they’re giving an understanding answer when they say the children are the priority stakeholders, even though we know that’s not who they’re listening to. Natalie understands this better than any candidate I’ve asked.
The Choice Issue
My other big issue is school choice. Public schools are not
an end unto themselves; they are a means toward an end. We pay our property
taxes not to fund public schools, but to fund the education of the next
generation. That means the taxes are meant to go for the education of every
child—as their parents see fit.
I said that to Natalie, and she said, “Exactly.” She is full
of creative ideas to meet needs—according to what parents want for their child.
She’s had to do some creative work to get what she needed for her own daughter
when the schools wouldn’t provide what she wanted.
And every child is different. You might manage a factory aiming
at the middle and eliminating the exceptions. But you can’t get every child to
reach their potential that way. She’s more than about attaching the money to
the child; she’d first like to offer creative ideas within the school system—since
that’s what the school’s mission is supposed to be. Then, if the schools can’t
come up with a way to meet a family’s needs, that’s when you give them the money
to get what they need.
One of the innovations she’d like to try is strands. You
could have a teacher and parents of enough students who all ask for, say, a
Christian strand. All willing, the schools provide the place and the support,
and the parents get what they want from a teacher who gets to teach what she/he
wants. You could do strands for STEM, or technology, or language immersion. Not
every student wants to have these things, but why not offer them for those who
do? We have classrooms. The cost per student and per teacher is essentially the
same. What’s stopping us?
Dr. Blasingame has been a teacher, assistant principal,
principal, and assistant superintendent. Some people might worry about having
an insider, but in this case I don’t think that’s a problem. She’s an
out-of-the-box thinker who happens to know how the system works. And she knows
where the system doesn’t work.
She’s committed to improving communication between the board
and the community. Right now that’s pretty dismal. But she says you can form a
committee for anything you want information on, so that puts you in touch with
the community. You just have to want that two-way communication.
When she says she’s about Choice, Voice, and Values, I
believe her.
Now we just have to get to work, get the word out, and get
people to the polls.
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* The quote comes from The Eden Conspiracy, by Joe Harless. I wrote about it here.
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