Off-Off-Year Means School Board Election

 We’re just a bit over two months out from an election—an off-off-year election. It’s not a presidential election year. It’s not even a congressional election year. This year is between even those. The only things on our ballot will be school board positions and propositions (proposed amendments to the state constitution, coming out of this year’s legislative session, but we’re not getting to those in this post).

 

The School Board Races

Four years ago we were among some of the first school districts attempting to flip our board from woke to conservative—or, you could say, to what parents and communities want, instead of what has been forced down our throats.

We have seven school board trustees (board members). Three positions come up the year after a presidential election, such as 2021 and this year; four other positions come up two years later, such as 2023 and 2027.

Cy-Fair Independent School District Board of Trustees, circled are incumbents
Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Luke Scanlon, whose seats are on the ballot this November.
Natalie and Scott are running again. Luke is not seeking reelection. Image found here

These are supposedly nonpartisan positions. But, as we’ve all learned the hard way, nonpartisan just means no information on the ballot about the candidates’ actual partisanship. Somehow we’d found ourselves—in a northwest section of Harris County, in one of the strongest conservative senatorial districts in the state—stuck with a 7-0 non-conservative school board. So we set out to change that.

We won three of three seats in 2021. That included an arch-enemy ringleader, who had essentially run the board for a couple of decades. But it still left us with a 4-3 woke-majority board.

I’m sure some of those board members don’t call themselves woke. They might say they’re all about what’s best for the kids—and they know what’s best so much better than mere parents and community members. But what we found, going door-to-door, was that people were fed up with what the schools were doing. You’ll remember, 2021 was just a year into the COVID pandemic. Schools had closed for a while, then did online learning (not very successfully), then had kids wear masks in school—all the time except when actually putting food in their mouths. It was during this time that parents became more aware of what schools were saying to their children, and they didn’t want it.

So we started pushing for legislative changes, to remove DEI, CRT, and LGBTQ sexualizing materials. The community spoke pretty clearly about that.

But it wasn’t until the second round, when we got three (out of four) more seats on the board,  that we had the opportunity to make real progress.

It turns out, taking over the school board, while essential, isn’t the end of the story. We got our majority at the same time that we got a new superintendent—chosen by the previous, outgoing board, although they let new board members participate in the vetting process. But there’s a whole “deep state” of district administrators still left. And, with the new board and the new superintendent—surprise!—there was a huge debt suddenly in need of being taken care of. This is just a year after the opening of a new administration building (named after the outgoing superintendent who caused so many of our problems, including debt for this new building) along with a new performing arts center.

You can’t really go to the taxpayers—after that incredibly expensive (and unnecessary?) infrastructure purchase and say, “We can’t actually educate your kids unless you give us more money.”

So, the new conservative board was put in an impossible position. Nevertheless, they did some of the things we asked for....

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