By Will Budington
Growing up, I always thought School Boards were a place of public service. Parents sacrificed their evenings to attend boring meetings centered around budgets and curriculum. As my father would watch these meetings on the local TV station I could not help but think to myself that I hope I never reach a point in my life where I watch school board meetings on TV. It was this mundane, cumbersome process that many people have come to associate with School Boards. Sure, maybe they have been grounds for hot-bed issues like allowance of To Kill a Mockingbird or Huck Finn in libraries, but at the end of the day School Board meetings were simply a boring bureaucratic process. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, very few people who kept up with their local School Board happenings would probably consider them places of violence, but as debates about masks, vaccines, and even Critical Race Theory have emerged, School Board meetings are more akin to political rallies than soccer moms balancing a district’s budget.
(Washington Post)
Beverley Anderson served as a classroom teacher for 36 years before running for School Board in Virginia Beach in 2012 when she wanted full-day kindergarten to be offered. After successfully lobbying for that change in policy, Anderson ran for re-election twice, won both times and found joy in the job. She loved touring schools, seeing classrooms, and advocating for teachers and students. The disruption caused to this peaceful system however, has completely changed Anderson’s experience. Anderson’s district has seen meetings run all the way to 1 or 2 AM reaching extreme levels of contention. After an especially heated meeting Anderson found a screw in her tire prompting her husband to encourage police escorts to her car. Now, Anderson faces a recall election over advocating for COVID-related safety measures.
Unfortunately, Anderson’s story is not out of the ordinary as many parents and board-members across the country have experienced threats, and even been physically attacked like one school-board member who was struck by a man in Mendon Illinois in September. These acts of violence have reached such an intensity that the F.B.I. has actually created a “threat-tag” to identify parents to who pose a threat to school board members.
(CNN)
Whether you agree with students being taught to reckon with the United State’s inherent racialized history, or you are in favor of a mask-mandate, one thing we should all be able to agree on, is that spaces created to better our children’s education should not be violent. We teach children at a young age to use their words, to ask for permission, to use their P’s and Q’s, not to strike people they disagree with. These violent actions taken by many disruptive anarchists across the country threaten the ability of our schools to function properly. COVID-19 has taken so much from everyone over the last two years, now it is starting to turn our School Boards from boring budget meetings to vicious and violent political debates. Without these bodies functioning properly, our Children’s’ livelihood is threatened, and that is a stance all parents should be able to agree on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/politics/fbi-school-threats.html
