Local school boards becoming more politicized

BY HANNAH MCLEOD STAFF WRITER

Public schools have grappled with constant change over the last several years due to the impacts of COVID-19.

As most schools work through the first “normal” school year of the last three, the challenges are abundant. Learning loss accumulated during the height of the pandemic when students were engaging in class virtually is rebounding, if slowly, despite a growing shortage of faculty and staff. Through it all public school boards have been tasked with making the key decisions that will have impacts on the lives of students for years to come.

These key decisions being made by school boards at a quicker pace, combined with the growing responsibility of parents and guardians in a student’s learning due to inhome school, is largely what drove herds of parents to school board meetings with increasing frequency throughout the pandemic months, centering school boards in countless political debates.

“We have seen a national trend recently that has brought school board elections and school board members into the crosshairs of partisan politics,” said Chris Cooper, Madison Distinguished Professor and director of the Public Policy Institute at Western Carolina University. “Part of that is because of the increasing nationalization of all politics. Voting patterns are increasingly consistent from dogcatcher to president, and school boards are no exception to that.”

The pandemic brought several sensitive healthcare decisions before boards of education, decisions in which parents wanted a say. Even before those healthcare choices had to be made, students spent months at home learning virtually and parents were tasked with even more duties than non-pandemic parenting involves, giving them an up close and personal view of what their children were learning and how they were learning it. Throughout the whole process, public comment sessions, usually a sleepy affair, became longer and more heated.

“The masking issue and the school shutdown issue clearly were an accelerant to a fire that was already burning,” said Cooper. “We’ve been becoming increasingly partisan. Our school boards are becoming increasingly partisan, and the pandemic absolutely contributed to that.”

During the pandemic, school boards were required to be public and transparent in the decisions they made. One requirement instituted statewide at the end of August 2021 mandated that school boards take a monthly vote on mask mandates, or lack thereof. Not only did this give parents an opportunity to understand the board’s decision-making process, it also gave them a monthly opportunity to share their opinions on the subject of administrative pandemic decisions, along with anything else they thought relevant to their child’s education.

“Many of the national political issues are also inherently local issues,” said Cooper. “The national conversation over the degree to which critical race theory is taught in schools is not a decision that’s determined at the national level; it’s one that is determined at the state and particularly the local level. So you’ve got national politicians using rhetoric that can only be implemented by local politicians, in this case, school board members.”

This politicization is not a new process. It has been happening for decades, long before the pandemic.

“There’s no question that school boards have become increasingly politicized,” said Cooper. “They have made political decisions, of course, for years, but they operated a bit in the shadows. The average voter was sort of unaware of what school boards did and might even be unaware that they voted for school boards.”

At the state level, Reps. Mark Pless (RHaywood) and Mike Clampitt (R-Swain) introduced a bill earlier this year that would have made all boards in Haywood County, including school board, partisan-elected.

The bill did not make it off the ground and while several current board members expressed ambivalence about the idea of partisan boards, Chuck Francis, Steven Kirkpatrick, Larry Henson, Jimmy Rogers and Bobby Rogers have all switched party affiliation from Democrat to Republican since the last time they ran for school board. What used to be a 63 Democrat majority board is now a 6-3 Republican board. Jimmy Rogers, Kirkpatrick, and Henson are all up for reelection this November. Rogers and Kirkpatrick are running unopposed in their district; Henson is challenged by Democrat Mike Graham.

Billy Handley is running for school board this election season in Macon County and is one of only a few candidates who supports the idea of partisan school boards.

“I feel the school board is already a partisan position, and I would not have thought so before I started running,” said Handley. “Personally, I F