Viewpoints: Why are school board meetings now war zones?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It seemed to come out of nowhere. In June, a school-board meeting in Loudon County, Va., devolved into a shouting match, with conservative protesters eventually cleared from the hall by police. Similar conflicts roiled school-board meetings across the country, over a range of hot-button issues: masks, vaccines, policies for trans athletes, Critical Race Theory. The conflicts moved past yelling, to lawsuits and demands for recalls; and not just of individual members, but entire boards. Over and over again, local school-board meetings have turned from staid discussions of budgets and staffing to heated ideological forums, hosting a go-nowhere series of fights that have little to do with the actual needs of the local schools.

Conservative pundits have talked up these confrontations as part of a larger political strategy. Ian Prior, an activist who has claimed credit for what he’s called “Loudoun awakening,” boasts that his “army of moms,” fired up by school board protests, will sweep Democrats out of national office in next year’s elections. The Heritage Foundation declared July “National Attend Your School Board Meeting Month” and celebrated the “Great Parent Revolt of 2021,” which includes the founding of hundreds of new parent activist groups that might thwart “the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats.”

Blaming public schools: Seen in the long view of our country’s culture wars, these outbursts are better understood as a politics of petulance. At moments when American culture has taken some progressive turn, conservatives have consistently blamed a single culprit for indoctrinating vulnerable youth with radical ideas: public schools. Local school board meetings offer an attractively close-to-hand target; a place to vent frustrations and feel some measure of control, instead of admitting defeat. Whenever activists and parents have feared for the souls of their children, they have engaged in the kind of disruption that we’re seeing today, wreaking significant havoc on the short-term functioning of public schools.

A hundred years ago, for example, it seemed to many Americans that the “flaming youth” were pushing the country in a dangerous direction. Young people were conspicuously flouting Prohibition; young women were challenging strict gender roles by smoking in public and cutting their hair short; white children were dancing to jazz music (a threatening development, in the eyes of white supremacists). The leader of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, Hiram Evans, minced no words about the alleged problem. For the past decade, Evans complained in 1926, the “traditional moral values” of white Protestants of the old “pioneer stock” had eroded; and worst of all, the “right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/viewpoints-why-are-school-board-meetings-now-war-zones/