The School Board Culture War

Across the country, new right-leaning PACs are pouring money into school board races, aiming to flip control of who governs schools in favor of self-proclaimed ‘parents rights’ advocates.

For significantly less than what it would cost them to influence a seat in the House or Senate, these PACs are pouring funds into local school board races and as a result, changing education on a national scale. Their aim? Gain control of more school systems and push back on what is taught about race, sex, gender, and history. 

Resources: https://redwine.blue/thecost/

https://schoolboardpartners.org

https://www.schoolboardschool.org

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

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Transcript

The Cost of Extremism - Episode 4 (School Boards)

Jill: Extremists across the country are attacking our freedoms and kids and families are paying the price. This is the cost of extremism. 

Episode 4, School Boards. We've all seen the videos, right? You scroll on social media and suddenly there's screaming coming from your phone. 

School board speaker 1: And you have a hard time with me sitting here telling you the words anal sex, masturbation. That's hard for you or the time’s up? Because the time's not really up. I don't believe you, Mr. Wiley, that my time is up. 

School board speaker 2: How are we going to prepare the young people to go to war? But sometimes it's necessary to have a military fight.

Jill: It's not a clip from a movie. It's a school board meeting. Just a few years ago, most people ignored school board meetings. They couldn't even tell you when they occurred or their purpose. But somewhere along the line, school board meetings have not only become ground zero for attacks on education, but have also been used as a platform to spread other far right political agendas. No one knows what it feels like to be at the other end of these attacks, quite like Jennifer Jenkins. 

Jennifer: I won in August of 2020, I was seated in November, and I often tell people that Moms for Liberty began to show up in my boardroom, I would refer to them as Moms Against Jennifer Jenkins.

Jill: Jennifer Jenkins ran against then school board member Tina Descovich for the District 3 seat in Florida, a place that's practically painted red. Despite that, she came out winning by 9 percentage points. Her opponent, Tina Descovich, would go on to help create the conservative so called parents rights group, Moms for Liberty, which was recently deemed an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But beating Descovich was only the beginning of the fight for Jennifer.

Jennifer: Tina had brought together a group of parents who were against masking already. They were already a group that had formulated on their own. And so yes, they would come and talk about anti masking policies. But in addition to that, they would talk about anything I would say, do, how I would act. They love to use “my decorum,” what I would wear, it was, it was like a scene out of high school, you know, just angry that I had defeated the person who had brought them all together. 

But it very quickly escalated. It started as, you know, simple insults in a boardroom, to mailing postcards to my house you know, talking negatively about our school system and about me, recording me, dedicating videos of me on Facebook pages that they had created or, and originally on their original Moms for Liberty Brevard Facebook page. Simple tactics like that but it escalated when they joined hands with a statehouse representative who had a press conference labeling me a child abuser. It led to insanity. It led to harassment and constant intimidation. 

I refer to the next school board meeting as our own mini insurrection. It was a scene that we're now used to seeing, unfortunately, across the nation in school boards, but it wasn't happening anywhere else at the time. There were protesters with signs calling people child abusers, pedophiles, screaming at our LGBTQ children, telling them that they're going to hell. They had a king sized white sheet with blood red lettering with my name on it outside of the school board, banging on the windows to get inside, screaming in officers’ faces. It was complete and utter chaos. 

Jill: The attacks didn't stop there. It was a constant threat in Jennifer's life. 

Jennifer: People following me in my car. People screaming at me as I was coming and going from the school board meetings. We had an increased security presence within our boardroom, but also escorting me to and from my car. About 25 protesters showed up in front of my, in front of my home. They said that the state house representative had sent them to my home. Same thing, same rhetoric. I'm a “pedophile.” I'm a “child abuser.” I went outside to record them because that's what law enforcement had instructed me to do. And unfortunately my daughter followed me. They were screaming at my daughter that “your mommy's going to jail. Your mommy hurts little kids.” Just really disgusting things. 

I had dropped my daughter off at a playdate with a classmate of hers. And on the way home from that, I received a call from the detective at the Department of Children and Family Services was at the police department inquiring about me, that they had received a claim that I was abusing my daughter. They claimed that I dragged her by the arm outside, that I beat her in the front yard, that I burned her with cigarettes. And that I was selling drugs out of my home, that her screams could be heard from outside of the home consistently, multiple days a week.

Luckily, the detective had, you know, informed DCF that there had been harassment and intimidation attempts the days before to my family. But they still had to come here and treat it like a serious claim. I still had to sit at my kitchen table and answer questions about how I discipline my daughter. Where she sleeps, how much food she eats. And then I had to immediately take them to her playdate, to an acquaintance's home, a person I don't know well enough for them to understand what's happening for them to look underneath her clothes and check for burn marks. 

Jill: Back in February of 2023, Ron DeSantis released a target list of the last remaining liberal leaning school board members that he once removed in 2024. It doesn't come as a surprise that Jennifer is on that list. It's also not a surprise that DeSantis made the announcement alongside Tina Descovich and her Moms4Liberty co-founder, Tiffany Justice. But Jennifer wasn't negatively impacted by the announcement. In fact, it made her laugh. 

Jennifer: I take it as a badge of honor, quite frankly. You know, I keep telling people if I ended up on a list where Ron DeSantis was supporting me, I would have to re-evaluate my values. I couldn't be more contrary to his beliefs on public education than anybody else. So I'm proud. I'm proud to have gone through what I've been through to continue to advocate with integrity and conviction for the people who elected me to be here. That it annoys the governor of the state of Florida so much to have a sit down meeting with Moms for Liberty and put my name on a list, I am so proud of myself 

Jill: By now, you might be wondering what school boards are, let alone how they became a hotbed for such hostile attacks. So let's start from the beginning.

Carrie: Many folks don't understand school boards, including school board members, until we actually get on a school board. So I think, you know, it's important to understand, like, nationally, there's about 13,000 school boards running our 100,000 public schools. And together we manage nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer dollars. But locally, we hire, manage, and evaluate the superintendent, who's the CEO of your district. We set the goals and vision of the district, which is really important. We approve the budget. Probably most importantly, we pass and monitor policies that determine almost everything that happens in a district, from attendance zones that determine which students get access to which schools, teacher contracts, curriculum, discipline policies and so much more. And then finally we represent the priorities and vision of our community. You know, who elect us to steward their public resources. 

Jill: Carrie Douglas is a school board member and the founder of School Board Partners, a national nonprofit dedicated to providing one on one mentorship, policy writing, and coaching support to like minded school board members.

Carrie: I mean, really outside of meetings, I have to do my job as a school board member late at night after I've finished my day job, put my kids to bed, clean the kitchen and then I can sit down and work on dismantling systemic racism in my school district. And so it's really helpful to have an organization and community like school board partners to help me and others do that.

Jill: Like Carrie, Elisa Hoffman also has a deep understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the school board. She's the founder and executive director of School Board School, which brings together aspiring school board members and education advocates and provides them with the knowledge and network needed to build a more equitable school system.

Elissa: At the kind of most basic level, since they are elected officials, the school board governs your district and then your administration. So your superintendent, their cabinet, everybody else, policymaking, that's the biggest, right? They're a governing body. So they are responsible for revising current policies and writing new policies. That's one of their biggest functions as a school board. So they're also responsible for overseeing and approving the budget. You might hear they are responsible for being good stewards of taxpayer dollars. That's what that means, right? 

And then I think the other one that many constituents don't know or maybe didn't know before it started making headlines recently is that your school board approves curriculum. And then I think the last thing about, you know, a well functioning school board is that the audience should remember is that the board represents you. They are elected officials, so they're supposed to represent you, their community, and they report to you. So that means that their decisions, you know, when they're making those, they should be hearing from you. And if they're well functioning, they should be listening to you as they make their decisions. 

Jill: Using school boards as sort of a battleground for culture wars is nothing new. Throughout the mid 1900s, heated debates over civil rights and school integration took stage at these meetings, followed by an influx of opinions over sex education, charter schools, and just about any other quote unquote hot topic you can think of.

But school boards really came to the forefront in 2021 when Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin used critical race theory to beat opponent Terry McAuliffe in the state's gubernatorial election. Despite rarely being used in K-12 education, CRT became a focal point for conservatives trying to use Parents Rights messaging to swing votes in their favor. Politicians such as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis sunk their claws into the approach and started using their platforms to accuse teachers of indoctrinating children, using misinformation to scare people into voting in their favor. On top of that, the COVID 19 pandemic wasn't helping the issue. Angry parents and community members would show up to school board meetings and start shouting matches over mask mandates and shutdowns. But meanwhile, our schools were already struggling to find their footing. 

Anusha: It felt like COVID was that sort of gateway, that gateway drug or the gateway to capture an audience that was, that felt powerless because you are powerless, you're powerless in the face of this. pandemic, you're powerless in the face of the fact that you don't know what, you know, so many, there was impact to every sector of life during COVID that includes and included education. And so it was sort of a great way to capture an audience. 

Jill: Anusha Vishwanathan knows from experience what it's like to be at the other side of the school board attacks. She's a parent in the Central Bucks School District and found a love for books in the fourth grade when they opened up a whole new world for her as a first generation immigrant. She's since gone on to become a pediatric infectious disease specialist. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, Anusha was brought in to discuss mitigation strategies in front of the school board. She had a toolkit prepared of facts and figures, well prepared to present the most up to date information about cases in Bucks County. But before long, the crowd turned on her. 

Anusha: I started speaking and other community members and students, actually, a high school student started speaking and immediately the crowd around us, which was what I later found out, this group called Reopen Box, members of this organization, that they started screaming really horrible things about me, even though they've never actually met me. They called me a murderer, a child abuser, and then... multiple times that I was an illegal, illegal alien. And this was in public with so many cameras. Both news cameras and people's personal cameras. And they were capturing all of this. On their own cameras to broadcast to their group, I guess. 

And the attacks were so virulent and personal and they had this like racist tinge to them. I was so flustered. I was really nervous and anxious and it was just such a pressure cooker atmosphere. I tried my best. At one point this was captured on video. Someone... is like coming, like lunging at me. I don't know what the intent of that person was. And, and someone steps in front of me sort of to block them. And I, I, I was just, I remember feeling like I was shaking. And I have met so many people who have had similar experiences or people, you know, who attended that, that press conference initially. And it's sort of galvanized people to action.

Jill: While that was Anusha's first interaction on the school board battleground, it wasn't her last. No one would have blamed her for running in the opposite direction, but Anusha kept fighting. What motivates her? Well, it's the students themselves. 

Anusha: I've seen personally, you know, students cry after being accosted. By the audience in school board meetings at a certain point, students had to have a separate section so that they were not in the milieu of all the other people. Certainly, you know, the impact on the actual students in our community is so deep. They speak about it eloquently, beautifully in so many ways. Board meetings. I mean, these board meetings occur weeknights, school nights, at seven o'clock. Who, what child wants to come, right? But they do because they're, they have a stake. They have the probably most important stake in this. One student said, “How can you ban books with the words that are being hurled at me every day in the school?”

Jill: But it's not just screaming matches and harsh words being thrown around. Research done by ProPublica has identified 59 cases of people being arrested or charged during school board meetings, all within an 18 month period of May 2021 to November 2022. Most of these incidents involve trespassing, resisting an officer, or disrupting a public meeting, and nearly all of them occurred in suburban districts with white participants. It's a growing pattern, with most of them occurring on camera. 

School board attendee: You should be appalled! And half of you don't deserve your job, I'm sorry. And I'm going to say this and end because I'm about to have a heart attack. We're coming for you. Take it as a threat, call the FBI, I don't care. You're all either going to be... recalled, or you're all, we're all coming for you. Guys, this is a, this is an unlawful arrest. I have a First Amendment right. Listen, listen, listen, you do, right? You're someone speaking rationally. That is an unlawful order! You need to be arrested! 

Carrie: Many Republican elected officials have sought to harness this anger over education policy to win elections and take over education at a local level. So Steve Bannon supposedly said, “I'd rather have 10, 000 school board members than one president.” And I think that really sums up what he realized before many others, and now other folks are realizing that school boards are really ripe for politicization. 

And to be clear, this is not new, right? Ruby Bridges’ school board was politicized. For years after Brown versus Board of Ed, school boards codified racist practices into policy until they created what we now really take for granted as a public school system, but it didn't have to be designed this way. So this is a new battle with new language, but it's really the same culture war. 

Jill: Only a few years ago, a campaign for the school board could run on only a few hundred dollars and some volunteers, but recently that's been changing. PACs have been pouring money into these elections at a massive level. For much less than it would cost to win a seat in the House or Senate, you could win a handful of school board seats and change education on a national scale. 

Carrie: So in my first election in 2017, it was really a typical election. I'm a Democrat, but I was supported by a lot of Republicans and my opponent and I sparred over kind of typical issues like teachers unions, but my 2021 campaign, the entire game had changed. My opponent was getting huge donations from national packs, which was crazy. We're like a small town school district. My opponent was on the Laura Ingram show. She was on Fox and friends. She had campaign ads produced for her by national groups. And here I am, I've been working in national education issues for 20 years and there was no national money behind my campaign. You know, I was still calling grandma for a check and knocking on doors. 

And so I think we need to be real about the fact that there is real money going into these races. A lot of it is hidden but it's coming from both individual people you know, donating $5 to national PACs, and then huge money from, you know, big names. And we need the same on our side. And ultimately school boards went from, you know, a super low profile, a super low profile races that, you know, back when there were newspapers, didn't get much room in newspapers. And now that media has been equalized and, you know, school board members can be almost as much as, you know, a Congressman. And then the politicization and polarization and, you know, it's affected every level of politics. And I think school boards just aren't immune and have become really one of the ground zero.

Jennifer: They were extremely well organized and well funded campaigns. And you saw that like in districts that kind of historically, maybe you had to raise $1,000 to get some yard signs, suddenly there were tens of thousands of dollars being poured into these campaigns. And there was just no way the average person could compete with that.

Jill: And who's funding and endorsing these candidates? Well, we've heard the name of one of the most prominent groups already, Moms for Liberty. 

Jennifer: I tell people, two women who lost their school board seats, one resigned before she was going to lose it. These are not the masterminds of a national organization. I mean, they both came from counties in which they had a significant Republican majority. I mean, they should have won, quite frankly, by a landslide. I believe that they are a quintessential pyramid scheme. I joke that instead of selling yoga pants, they're selling comfort in your curriculum and, and your libraries. 

Jill: Since 2021, Moms for Liberty has become one of the loudest voices in the discussion around parents rights in public education. Their goal is primarily focused on controlling school boards and endorsing legislation that limits what can be discussed in classrooms, such as Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill. They're known for disrupting school board meetings to fight against everything from books to empathy, with a particular focus on anything involving LGBTQ plus students and CRT.

School board attendee: And I'm here representing Moms for Liberty. Today it's about masks. Tomorrow it's isolating and segregating the unvaccinated. Then it's CRT being disguised as equity training to skirt new state legislation. Parents beware of terms like social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion. Those inherently good things are being used to disguise a biased political agenda. And sadly, even in some Christian schools. 

Jill: If you need an endorsement for Moms for Liberty, Donald Trump once referred to them as the best thing that's ever happened to America. And let's not forget that time they quoted Hitler in one of their pamphlets. As of July 2023, Moms for Liberty claims to have 285 chapters in 45 states. And if you remember, one of the two co-founders, Tina Descovich, lost her seat to Jennifer Jenkins and sent a barrage of attacks in her direction. Since then, they've gone on to endorse over 500 school board candidates. But this isn't a grassroots organization like they claim to be.

Jennifer: I think that they were always planned to happen by the Florida Republican Party. I believe that Tina and Tiffany just became available to be the faces of this organization for them. But I think this was intentional. It was to engage with middle-aged white Republican women, the voting base that didn't necessarily always turn out for them. It was to stoke this fear because it's a tactic that we see often in politics to get people engaged, to get them to vote, to get them to not listen to the opposing side. 

And I think long term strategy, it was so Ron DeSantis could accomplish the public education agenda that he has unfortunately been successful in accomplishing and now taking to the presidential run that he's doing. I mean, he's not shy about it. Even right now, as he's campaigning, you know, his favorite thing to say is we're going to make America Florida. And he is, he is boasting about his, his, what he likes to call advancements in public education reforms. 

Jill: Aside from the funding being supplied by right wing groups such as Leadership Institute, Heritage Foundation, and various conservative celebrities, Moms for Liberty is getting their largest boost from right wing media and conservative politicians. Ron DeSantis has openly supported Moms for Liberty, including endorsing their school board candidates and speaking at their conferences. These free recruitment services have catapulted Moms for Liberty to prominence, giving them the platform they so desperately want. They're using this public attention to harness and intimidate librarians, teachers, parents, and students into silence. They've accused parents of child abuse and grooming, threatened people with gun violence, called for LGBTQ plus kids to be put in separate classrooms. But these aren't just lone wolves stirring up trouble for the fun of it. This is a coordinated effort coming from a playbook. 

Anusha: You have to engage in your community, even if it's difficult. You have to be aware that this is not, I think the first thing is to be aware that this is not a grassroots movement, even though it pretends to be. It's all top down. There's a playbook that is filtered top down. And each town will have it, a different flavor of it, but it's all the same, like, ice cream.

Jill: But Moms for Liberty isn't alone in this. There are countless organizations working towards the same goal, such as Parents Defending Education and the 1776 Project. Another one of these prominent organizations is Take Back Our Schools, which Monica Walker knows well. 

Monica: Take Back Our Schools was a, really a right wing organization. I want you to think about that. Take Back Our Schools from whom? Why? And for what? Because the struggle in our district, and I would say in most districts across the United States, are, should be, and on our end was trying to do everything we could to position the platform for education, the work inside of education, to give consideration to the circumstances of all students, and particularly students who had the least effective outcomes. It has always been a challenge to figure out what is it that we're not doing and what is it that we need to do in order that when we look at the outcomes of all students, that we're not seeing just white students on top and Black students on the bottom and other students distributed in between. That's not a challenge for just our city, our county, our state. It's a challenge across the nation. 

And so, from that vantage point, that was the work that I think well meaning board members were attempting to do, as well as well meaning administrators. So, when you get an organization and say, well, we're taking back our schools, one should ask the question, taking back from who and why? Because you shouldn't have to take back schools, you should be heavily invested in the, the building up the, the, the, the securing the advancement of schools. 

And so, but if you did any of your investigations, you would find that there has been a national agenda by conservative white and largely white extremists. Who have said that, you know, we're going to go after school boards because we recognize that schools are the heart of the country, that everybody's concerned about their children and the welfare of their children. So there has been an agenda that says that the best place to work, you know, on that type of conservative platform is that if you strike at the level of people's commitment and interest in their children. Hello, that's the place where you can gain the most ground.

Jill: Monica Walker spent years serving as the Executive Director of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with North Carolina's Guilford County School District. In her position, she addressed the structural and institutional racism in the school system. 

Monica: One of the things that perhaps is the most enduring that was established there is that we began to do a two day training with school teachers, with school administrators, support officers, with the chief officers of the school district. And that two day training was helping them to understand from our history of really presenting and interrogating history, race and culture, how we can, well, how we've come to be in the circumstances that we're in, not just as a school district, because that training would be relevant to any system, you know, from, you know, banking and lending, housing and real estate or whatever.

But it's through the lens of understanding the challenges that have been created by the structure and the arrangement of where people are positioned. Where white families are positioned and white students. Where Black families are positioned and Black students. Because we are often approaching the disparities and the inequities of education as if people are to blame for their circumstances and we're trying to fix them in our approach to really beginning to address that no, there is a much larger perspective that must be taken into account. Otherwise, we're fixing, what we call fixing the issues of fish as opposed to fixing our broken systems.

Jill:  Now what's important to remember is that positions like these only exist thanks to school boards. They have the power to create programs that work towards diversity and inclusion, but they also have the power to demolish them. Across the country, diversity programs are being cut under the guise of indoctrinating children, and it doesn't stop there. School boards are dictating what can be taught and even seen in the classroom. Black and LGBTQ+ history is being erased. Books that our kids love are being taken off the shelves. And at the center of it all are school boards. 

Monica: We are at a crisis point in this nation, and I don't think I could find anybody who wouldn't agree. We might disagree on the nature of the crisis, but I still think that most of us understand that there is a crisis. 

Jill: It's a cultural movement, whether we want to admit it or not. And the impact? Well, the outcome could be detrimental. 

Jennifer: This far right takeover of our elected school boards and therefore public schools is one of the single biggest threats to our democracy. And so we have seen how so many of the communities where these takeovers have happened they don't actually represent the majority of voters.

The ramifications of what we've seen and what I've been living on this board is that it completely stunts progress. And I mean, that's their intention. I go so far and so bold to say the ultimate goal of the Florida Republican Party and maybe nationally as well. But I definitely can speak to Florida and Ron DeSantis is to privatize public education in a way that segregation just becomes accepted and legal because that's, that's really what's happening here with the expansion of voucher programs with the rewriting of history and whitewashing of history and banning AP and African American history classes in the state of Florida. That is the danger. That is the significant consequence of what we've been dealing with as school board members, where we can't talk about the 34-point reading gap across the state of Florida between African-American students and their white peers. We can't talk about the fact that that has widened to 40 points in the area of math. 

If you look at what our, I'm speaking to the state of Florida, all the laws that they have passed for public education, not one of them focuses on something positive or progress. It focuses on creating a solution to a problem we don't have. And that trickles down to the school board level because it ties our hands to where that's all we're focusing on as well. That's all our community is focusing on. And when people are coming, making public comments, that's all they're talking about. We need to educate the public about what has been happening in the state of Florida and that it could happen to them too, because there are significant consequences. This impacts the future of our children and quite frankly, the future of our democracy. 

Carrie: I think school boards are being used to dismantle public education in a number of ways. I think ultimately, the promise of our country's public education system was to provide a high quality, free, and fair public system of schools. We've certainly never lived up to that promise. But every decision made that perpetuates systemic racism or any other type of ism really dismantles public education as it was designed. 

You know, I just want the message to be that everyone benefits from a high quality, free and fair education and that our country is great because it's a democracy. It's great because of free speech and diversity of views and because it's theoretically this land of opportunity. And so every step taken to erode democracy, to hide the truth, to limit what our students read and learn. That weakens our country and it weakens our public school system. And that is to the detriment of all of us.

Jill: But the real question here is, is it working? Do these wild stunts and viral videos of parents screaming actually win them the votes? 

Carrie: I think they're winning a lot and losing a lot. 

Jill: Let's use Moms for Liberty as an example. Last year, their chapter endorsed 500 school board candidates, and out of those 500, the group claims that 275 of those won their elections. Sure, they may have technically won the majority, but that was with the support of high profile politicians such as Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. So like Carrie said, they're winning a lot and losing a lot. But there are ways that we can change that. 

Carrie: The focus needs to be on the opportunity because they're so extreme that if the left or middle is able to put up high quality, normal candidates, I think they have a really good chance. And part of what's difficult is just that it's so hard to get folks to run and you know, want to be on school boards right now. And then it's hard to get good folks who are on school boards to run for reelection. A big survey last year found that only 38% of incumbents were planning to run for reelection. So that is either a huge opportunity or a huge crisis, depending on whether or not we think we're ready to fill those seats with high quality civil rights focused candidates. 

Jill: The low number of incumbents running for reelection is largely due to the lack of support surrounding them. They raise their kids, have a 9 to 5 job, then spend their nights at school board meetings that are riddled with attacks and arguments.

So what can we do? How can we support these school board members fighting for public education and the students being most impacted by these hateful attacks? 

Carrie: Support organizations like ours and School Board School and others that are supporting school board members once they're elected, because that's when everyone else peace out and it's like, “cool, we got you elected, like good luck.” And yeah, that's when the really hard work is just beginning. And so, you know, bring your school board members dinner, offer to watch their kids, offer to pay for therapy. Like just wrap around them. We need good school board members to stay and be effective. 

Jill: These may seem like small actions, but they really do make a difference in the lives of the school board members. When Jennifer Jenkins was being harassed left and right, this kind of support is what got her through it. 

Jennifer: About 10 people showed up in front of my home with signs again calling. calling me a pedophile and a child abuser anti LGBTQ rhetoric. And I live in a tiny little beach town in Florida and, you know, my community wasn't having it. And so, you know, a counter voice had showed up on my lawn to stand there in solidarity. It was interesting because the next day the community came together. 

I had organized a “chalk the walk” on my driveway and on the sidewalk alongside of my house. I was trying to do something to deter people from, you know, counter protesting and, and, and causing a chaos for the community here, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful to see all different walks of life show up and write messages of love and solidarity for our kids. I cried every single day. Multiple times a day. If I gave myself time to think about it, what I was feeling in that moment right now, I probably would start crying. 

I would, I would label it trauma. It was, it was traumatizing. The only thing I could do to survive though, was to keep pushing forward. I couldn't, I didn't have time to, to wallow. I didn't have time to think about backing down. I just was trying to survive and, and as much hate and disgusting attention I was getting from one side, I was getting so much more respect, appreciation and support on the other. This community was so good to me, so good to me. And when someone would come up to me and say, “thank you for being a voice for my child,” I can't back down from that. I can’t tell this story to my daughter 10 years from now and tell her that I gave up. And so I'm so proud to have a little girl in my life to focus on, to drive, to be an example for and she's really what motivates me to continue to do what I'm doing.

Jill: That's just the first step. There's still so much more you can do to help create a safer environment and a more effective school board. 

Carrie: First and foremost, we are going to be releasing a policy toolkit in a couple of months for equity focused school board members, and we hope that you will share it widely, email it to your school board, ask them to implement it. Second, recruit and support diverse representative school board candidates to run. 

Jennifer: I think the biggest thing that people can do is if there's a school board election happening in your community, use your megaphone. Spread the word, right? Use your social media. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Let them know there is a school board election. Here's why it's important that you vote for this, whether or not you have kids in our district. And here's a link to where you can find out about the candidates. So that you know who to go vote for and then in that week leading up to the election, you are following up with all your friends. You are annoying on social media you've posted so many times. You are texting your friends. You are taking two or three people to the polls with you. You're making sure that they're voting for school board. 

The other thing is going to speak at school board meetings or submitting testimony at the state level. Your elected officials have to hear from you. They are supposed to represent you. It may feel futile, like they're not listening, but like you, you are on public record. And if you go, and if you can take a couple friends to go, your voice gets louder the more people who are with you. And so if you can go speak and you can bring a couple other people to speak and just keep coming back, that's how we get our voices heard.

Jill: These actions might seem intimidating at first, but they're necessary if we want to protect public education and make our schools safe and accepting for students. Organizations like Red Wine and Blue make it easier for you to find the tools and resources needed to take these first steps. So go to redwine.blue.