Virginia school boards have garnered significant attention over the past two years due to a parent’s arrest during a Loudoun County Public Schools board meeting and allegations of a cover-up regarding sexual assaults in school bathrooms.
These incidents have underscored just how powerful school boards are.
Conservative leaders have recognized the importance of not only electing pro-America candidates to school boards but also providing support and training to these newly elected members, in an effort to restore academic rigor and advance parental rights.
There are nearly 400 school board positions on the ballot in Virginia in the November elections.
School Boards Have Power
Melvin Adams, founder of the Noah Webster Educational Foundation, spoke during a June 1 webinar hosted by the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance.In his comments, Adams stressed the need for strategic changes within the current public school system, beginning with school board elections. He said the school board holds the most considerable authority over public education, making it a critical point for initiating reforms.
“They are also the ones that the law, the state, gives authority for local leadership and policy and the hiring and firing, the choice of curriculum, and on and on and on,” he said.
That is why it is crucial to get solid conservatives elected to school board, he added.
“When I say ‘conservatives,’ I’m talking about principle-based people that aren’t just for sale to some woke agenda or to somebody’s union,” said Adams.
Sherri Story, chair of the School Board Member Alliance, also spoke during the webinar. Story was a longtime teacher before becoming a school board member and later founding the School Board Member Alliance.
She said newly elected school board members do not realize that state laws actually give much more power to school board members than even the school superintendents.
“It gives all the power to school board members. It does not empower superintendents to run the entire district however they want,” said Story.
In addition, most large school districts have hefty budgets of billions of dollars annually, and school boards can decide where these funds are used, she said. Loudoun County’s 2022–2023 budget was over $2 billion, and Fairfax County’s fiscal year 2022 budget was over $3 billion.
On top of that, these boards can decide policies that determine the public’s access to school documents, including how Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are handled within the school district.
“FOIA has started to be weaponized as parents have become informed,” said Story, adding that the only reason this is obvious is that the Virginia Legislature passed a law that FOIA fees have to be published clearly on the organization’s website.
“What city councils and what school boards, districts have done is they’ve weaponized it by charging outlandish fees,” said Story. “We’re informing our members: listen, school boards should be involved in setting those fees because that literally translates to how transparent do you want to be to your community?”
School boards have an enormous amount of power. They play a crucial role in setting policies, like Loudoun County’s 2021 transgender bathroom policy that allowed biological boys to use the girls’ bathroom if they “identified” as a girl. Currently, that district is running a pilot program by installing some “unisex” and completely private stalls for both girls and boys to use. In the fall of 2023, the program will be piloted for 60 days and considered by the school board.
Need a Conservative Voice
According to Adams, public education is controlled by the political left, and he likens it to a three-pronged stool: the first leg is the teachers and their union, the second leg is superintendents and their associations, and the third leg is school boards and their professional organizations.“This three-legged stool, let’s just be honest, the left owns it,” said Adams.
Story said she helped found the School Board Member Alliance to support school board members who did not share the values of the district’s default professional organization, the Virginia School Boards Association (VSBA).
VSBA has been the largest and most influential organization representing Virginia school board members for the last 118 years. And although VSBA says it is nonpartisan, it supports left-leaning school board policies, which Story said does not represent the values of many board members and teachers, including herself.
“I felt that they did not represent me,” said Story. “Our goal isn’t to oust the VSBA but there has to be another voice that represents school board members,” said Story. “There has to be a voice in Richmond for conservative school board members that want things to change in education.”
Upcoming School Board Elections
This year there are 382 county school board seats that could potentially be flipped after the November elections. Virginia’s school board primaries are June 20 and elections are Nov. 7.Virginia has 132 county and independent city school districts, and each has a school board. County school board elections happen on odd number years and city school board elections happen on even number years.
All nine of the Loudoun County School Board positions are up for grabs this year, with many conservative candidates hoping to take the spots of progressive school board members.
Prior to the pandemic, many conservatives did not believe they could change the public education system, but since the COVID-19 lockdowns, parents have begun to push back against the left’s education agenda and there is momentum for positive change, said Adams.
“The parents started to see things that some of us have been talking about forever. And now all of a sudden, the winds have shifted, and so this is a tremendous opportunity for us,” said Adams.
Training Newly Elected Board Members
Many Virginians were angered by what they were seeing in Loudoun County and in their own children’s schools, so they ran for school board. But after being elected, they found they lacked the know-how to make a meaningful impact, said Adams.Newly elected school board members need resources and training.
“Anger can be a great motivator, but anger does not necessarily help you do a good job,“ he said. ”You have got to know what the job is all about and what your responsibilities are.”
Adams’ organization developed training for these school board members.
Hundreds of school board members across the United States have taken the Noah Webster training and no longer have to struggle alone, said Adams.
The Noah Webster Educational Foundation has been so successful at training new school board members that left-leaning education advocates recently started their own organization to help elect and train school board members. Their organization is called We the People for Education, said Adams.
“That means we’re over the target,” he said.
The advisory board for We the People for Education includes former Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni, Virginia Education Association President James Fedderman, and Anne Holton, wife of Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine and current member of the Virginia Board of Education.
Holton recently claimed that America’s founding documents enshrined slavery.
In an announcement about the creation of We the People for Education, Sarah Gross, president of the organization, said the goal is to put the focus of education back on students.
“Over the last couple of years we have witnessed extremism and hateful rhetoric take over our school board meetings, sow disinformation in our communities, and work to divide us,” Gross said.
The Epoch Times reached out to We the People for Education for comment.
Parents Targeted
Gross’ comments follow a similar narrative about conservative parents promoted by the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The organization sent a letter (pdf) to President Joe Biden at the end of 2021 asking that he direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate parents for alleged threats to school board members.The NSBA has 90,000 members from across the almost 14,000 school districts in the United States.
Besides parents being maligned, Story said that in many instances, the few conservative school board members are also bullied and told to align with the majority members’ vote.
“This is our challenge. This is our battle and we’re going to undertake it and we’re here for the long term,” said Story. “We want to support parent input, school choice, conservative values that are going to make our education system better and actually get back to teaching kids.”
