Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member, has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on. Her defiance has brought her backlash.
Courtney Gore has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on when she won election to the Granbury ISD school board.Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletterWeeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed.
Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.” “It’s a rare event to see this kind of political leap, especially in a world that’s so polarized,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. “You rarely see these kinds of changes because the people who are vetted to run tend to be true believers. They tend not to be people who are necessarily thinking about the holistic problem.”
But Gore said she feels that she was unwittingly part of a statewide effort to weaken local support of public schools and lay the groundwork for a voucher system. In May 2021, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told followers on his podcast that school boards were the road back to power for conservatives following the 2020 presidential election. Two months later, North Texas-based influential pastor Rafael Cruz, the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, amplified that message on social media, saying that getting candidates on school boards was critical.
Gore, now 43, first became involved in local politics in 2016 when she campaigned door-to-door for Lang, a former constable who successfully ran for the Texas Legislature. She then served on a leadership committee for the Hood County GOP. The book debate, along with a series of other fissures, contributed to Gore’s growing belief that her former colleagues were more interested in misleading residents than in improving educational outcomes.
According to Gore, Criswell also pressured her to stop speaking with all of her fellow school board members, except for Graft. “They’re just lying to you. They’re not your friends,” she recalled him saying. In June 2022, Lang and Criswell directed one of their snowballs in Gore’s direction, taking a veiled shot at the former co-host of their show. In a video, Criswell praised Graft for continuing the fight to remove books from the school district’s libraries, saying she was “the only one that acts as the buffer right now on that board. Which is sad, because, you know, we’ve had other people elected in recent elections that just haven’t lived up to the expectations.
“We have profile sheets” on all the trustees except for Graft, Cliff Criswell shouted. “We know what you do. We know where you live.” “That was the moment I saw how crazy it was, how unhinged it had become and how far some people were willing to go to prove their points,” Gore said. Her victory helped resurface the district’s book battles as she pressed to remove more titles. Then, in August 2023, Lowery snuck into a high school library during a charity event and began inspecting books using the light of her cellphone,
Texas Politics Texas Policy Texas Government Politics Public Education State Government Texas Legislature Greg Abbott Fort Worth Granbury Hood County Matt Krause
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