Over the past three years, local school board elections have become the place where America’s deep political divisions are on full display. In Tuesday's races in Virginia, far-right candidates are looking to take over a number of school boards or expand their slim majorities from past elections. The left is fighting fiercely to make up lost ground.
Dale Swanson, chair of the Spotsylvania County GOP, displays an official GOP sample ballot she was handing out at an early voting location in Fredericksburg, Va., on Oct. 17, 2023, while lamenting a campaign that is seeing “dirty tricks being played all over the place.” She and Democrats alike were upset that a candidate for Spotsylvania County clerk of court was distributing sample ballots that resembled those of the parties, until a judge barred him from doing so.
In communities where political differences used to be sorted out with civilized compromise, public meetings devolve into screaming matches. Legal complaints fly. Deputies kick people out. School board members refuse to cede any ground. Neither side can bear giving up what each thinks is best for kids.is possible and whether a plaintive cry to restore civility, heard from many across the political spectrum, can be met.
In September 2022, one meeting got so bad the county sheriff pulled his deputies from future ones, exasperated, he said, by demands from the chair that his officers eject citizens merely for expressing opinions contrary to the body’s conservative leadership. Since then, the school board has hired its own private security to stand guard at meetings.
Democrats and Republicans implored him to stop, but he defiantly pressed on until, days later, a judge barred him from distributing the sheets. In Goochland County, civility and the board majority hang in the balance as the board’s vice chair sues her four colleagues for defamation. Kirk Twigg, his colleague who is running for reelection Tuesday and served last year as board chairman, said he wanted to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”The same month, an election flipped the school board, giving Twigg, Abuismail and two more hard-right colleagues a majority on the seven-person board. Twigg became chairman.
Eichenberg, who said he used to email school board members with questions regularly and receive quick replies, sent The Associated Press copies of emails he has written to the new majority. He has fired off more than 20 and received no answers to his questions. “It just seemed like I turned around and one minute, we’re being lauded for the extra work we were doing, and the next, we were being vilified,” said Drane, who added she easily knows 10 other staff members who have left in part because of the school board’s new direction. “I do think the soul of this county is on the line.”
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