Over the past three years, local school board elections have become the place where America’s deep political divisions are on full display.
Lowest price on the web! This all-in-one PDF app is $70 for lifeDale 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.
Two meetings, a month apart, illustrate the gulf between the raw politics of the day and the sober civility that some dare hope will return. “The local political scene is just bananas,” said Belén Rodas, a candidate for school board who received money from a Democratic political action committee but won't take any party endorsement. “Everything about Spotsylvania right now is completely extreme and chaotic and irrational.
“There’s dirty tricks being played all over the place," Swanson said. “This country is so divided now, and they’re pitting people against people and parties against parties. And it’s intentional. It’s really intentional. None of us accomplishes anything that we want to do, neither party.”and others on the left, it seems the old axiom that all politics is local no longer applies. Local politics now is everyone’s fray.
The polarization on school boards distresses Frank Morgan, a retired career-long educator in Virginia and South Carolina who said schools can only work with collaboration in the community.School board members “are just going to focus on these hot button political partisan issues and not look at really the successful operation of schools,” he said. “I want voters to look at the whole picture and not just narrow little slivers that fire people up.
The county's superintendent of nine years agreed to resign at the end of the school year to give the board time to find new leadership. Instead, the new majority fired him “without cause” during an incendiary meeting as one of its first acts., only to select Mark Taylor, a former Spotsylvania County administrator and attorney who had no experience in public education.
In February, just after his term as chair, Twigg was charged with criminal forgery of a public document and a misdemeanor count of tampering with a public record in an effort last year to unilaterally raise the pay of an interim superintendent above levels approved by the board. Twigg pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a jury trial expected in January.
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