November 9, 2022 • 18 mins
This week on Bedrock, USA, hosts Kathleen Quillian and Samantha Storey speak to Doug Kronaizl, a senior staff writer for Ballotpedia, a nonprofit that tracks elections and ballot measures. Kronaizl studies conflicts on school board elections. For this episode, he breaks down what the education landscape looks like in the wake of pandemic mandates. He describes how conservatives are making inroads on education boards, pushing “parental rights” and issues on race and gender.
For more information visit bloomberg.com/bedrock-usa. Have a suggestion or comment? We’d love to hear from you: kquillian@bloomberg.net or sstorey17@bloomberg.net.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome back to bed Rock, USA. I'm Kathleen Cillian and
I'm Samantha Story. Here on our podcast, we delve into
how political extremism is making inroads into local government. This week,
we're going to talk about school boards. I remember during
the pandemic there was some really shouty clips of parents
flying around online. They were upset about mask mandates and
(00:30):
school closures. Yeah, but now we're seeing a pivot. Parents
are organizing, especially on the right. They're running for school
boards all over the country. They want to make big changes,
their anti CRT, their pro book banning, and they're very
concerned about who gets to use which bathroom. We're really
generalizing here, but under all that anger is a parent
who cares deeply about the welfare of their kid. We
(00:52):
wanted to know more, who are these parents and why
are they so motivated to make change? So we spend
time with one of the most influent school board members
in the country. It was very clearly, very pro Black
Lives Matter movement. So the next meeting, I remember going
into my school board meeting thinking I was going to
have an hour or five hours worth of people calling
(01:14):
me racist because I just did not believe that was
appropriate material for elementary students, particularly without parents being around
or being prepared to have that conversation with our children.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we took a
trip to Florida to meet the Queen of school Boards,
we had to understand them better, so we called up
the man who could break down all the latest school
(01:34):
board trends. Hi, thanks for hopping on with us. Tell
us about what you do. Yeah, my name is Douchronisle.
I'm a staff writer with ballot Pedia. My role at
the website is covering a lot to do with conflicts
in school board elections. Is one of the big projects
I've been working on for a little bit over a
year at this point. Um So trying to find these
(01:55):
races where hot button issues are coming up and seeing
sort of who's running in the races and where they're
spread out geographically, and then sometimes looking a little bit
into the results from those races to see how things
play out. Additionally covering a number of other elections across
the board. So we're kind of a jack of all
trade sort of sort of organization. Okay, perfect. Before working
(02:18):
on this podcast, I never really thought about school boards.
I picture their meetings is pretty boring, but now they're
taking over headlines. Why yeah, I mean, school boards have
always kind of flown under the radar in terms of
election coverage, but starting in we started to notice a
large increase in recall efforts where voters in a school
(02:41):
district gathered petitions to try to remove a member from office,
or or for step member to stand for election earlier
and potentially vote them out of office. You started to
see a lot more stories about school board elections making
their way up into kind of the more common right
lear dialogue in terms of what people are talking about,
(03:02):
what campaigns are talking about, and candidates are talking about.
But as far as like what school boards do, that's
something that's kind of a mixed bag. What these boards
do varies across the country. But I think it's safe
to say that before last year, people really weren't paying
a lot of attention to what was going on in
these elections, And now all of a sudden, people are
paying very close attention to what's going on. What are
(03:24):
they paying attention to? So there really have been these
three large conflict issues that that we started noticing, So
things like critical race theory, the role of race in education, curricula,
district equity plans, things like that. The really kind of
elephant in the room, big one was the coronavirus pandemic,
a large impetus for a lot of the early recall
(03:47):
efforts we saw, and then came up in a lot
of school board elections, so things like mask requirements, reopening
plans when those were still being discussed, vaccine requirements. And
then a third issue has been sex and gender in schools,
so things like sexual education, curricula, content standards, and also
the usage of gender specific facilities like locker rooms and restrooms.
(04:11):
So those are kind of the three big ones that
we saw in one and have been tracking ever since
all across the country. Has anything changed today, Like the
biggest change I think has to do with the sex
and gender in schools. Yeah, and I'm also seeing parental
rights all over the place. Yeah, parental rights is something
(04:32):
that also we've started to see come up more frequently
in two. And I'll say that from our side of
things in trying to kind of because we've got a
pretty strict methodology and sort of what constitutes a stance
being taken or what constitutes an issue coming up, So
we don't cover a race if the only thing being
talked about is parental rights. Beas parental rights has kind
(04:55):
of been a catch all. Beas parental rights could refer
to parents rights to decide whether or not to master
their children, it could refer to whether or not their
children should be reading certain books regarding sexual education. So
it's kind of obfuscated the issues a little bit while
also kind of standing in for all of them. They
(05:18):
were saying, I support masks or I oppose masks, I
support equity in racial education, I oppose critical race theory.
So everyone was saying it, and it was making things
really easy for us in identifying stances. But since then,
we've definitely seen parental rights kind of come in as
(05:38):
a stand in that really anybody can use, Like you
could be on one side or the other of any
of these issues and say I support parental rights, and
so you're saying the thing without actually saying the thing,
so to speak. Um, So that's definitely something that that
we've seen. Okay, so let's step back a second. Maybe
you could give us a quick overview of the school
(05:59):
board ndscape. Over the summer, ballot Pedia released an analysis
report of the makeup of school board elections nationwide. For starters,
we wanted to know how many school boards are there,
how many school board members are there, and those are
two numbers that we found out, but it definitely takes
a lot of work to do it. We found two
three school board members across thirteen school districts and that work.
(06:26):
You know, There's there's some starting points that we were
able to utilize, but with school district consolidations, new names
that school districts have, we basically had to go to everything.
We looked at every single one, trying to go to
all their u r l s, all their websites to
find the names of all the members who were there
as of the start of the school year. And I'd
(06:49):
say the biggest takeaway from the report was the gender
makeup of school boards, specifically how many women serve on
school boards across the country. Women may couple over of
the U S population, but generally hold a smaller percentage
of positions in government. You got percent of seats in Congress,
eighteen percent of governorships, thirty percent of state legislative seats.
(07:12):
But from our report, we found that women hold forty
three percent of school board seats nationwide, and they actually
control over fifty percent of all school board seats in
twelve states. Democrats control five of these states currently Republicans
control three, and then the other four have split governments.
But at the very top of the list, you've got
(07:32):
Florida with of its school board members are female. Wow,
that's so interesting. What are some other trends you've noticed.
One of the most noticeable things that we've seen is
that with these races kind of flying under the radar,
incumbents when they run for re election have tended to
do pretty well. From two the average was incumbents losing
(07:56):
around seventeen or eighteen percent of the races they ran in,
which gives them a win rate in the eighties, which
is pretty high. But in these conflict races and these
races where these hot button issues pop up, we've seen
that just under one third of incumbents who run for
re election end up losing to newcomers losing to challengers,
(08:17):
which puts the wind rate down into the sixties, which
is a pretty sizeable difference. WHOA, that's a huge difference.
How many of these races have you looked into. We've
covered two elections so far with these conflict races. We
covered the November races and then April five races in Wisconsin, Missouri,
and Oklahoma that was kind of the first big school
(08:39):
board election day of And in these races, we found
that either between thirty of the seats were won by
candidates who opposed things like masks requirements and critical race
theory and certain certain aspects of sexual education curricula. Now,
I will say of these aren't necessarily win rates since
(09:03):
we don't know the stances of every candidate who is
running in these races. We just know the stances of
who won these races. But what this does tell us
is gives us a snapshot of what the makeup of
these school boards will look like after the election. And
I think that's something that people find very important to
know is sort of, now that the dust is settled
(09:23):
and the balances involving cast, what's going to change? You know?
How how are things going to look moving forward as
these individuals, you know, assume office and start crafting policy
in school districts across the country. More on that change
after the break. So school boards are generally nonpartisan, but
(09:45):
that appears to be changing. Have you noticed this as well. Yeah,
I mean, one of the things that we've seen in
these races in general is just a ton more attention
in terms of who's making endorsements and who's endorsed and candidates.
But probably the most unique thing that that has come
across our place was when Governor run To Santis issued
(10:08):
a slate of endorsements in Florida. To the best of
our knowledge, we had never seen a governor or a
state executive official endorsing a slew of candidates, but we
saw it there. And then actually his opponent, Charlie Christ
also endorsed a slate of candidates in Florida as well.
And I shouldn't say that now this is the thing
that everybody's doing, because it really isn't a thing that
(10:29):
everybody's doing. We saw it to Santis and Chris do it,
and that's just about it. There were a few other
endorsements that popped up around the country, but in terms
of kind of putting together a slate, kind of making
it sort of a media blast, something that these endorsers
wanted people to know because usually when someone makes an endorsement,
(10:52):
it's the candidate who gets the endorsement. It's their responsibility
to go yell at from the rooftops that they got
this endorsement. But in these instances, it was the endorsers
themselves to Santists and Chris who are going out of
their way to let people know who they were endorsing
in these school board races and letting them know why
they were endorsing in these school board races, and the
(11:13):
why had a lot to do with these conflict issues
that have been taking on an outsize role in a
number of these elections over the past year. Yeah, we've
noticed a handful of groups who are capitalizing on those
conflict issues as far as kind of having a presence
in a large number of states and a large number
of racist monster liberties the one that we've seen appear
(11:34):
pretty frequently and kind of equipping candidates with things they
might not have known because they've never run for office before.
You know, it's not like an intuitive thing to do,
and messaging materials along those lines. You know, it costs
a lot of money to run a poll, but if
you've got you know, organizations that have message tested or
(11:55):
or done that work for you, and they are able
to share that with you, that can be an invaluable
thing for a school board can bits. Yeah, it seems
like they're more organized than ever. I mean, that's that's
for sure. Like the double edged sort of like the
most interesting and most frustrating part about all the attention
that's been coming to school board elections right now is
that you do see like all of these new sort
(12:16):
of paradigm shifts or all these new like I don't know,
you didn't really hear of people organizing for school board candidates,
like around college campuses or anything like that. That wasn't
a thing that that happened. People who ran for school
board were you know, they got some kids in the district,
maybe they got you know, the Monday nights are free,
(12:36):
like they can go around and knock on some doors,
like talk to their neighbors. So it's like it's equally
fascinating but then frustrating because it's like happening at such
a breakneck pace and in different ways all over the
country that it can feel like almost impossible to track
and follow. There's definitely a lot to work with that's
been given to us over the past year. Yeah, it
(12:56):
feels like school board issues are not just happening in
schools there's some kind of bigger agenda play. This is
not the first time really that people have been interested
in like an issue pertaining to education, but it's kind
of the first time that the issues have had something
(13:17):
to do with education. You know, all these things race
and education, um, mass requirements, sex and gender in schools,
they all are grounded in what's happening in schools, but
they also seem to be conversations about things that are
bigger than schools themselves. You know, if you think back
to like common Core when that was happening, that was
(13:38):
the thing that people talked about, people talked about that
running for Congress, but you know, it was kind of esoteric, right,
it's like an education issue being talked about in schools.
But what we've been seeing here is just kind of, yeah,
an entirely different sort of way of approaching these issues,
where on the one hand, yes, they have everything to
do with schools because they're they're pertaining to how students
(14:03):
are going to be affected by policies that these school
boards released. But then on the other hand, they also
seem to be speaking to issues that are bigger than
schools and and extend out into the national sphere. In
a way that I don't feel like we've seen in
the past, and I think that that is something that
has taken school boards. It's definitely taken me by surprise
as someone who watches school boards. So I'm assuming, and
(14:25):
it's not good to assume, but I'm assuming that school
board members themselves have also been taken by surprise. I mean,
I've read enough from people saying that they have to
say that I don't think it's an uncommon feeling for
school board members to have because you have these individuals
who for so long had just been, you know, meeting
in the gymnasium every Tuesday night at seven pm. There's
(14:49):
two people in the audience, one person fell asleep, they
go through the paces. But now all of a sudden,
there's all of this attention, all this focus, the spotlight
pointed on what's bo boards are doing. Yeah, that's That's
one aspect of this attention that I always find interesting
to hear about whether or not an incumbent chooses to
(15:10):
run for re election or says I'm not running for
re election again because of some experiences that they've had.
The one thing that I would love to be able
to quantify more but for the time being have only
been able to see in terms of what we've spotted
as we've gone around and identified and gathered and collected
information about these school districts. We'll be back after the break.
(15:33):
That was great. Really appreciate you all. Well, Doug was
absolutely lovely and we learned so much. He really was,
wasn't he. So let's recap. It seems like parents are
not just mad, they're taking action, and they're running for
school boards and pushing out plenty of incumbents. Yeah, and
if they continue to win, it feels like they're potentially
going to have a ton of influence on policy, all
(15:55):
summed up under that tidy umbrella of parental rights. I
also thought it was really interesting how more women are
serving on school boards. Florida was the highest rate he's
at of a school board members or female. Makes sense
why Florida's ground zero for Moms for Liberty. I read
a bit more about that group. They've only been around
for over a year and they're already up to like
(16:16):
a hundred thousand members and it looks like they're chapters
in almost every state. That's practically an army cathlete hybreadd
Hy so makes sense. We had to meet one of
their generals. Since we talked to Doug Smith and I've
been doing a ton of reporting, we met someone we
want you to meet, a school board member from Florida
(16:37):
who co founded the Mom's for Liberty organization. She's been
a recurring guest on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, and
she has Governor Ron de santiss ear she helped him
craft the parental Rights Bill, which her opponents call that
don't say gay bill, And on top of that, she's
now a director of an ultra conservative group that plans
to help spread that ideology. I'm Samantha. I'm sorry, perpetually late.
(17:01):
It's my life. But again, Samantha, we're generalizing because at
the core she is a mom who cares about her
children's education. You are really right now, yah, So now
I understand what you're saying. Yeah, we don't know what
we're doing at the beginning. And I feel I always say,
people are like, what's the best advice you can give?
And the best I got was trust your instinct, because
every person in the entire world is going to give
you some kind of advice. Do this, don't do this,
(17:23):
don't do this, and but there's completely different parenting styles.
And I think your instincts is like you know it,
like it's built inherently into so I think it's funny
you don't know what you just trial and error figured out.
That's next time on bed Rock USA. This episode was reported,
(17:43):
produced and hosted by US Samantha Story and Kathleen Quillian.
Original music and scoring by Zachary Walter and audio engineering
by Blake Maples an additional editing help from Jennifer Sondag
head a Bloomberg City Lab. Thank you to Doug Chronizal
of Ballot PDA for taking so much time to speak
with us. Bedrock USA is a production of Bloomberg City
(18:03):
Lab and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome back to bed Rock, USA. I'm Kathleen Cillian and
I'm Samantha Story. Here on our podcast, we delve into
how political extremism is making inroads into local government. This week,
we're going to talk about school boards. I remember during
the pandemic there was some really shouty clips of parents
flying around online. They were upset about mask mandates and
(00:30):
school closures. Yeah, but now we're seeing a pivot. Parents
are organizing, especially on the right. They're running for school
boards all over the country. They want to make big changes,
their anti CRT, their pro book banning, and they're very
concerned about who gets to use which bathroom. We're really
generalizing here, but under all that anger is a parent
who cares deeply about the welfare of their kid. We
(00:52):
wanted to know more, who are these parents and why
are they so motivated to make change? So we spend
time with one of the most influent school board members
in the country. It was very clearly, very pro Black
Lives Matter movement. So the next meeting, I remember going
into my school board meeting thinking I was going to
have an hour or five hours worth of people calling
(01:14):
me racist because I just did not believe that was
appropriate material for elementary students, particularly without parents being around
or being prepared to have that conversation with our children.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we took a
trip to Florida to meet the Queen of school Boards,
we had to understand them better, so we called up
the man who could break down all the latest school
(01:34):
board trends. Hi, thanks for hopping on with us. Tell
us about what you do. Yeah, my name is Douchronisle.
I'm a staff writer with ballot Pedia. My role at
the website is covering a lot to do with conflicts
in school board elections. Is one of the big projects
I've been working on for a little bit over a
year at this point. Um So trying to find these
(01:55):
races where hot button issues are coming up and seeing
sort of who's running in the races and where they're
spread out geographically, and then sometimes looking a little bit
into the results from those races to see how things
play out. Additionally covering a number of other elections across
the board. So we're kind of a jack of all
trade sort of sort of organization. Okay, perfect. Before working
(02:18):
on this podcast, I never really thought about school boards.
I picture their meetings is pretty boring, but now they're
taking over headlines. Why yeah, I mean, school boards have
always kind of flown under the radar in terms of
election coverage, but starting in we started to notice a
large increase in recall efforts where voters in a school
(02:41):
district gathered petitions to try to remove a member from office,
or or for step member to stand for election earlier
and potentially vote them out of office. You started to
see a lot more stories about school board elections making
their way up into kind of the more common right
lear dialogue in terms of what people are talking about,
(03:02):
what campaigns are talking about, and candidates are talking about.
But as far as like what school boards do, that's
something that's kind of a mixed bag. What these boards
do varies across the country. But I think it's safe
to say that before last year, people really weren't paying
a lot of attention to what was going on in
these elections, And now all of a sudden, people are
paying very close attention to what's going on. What are
(03:24):
they paying attention to? So there really have been these
three large conflict issues that that we started noticing, So
things like critical race theory, the role of race in education, curricula,
district equity plans, things like that. The really kind of
elephant in the room, big one was the coronavirus pandemic,
a large impetus for a lot of the early recall
(03:47):
efforts we saw, and then came up in a lot
of school board elections, so things like mask requirements, reopening
plans when those were still being discussed, vaccine requirements. And
then a third issue has been sex and gender in schools,
so things like sexual education, curricula, content standards, and also
the usage of gender specific facilities like locker rooms and restrooms.
(04:11):
So those are kind of the three big ones that
we saw in one and have been tracking ever since
all across the country. Has anything changed today, Like the
biggest change I think has to do with the sex
and gender in schools. Yeah, and I'm also seeing parental
rights all over the place. Yeah, parental rights is something
(04:32):
that also we've started to see come up more frequently
in two. And I'll say that from our side of
things in trying to kind of because we've got a
pretty strict methodology and sort of what constitutes a stance
being taken or what constitutes an issue coming up, So
we don't cover a race if the only thing being
talked about is parental rights. Beas parental rights has kind
(04:55):
of been a catch all. Beas parental rights could refer
to parents rights to decide whether or not to master
their children, it could refer to whether or not their
children should be reading certain books regarding sexual education. So
it's kind of obfuscated the issues a little bit while
also kind of standing in for all of them. They
(05:18):
were saying, I support masks or I oppose masks, I
support equity in racial education, I oppose critical race theory.
So everyone was saying it, and it was making things
really easy for us in identifying stances. But since then,
we've definitely seen parental rights kind of come in as
(05:38):
a stand in that really anybody can use, Like you
could be on one side or the other of any
of these issues and say I support parental rights, and
so you're saying the thing without actually saying the thing,
so to speak. Um, So that's definitely something that that
we've seen. Okay, so let's step back a second. Maybe
you could give us a quick overview of the school
(05:59):
board ndscape. Over the summer, ballot Pedia released an analysis
report of the makeup of school board elections nationwide. For starters,
we wanted to know how many school boards are there,
how many school board members are there, and those are
two numbers that we found out, but it definitely takes
a lot of work to do it. We found two
three school board members across thirteen school districts and that work.
(06:26):
You know, There's there's some starting points that we were
able to utilize, but with school district consolidations, new names
that school districts have, we basically had to go to everything.
We looked at every single one, trying to go to
all their u r l s, all their websites to
find the names of all the members who were there
as of the start of the school year. And I'd
(06:49):
say the biggest takeaway from the report was the gender
makeup of school boards, specifically how many women serve on
school boards across the country. Women may couple over of
the U S population, but generally hold a smaller percentage
of positions in government. You got percent of seats in Congress,
eighteen percent of governorships, thirty percent of state legislative seats.
(07:12):
But from our report, we found that women hold forty
three percent of school board seats nationwide, and they actually
control over fifty percent of all school board seats in
twelve states. Democrats control five of these states currently Republicans
control three, and then the other four have split governments.
But at the very top of the list, you've got
(07:32):
Florida with of its school board members are female. Wow,
that's so interesting. What are some other trends you've noticed.
One of the most noticeable things that we've seen is
that with these races kind of flying under the radar,
incumbents when they run for re election have tended to
do pretty well. From two the average was incumbents losing
(07:56):
around seventeen or eighteen percent of the races they ran in,
which gives them a win rate in the eighties, which
is pretty high. But in these conflict races and these
races where these hot button issues pop up, we've seen
that just under one third of incumbents who run for
re election end up losing to newcomers losing to challengers,
(08:17):
which puts the wind rate down into the sixties, which
is a pretty sizeable difference. WHOA, that's a huge difference.
How many of these races have you looked into. We've
covered two elections so far with these conflict races. We
covered the November races and then April five races in Wisconsin, Missouri,
and Oklahoma that was kind of the first big school
(08:39):
board election day of And in these races, we found
that either between thirty of the seats were won by
candidates who opposed things like masks requirements and critical race
theory and certain certain aspects of sexual education curricula. Now,
I will say of these aren't necessarily win rates since
(09:03):
we don't know the stances of every candidate who is
running in these races. We just know the stances of
who won these races. But what this does tell us
is gives us a snapshot of what the makeup of
these school boards will look like after the election. And
I think that's something that people find very important to
know is sort of, now that the dust is settled
(09:23):
and the balances involving cast, what's going to change? You know?
How how are things going to look moving forward as
these individuals, you know, assume office and start crafting policy
in school districts across the country. More on that change
after the break. So school boards are generally nonpartisan, but
(09:45):
that appears to be changing. Have you noticed this as well. Yeah,
I mean, one of the things that we've seen in
these races in general is just a ton more attention
in terms of who's making endorsements and who's endorsed and candidates.
But probably the most unique thing that that has come
across our place was when Governor run To Santis issued
(10:08):
a slate of endorsements in Florida. To the best of
our knowledge, we had never seen a governor or a
state executive official endorsing a slew of candidates, but we
saw it there. And then actually his opponent, Charlie Christ
also endorsed a slate of candidates in Florida as well.
And I shouldn't say that now this is the thing
that everybody's doing, because it really isn't a thing that
(10:29):
everybody's doing. We saw it to Santis and Chris do it,
and that's just about it. There were a few other
endorsements that popped up around the country, but in terms
of kind of putting together a slate, kind of making
it sort of a media blast, something that these endorsers
wanted people to know because usually when someone makes an endorsement,
(10:52):
it's the candidate who gets the endorsement. It's their responsibility
to go yell at from the rooftops that they got
this endorsement. But in these instances, it was the endorsers
themselves to Santists and Chris who are going out of
their way to let people know who they were endorsing
in these school board races and letting them know why
they were endorsing in these school board races, and the
(11:13):
why had a lot to do with these conflict issues
that have been taking on an outsize role in a
number of these elections over the past year. Yeah, we've
noticed a handful of groups who are capitalizing on those
conflict issues as far as kind of having a presence
in a large number of states and a large number
of racist monster liberties the one that we've seen appear
(11:34):
pretty frequently and kind of equipping candidates with things they
might not have known because they've never run for office before.
You know, it's not like an intuitive thing to do,
and messaging materials along those lines. You know, it costs
a lot of money to run a poll, but if
you've got you know, organizations that have message tested or
(11:55):
or done that work for you, and they are able
to share that with you, that can be an invaluable
thing for a school board can bits. Yeah, it seems
like they're more organized than ever. I mean, that's that's
for sure. Like the double edged sort of like the
most interesting and most frustrating part about all the attention
that's been coming to school board elections right now is
that you do see like all of these new sort
(12:16):
of paradigm shifts or all these new like I don't know,
you didn't really hear of people organizing for school board candidates,
like around college campuses or anything like that. That wasn't
a thing that that happened. People who ran for school
board were you know, they got some kids in the district,
maybe they got you know, the Monday nights are free,
(12:36):
like they can go around and knock on some doors,
like talk to their neighbors. So it's like it's equally
fascinating but then frustrating because it's like happening at such
a breakneck pace and in different ways all over the
country that it can feel like almost impossible to track
and follow. There's definitely a lot to work with that's
been given to us over the past year. Yeah, it
(12:56):
feels like school board issues are not just happening in
schools there's some kind of bigger agenda play. This is
not the first time really that people have been interested
in like an issue pertaining to education, but it's kind
of the first time that the issues have had something
(13:17):
to do with education. You know, all these things race
and education, um, mass requirements, sex and gender in schools,
they all are grounded in what's happening in schools, but
they also seem to be conversations about things that are
bigger than schools themselves. You know, if you think back
to like common Core when that was happening, that was
(13:38):
the thing that people talked about, people talked about that
running for Congress, but you know, it was kind of esoteric, right,
it's like an education issue being talked about in schools.
But what we've been seeing here is just kind of, yeah,
an entirely different sort of way of approaching these issues,
where on the one hand, yes, they have everything to
do with schools because they're they're pertaining to how students
(14:03):
are going to be affected by policies that these school
boards released. But then on the other hand, they also
seem to be speaking to issues that are bigger than
schools and and extend out into the national sphere. In
a way that I don't feel like we've seen in
the past, and I think that that is something that
has taken school boards. It's definitely taken me by surprise
as someone who watches school boards. So I'm assuming, and
(14:25):
it's not good to assume, but I'm assuming that school
board members themselves have also been taken by surprise. I mean,
I've read enough from people saying that they have to
say that I don't think it's an uncommon feeling for
school board members to have because you have these individuals
who for so long had just been, you know, meeting
in the gymnasium every Tuesday night at seven pm. There's
(14:49):
two people in the audience, one person fell asleep, they
go through the paces. But now all of a sudden,
there's all of this attention, all this focus, the spotlight
pointed on what's bo boards are doing. Yeah, that's That's
one aspect of this attention that I always find interesting
to hear about whether or not an incumbent chooses to
(15:10):
run for re election or says I'm not running for
re election again because of some experiences that they've had.
The one thing that I would love to be able
to quantify more but for the time being have only
been able to see in terms of what we've spotted
as we've gone around and identified and gathered and collected
information about these school districts. We'll be back after the break.
(15:33):
That was great. Really appreciate you all. Well, Doug was
absolutely lovely and we learned so much. He really was,
wasn't he. So let's recap. It seems like parents are
not just mad, they're taking action, and they're running for
school boards and pushing out plenty of incumbents. Yeah, and
if they continue to win, it feels like they're potentially
going to have a ton of influence on policy, all
(15:55):
summed up under that tidy umbrella of parental rights. I
also thought it was really interesting how more women are
serving on school boards. Florida was the highest rate he's
at of a school board members or female. Makes sense
why Florida's ground zero for Moms for Liberty. I read
a bit more about that group. They've only been around
for over a year and they're already up to like
(16:16):
a hundred thousand members and it looks like they're chapters
in almost every state. That's practically an army cathlete hybreadd
Hy so makes sense. We had to meet one of
their generals. Since we talked to Doug Smith and I've
been doing a ton of reporting, we met someone we
want you to meet, a school board member from Florida
(16:37):
who co founded the Mom's for Liberty organization. She's been
a recurring guest on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, and
she has Governor Ron de santiss ear she helped him
craft the parental Rights Bill, which her opponents call that
don't say gay bill, And on top of that, she's
now a director of an ultra conservative group that plans
to help spread that ideology. I'm Samantha. I'm sorry, perpetually late.
(17:01):
It's my life. But again, Samantha, we're generalizing because at
the core she is a mom who cares about her
children's education. You are really right now, yah, So now
I understand what you're saying. Yeah, we don't know what
we're doing at the beginning. And I feel I always say,
people are like, what's the best advice you can give?
And the best I got was trust your instinct, because
every person in the entire world is going to give
you some kind of advice. Do this, don't do this,
(17:23):
don't do this, and but there's completely different parenting styles.
And I think your instincts is like you know it,
like it's built inherently into so I think it's funny
you don't know what you just trial and error figured out.
That's next time on bed Rock USA. This episode was reported,
(17:43):
produced and hosted by US Samantha Story and Kathleen Quillian.
Original music and scoring by Zachary Walter and audio engineering
by Blake Maples an additional editing help from Jennifer Sondag
head a Bloomberg City Lab. Thank you to Doug Chronizal
of Ballot PDA for taking so much time to speak
with us. Bedrock USA is a production of Bloomberg City
(18:03):
Lab and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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