Can a School Board Teach Us to Overcome Division?

We’re told America is hopelessly divided. But zoom in—like, say, to a school board in South Central Pennsylvania—and a different story emerges.

Full video viewing options for this story plus links to the Instagram and LinkedIn versions:
https://newsletter.baratunde.com/p/proof-we-can-overcome-division-3rd 

This episode features Steph and Lance: one conservative, one liberal, both neighbors, both school board members. With the support of Urban Rural Action, they chose relationship over partisanship. Listening over labeling. Curiosity over contempt.

And the result? A school board that works. For the kids. For the community. For all of us. This is what it looks like to citizen:

Listen deeply. Speak honestly. Resist the pull to polarize. Build something different—together

🧭 More stories and updates: https://stories.howtocitizen.com

🎙️ This story series is a collaborative effort by Shira Abramowitz, Jon Alexander, Elizabeth Stewart, and Baratunde Thurston. Video produced by Anne Gutteridge.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's the Wednesday, April sixteenth, we are dropping our third
story in this week of citizen ing, this how to
Citizens story sprint, and this one is about division allegedly.
So I was talking with John Alexander. We have like
a group chat going with me, him, Elizabeth and Shira

(00:23):
to run this little sprint, this project, and he hit
me with a note that I want to weave into
the setup for this story. And he's like, look, there
is this nationalization of the story of division, and we
have these big old.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Headlines about how divided we are.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
But when you zoom in at any local level, in
any community, you find people who trying.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
To live together, trying to work it out. And that's
what this story is today.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
I mean, we are obviously divided, but I remember some
of you may remember Tim Phillips episode of How the
Citizen audio podcast where he talks about these consistent studies
that we think we're more divided than we are. We
think the quote unquote other sides hates us more than

(01:14):
they do, and that's a perception challenge.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's also a manipulation.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Experience that there is benefit to someone from making us
think that we're not aligned here. So part of what
we need to do is drop down a level, get
literally closer to the ground, closer to where we live, locals,
where it's at.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
And I mean I remember when I was even doing.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Campaigning for Obama local, it was much harder to be
you know, talking trash on people's front porch, like to
their face, and so the coarseness of the dialogue that
is so easy to perform on social media and at
a distance, you know, slinging mud at states far away,
at Washington, It's just harder to do that in community.

(02:02):
People you see at the market, people you see when
you drop your kids off at school, and that those
zones have been infected with that.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Same poison of division.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
And there's an antidote, which is investing in relationships. That's
one of the big pillars of how the citizen. Those
who've been on this feed for a while know that
we repeat it ad nauseum. If you're new, we got
one of these principles of citizen as a verb is
to invest in relationships with yourself, with others and the
planet around you. And once you establish relationship, it's just

(02:32):
harder to demonize and vilify and see someone as an enemy,
even as they may still be your opponent, even as
you may still have real disagreements. So that's the spirit
of today's offering. I think the story is shorter than
my setup for it, but I'm just going to use
this audio feed to provide a bit more context and

(02:55):
lay the ground for what you're about to hear. Please
go to story howtositizen dot com. Join the email lists.
We will do some kind of summary wrap up thing.
We're dropping an update every day to drive to these stories,
their video stories. So you're obviously on an audio feed
here in this and you can find those video stories

(03:17):
linked right from those email newsletters. They are linked in
my own substack newsletter dot baritunday dot com.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Be very easy.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
I'll keep them archived there, and they're linked on social
media on LinkedIn for me and John, and on Instagram
for me, baratun Day for how to Citizen the account,
and for the citizens guy plural that's John. So giving
you a lot of places to engage. Please comment, please share,
Please lift up other examples where you see people building bridges,

(03:51):
building deep relationship across division to move the community forward,
and in today's case, that community it's for the cheering
it's about school boards. So enjoy and I'm liking this
voice memo mode.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
No big studio, no big.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Mic, just talking louder than I should into my smartphone.
Let's get smart. We'll deal with all the noise and
the nonsense in a real good way.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Love.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
If we only see stories of how divided we are,
we're going to be divided.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
That's the national story.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
But when you zoom in on any community, you find
people trying to live together, neighbors who want to be neighborly.
This is the story of two neighbors who built relationship across.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Their division as members of the school board.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
This local story is happening all over the nation, which
kind of makes it a national story.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
It makes you wonder why you're not hearing it more.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
It was very contentious. There was a lot of tension
on the school board, to the point where the communication
had really broken down and the board was not able
to address the shoes that school boards need to address
and make the kinds of decisions they need to make
because they couldn't have hard conversations in a productive way.
I had been on the board for like five seconds
and he was like, yep, you're gonna be the brig

(05:11):
builder us. Like Lance, that's a lot of pressure in here.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
We've got some different viewpoints on some things.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
When I realized over the courts of time, maybe our
viewpoints wasn't as far apart as what I thought.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Lance and Steph were both participants in our Uniting to
Prevent Targeted Violence in South Central Pennsylvania program. He would
not characterize himself as a liberal, although he leans liberal
on a lot of issues, particularly the kinds of issues
that tend to face school boards. Steph is also a
community member in Chambersburg. She would characterize herself as conservative.

(05:45):
In our Uniting for Action programs, we intentionally teach the
community members who are participating to develop active listening skills
and to explore each other's perspectives across difference from a
perspective of curiosity. They built this really enduring relationship such
that when Steph was elected to the board, the existing

(06:09):
board members expected that she would join the right leaning contingent,
and Lance was already on the sort of left leaning contingent,
if we can call it that. But they refused to
buy into that narrative. They resisted this intense pressure really
to polarize and to demonize, and were able to really
shift the dynamic on the school board to make it

(06:33):
much more productive.