Texas School Board Races Draw More Interest and Money

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Venture about 20 miles northwest of Austin and you’ll eventually find Lake Travis, the premier destination for boating and recreation. Pickup trucks and SUVs pulling boats are an easy clue this time of year. What you won’t immediately realize is that the Lake Travis Independent School District, which serves about 11,357 students, is bracing for a tense school election.

Before the pandemic, there wasn’t much point in spending Wednesday nights at a Lake Travis ISD school board meeting — or much attention paid to how members voted. Lake Travis ISD would consistently rank high in school, which would make most parents pretty happy.

Prior to 2020, the biggest issue that caught parents’ attention was the occasional staff issue. And more recently, the community may be asked to consider approving bonds to pay for another high school as the district continues to grow, attracting some of the influx of new residents pouring into Austin.

But now, two years later, the focus is on school board races as angry debates over masks, race and gender have unfolded between parents and school boards on weeknights across the board. the state.

And in Lake Travis, Erin Archer, candidate for Lake Travis School Board Place 3, has seen her community become more engaged with the school district and its operations — more than she has seen in the past 15 years.

“Pre-pandemic and [before] the new focus on cultural issues, I would say our school board was pretty quiet,” Archer said.

Last September, Lake Travis ISD made headlines when a parent angrily confronted his school board over the book ‘Out of Darkness’, a novel set in East Texas in the days before the explosion. natural gas disaster of 1937 at the New London School, one of the worst disasters in United States history. The parent claimed that the book promoted anal sex to middle schoolers, which the author, said is completely wrong.

But since the pandemic began, parents in Lake Travis and across the state have been at odds over mask mandates and school closures to prevent exposure to COVID-19. Over the past year, there has been even more focus than ever on whether what Governor Greg Abbott has called “pornographic” books — particularly books about sex or gender identity — end up in school district libraries.

Although school board races are nonpartisan, it has never been difficult to determine what political allegiance a candidate carries based on the school issues a candidate holds dear. But those subtle differences have become more pronounced, and voters can now easily identify who is Republican and who is Democrat.

And for the first time, there is more money in these races. Across the state, a handful of political action committees have formed to fuel the campaigns of more conservative candidates who promise to keep critical race theory out of schools and potential future pandemic-related restrictions like shutdowns. schools and distance mask mandates.

Most of these PACs were started in North Texas and followed the Southlake playbookin which most white parents in suburban North Texas have been able to place people on the school board who oppose a plan to diversify its curriculum.

Last month in the central Texas Hill Country, Lake Travis area parents launched the Lake Travis Families PAC. With the May school board election approaching, the PAC has about $19,000 in cash, according to the latest campaign finance reports. There are three seats up for grabs in Lake Travis in May, and the PAC has endorsed candidates who oppose mask and vaccine mandates and school closures.

Christian Alvarado, a Lake Travis ISD relative and one of the founders of PAC, said in a Facebook post on Feb. 3 that parents should make choices for their children and that he doesn’t believe in “modern progressiveism that claims my kids are oppressed because they’re Hispanic.”

“I want my kids to learn how to think, not what to think, with an age-appropriate curriculum,” he said online.

Alvarado, an Abbott appointee with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board, said in the post that he hopes the school board race doesn’t further divide the community. One of the PAC’s goals is to “turn the temperature down” as the district has seen flare-ups in the battle over which books should be in schools and whether masks should be mandatory.

Alvarado did not respond to a Texas Tribune request for comment.

PAC leadership did not respond to a request for comment and its strategist, Brendan Steinhauser, declined to comment officially. Steinhauser, who is a partner in a public relations and political communications firm called Steinhauser Strategies, has worked with Republicans such as U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Houston and State Senator Angela Paxton of McKinney.

In mid-February, Steinhauser told Politico that they aimed to raise $100,000 for school board races and wanted to protect incumbents who voted against mask mandates.

Trying to raise that kind of money for a school board race is unusual, said Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Usually, this kind of fundraising money is seen in campaigns for state officials.

While the Lake Travis PAC wants to try to keep political temperatures low, Deen said it’s hard for school board races not to be political because the issues presented by the PAC have been front and center for politicians. republicans.

If school board races continue to become increasingly partisan, Deen said it would derail the school boards’ raison d’être, which is to work for the community and not for a political position.

“I’m glad we’re paying attention to school boards, but I worry it’s the wrong kind of attention or for the wrong reasons,” Deen said.

A growing movement

The difference now, Deen says, is that parents are organizing, mobilizing and fundraising to support their favorite school board candidate — and all within the context of the national narrative that critical race theory, or CRT, is taught in schools and there. is “pornographic” content accessible to children.

And while school boards have been controversial and combative, Stephanie Knight, dean of the Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University, said these conservative groups will use language that appeals to all types of voters, not just to those who shout at school boards.

“We must always be wary of the underlying agenda because ultimately that agenda could cause divisions and distract us from focusing on other educational issues,” she said.

Parents have been emboldened by Republican politicians who have advanced the idea that critical race theory is taught in public schools and should be kept out of the way, even as Texas lawmakers have embraced the a law last year which they say prohibits its teaching.

Critical Race Theory is a college-level course, not taught in high schools. He argues that racism is embedded in the country’s legal and structural systems. That hasn’t stopped some Republicans from calling anything about diversity or inclusiveness critical race theory.

Some PACs like Southlake Families in North Texas said critical race theory is taught in schools. Although Lake Travis Families hasn’t named CRT as a problem, they instead oppose what they loosely call “political indoctrination.”

The Lake Travis Families PAC has so far endorsed Archer and two incumbents. One of her goals, she says, is to get politics out of schools, but knows issues like mask mandates and CRT have become political.

“We really need to focus on the education itself and take out a lot of the political rhetoric and drama that surrounds classrooms,” Archer said.

But not everyone is buying the PAC’s mission.

Laurie Higginbotham, who is running against Archer for the Place 3 seat, said the PAC’s assertion that it’s not partisan isn’t true because of their views on masks and the way which they fear critical papers on race theory will be pushed into the district.

Higginbotham also points out that the PAC is not interested in issues such as student overcrowding and a bond measure which would fund a second high school in the district.

“Why are you only focusing on political issues and not on the issues that our schools actually face?” she says. “They’re trying to pretend to be non-partisan, but the people who are driving this train for the PAC, they have a different agenda.”

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin, said Republican politicians in the state see the shift to school board elections as one more way to unify the party.

“There’s a pretty clear effort by Republican candidates to take the issue of public education away from Democrats,” Henson said.

But, at least in central Texas, some Democrats will not remain silent.

On March 8, Texas Blue Action, a liberal organization focused on voter mobilization, announced the formation of Safe Schools for Texas, an organization that will support school board candidates in the upcoming May election. The group will focus on races in the districts of Round Rock, Dripping Springs, Eanes, Hays, Comal, Lake Travis and Spring Branch.

Lana Hansen, president of Safe Schools For All, said the group was trying to counter conservative talking points.

“We want to bring in candidates who won’t support book bans,” Hansen said. “We want to bring in candidates who understand the CRT [rhetoric] That’s bullshit, and that’s a talking point for Republicans.

To Hansen’s knowledge, there haven’t been many Democratic organizations that have sought to challenge what conservatives have done, and she thinks that’s a mistake.

“We want to believe that what we see on the other side is so absurd, that it wouldn’t work,” she said. “But it turns out it’s in a lot of communities, and we don’t want to see that community be ours.”

Disclosure: Facebook, Politico, Southern Methodist University and University of Texas – Arlington financially supported The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporations sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the journalism of the Tribune. Find a full list here.