By: Navyaa Jain ‘23, Social Justice Editor

If you tuned in to Saturday Night Live (SNL) in October, you might have seen a sketch called School Board Meetings, which featured crazy parents who came to “advocate” for their children, and Owen Wilson as a confused middle school teacher. However, as viewers of SNL know, there is always an unfortunate reality behind all of the jokes and sketches. The parents’ arguments about how the school should handle Covid protocols and critical race theory hit close to home for many students, parents, and teachers who have attended their own versions of chaotic school board meetings. What is meant to be a bureaucratic place where members of a community can come together to collaboratively improve the education of their children, has become a sparring ground filled with heckling, screaming, and overall confusion.

Since school board meetings are shared gathering places, most conflict can be traced back to a lack of respect for others. When talking about mask mandates for students, one New York State teacher recalls hearing a parent shout “I am tired of being told I live in a community,” at a community meeting. Regardless of the statement’s irony, it is unsettling to think that people are willing to openly share (and scream) about their reluctance to care for the people around them. 

At these meetings, citizens can easily feel threatened or shunned by the entire community; often, this stems from the close-knit nature of several districts and neighborhoods. In Hastings, Minnesota, Kelsey Waits, a school board member who angered parents by enforcing a mask mandate for students, had to leave town as members of the community began to attack her personally. Kelsey’s daughter, Kit, is transgender, and she and her mother had decided to keep that information private. However, disgruntled parents resorted to outing Kit and making the neighborhood an unsafe place for the Waits to live. Similarly, in Corvallis, Oregon, Sami Al-Abdrabbuh received death threats a few days after he was re-elected to the school board. All across the country, school boards have seen dedicated and capable elected officials step down from their positions due to a concern for their safety, and overall interest in running for school boards has declined. While all parents have the right to express their feelings of unhappiness with the school district, the increasing reliance on violence and disruption from certain groups makes the democratic process inefficient and hazardous. 

The issue with school boards has also surpassed the local level, as it has made its way to many congressional and gubernatorial elections. In Virginia, the two candidates for governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe, both commented on critical race theory and the concerns that parents are voicing about teaching it in school. McAuliffe emphasizes that “parents should not be telling schools what they should teach” and Youngkin responded by centering his campaign around parents’ rights. While the Democratic candidate’s statement that parents should have no opinion in their child’s education goes against a key reason for having school board meetings, neither candidate focused on the misinformation that fuels the argument against critical race theory. Instead, the argument became a political stunt for the Republican candidate to gain more conservative votes and increasingly prevented the implementation of critical race theory. The campaign increased the volatility of school board meetings, polarizing the issues further instead of working to address questions and concerns posed by civil community members.

With about 600 school districts in NJ and 13,800 districts in the whole country, efficient local school boards are imperative to ensuring that education is optimized for every county in the US. While local politics tend to get overlooked or deemed as less important, they are one of the only places where people can see direct change that is tailored to their own community’s needs. As EIT presented recently, maintaining civil discourse is the only way to come to beneficial solutions for the community. While all parents deserve the right to peacefully voice their opinions about schools, being concerned about the funding for a club is a lot different than harboring disrespect for people by refusing mask mandates or preventing critical race education.