In a high-school English class in Guilford, Conn., last year, a student received a racial-justice scorecard as an optional resource for a speech assignment on the novel The Catcher in the Rye.
Designed for teachers, the point system scores books and classroom materials on a spectrum ranging from “culturally destructive” to “culturally responsive,” based on their representation of diverse ethnicities and experiences.
Disconcerted by the guide, the student reported it to a staff member at Guilford Public Schools (GPS), who brought it up to a contingent of town residents growing increasingly suspicious of the district’s “equity and inclusion” initiatives. That was the tip of the iceberg, they soon discovered. There had been reports of other troubling incidents, such as a seventh-grade English teacher’s vowing during a department meeting to limit his reading list to authors of color.
Alarmed at what they saw as deception from the administration, a ragtag alliance of parents came together to demand transparency. Hearing through the grapevine that the district had distributed a guide based on critical race theory (CRT) for teachers to use when evaluating curricula, typically neutral parents came out of hibernation to shout their opposition. The resulting movement would roil the town’s sleepy politics and shake the status quo on the school board.
As “dance mom”–turned–Guilford school-board candidate Danielle Scarpellino told me, “in order for our cause to come to fruition, which is to keep the evil tenets of CRT out of our children’s education, we need to flip the board.”
Guilford is the story, in microcosm, of what’s been happening around the country. The specter of critical race theory in the classroom has galvanized grassroots moms and dads without prior political credentials in towns from Rapid City, S.D., to Long Island, in New York, to North Yarmouth, Maine. Their goal is to recapture their progressive-dominated school boards and expel even Republican members deemed too complaisant. In almost all cases, what poked the parental bear was the insistence of the school districts that they were not teaching critical race theory, despite evidence to the contrary.
“We may not be Ph.D.s, or experts in education, or reporters, or detectives, but we’re not stupid. Parents are the experts on their children,” Scarpellino says.
With its rural, colonial roots, Guilford is a quintessential New England community. It is home to Connecticut’s second-largest agricultural fair, complete with goats, a circus, and a harvest celebration fit for E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Its postcard-esque town center features a village green, a church steeple, and a cozy cluster of mom-and-pop shops. Twenty years ago, Guilford was a red town. But once Yale graduates and Manhattan commuters started occupying and gentrifying it, a liberal consensus hardened within it, making political commotion rare. It remained that way for many years — that is, until the emergence of that racial-justice scorecard.
The changes came on slowly, then all at once. In June 2020, the school board unanimously voted to scrap Guilford Public Schools’ cherished “Indian” mascot, which students later replaced with “Grizzlies.” That same month, parent Tim Chamberlain says, he and other parents received an email from the district about altering Guilford’s curriculum to teach a “hard” history. It was nothing to raise a fuss about, he figured, but it piqued his interest. Then, at the end of June 2020, Superintendent Paul Freeman announced a curricular audit to address “the topics of race, racism, justice, equity, and identity,” invoking critical-race-theory apostles Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Nearly a year later, in April 2021, the Guilford Board of Education released a statement defending the audit and citing the need to tackle America’s “systemically racist” history, yet it denied the charges that the administration had plans to transform the curriculum.
That gave Chamberlain pause. “It sounded like doublespeak. It sounded like they were hiding something,” he says. Other parents told me they became concerned when the school board effectively gaslighted them with the refrain “you don’t want real history to be taught.” They became convinced that the audit was a Trojan horse for critical race theory.
The audit was the handiwork of paid consultants with robust social-justice résumés. They conducted it by interviewing students of color about their experiences in the school system and deploying that same racial-justice scorecard to help teachers overhaul the “equity” shortcomings in their classes.
“The assertion that CRT is not being taught in GPS is ‘technically true’ by the narrowest of definitions because no such class exists in GPS. What they are not telling you is that CRT is not a class that is taught to the students but rather a lens or philosophy that is woven through a student’s entire educational experience,” hockey coach and homegrown Guilford parent Nick Cusano told me.
“They’ve changed the pedagogy, and that’s a change in curriculum whether they want to admit it or not,” Chamberlain adds.
Flash forward to June 2021, when Chamberlain’s son came home from high school with a beat-up face and chipped front teeth. For a presentation in English class, his son argued against affirmative action, prompting interrogation and ire from his peers and teacher. A week later at recess, a bully from that class, who had quarreled with the son before, kicked him in the face after he tumbled to the ground with a football, an offense the father claims was not accidental.
Chamberlain says that the administration is fostering intolerance of honest debate about race-related issues and that instructors have adopted the same attitude, which is breeding a toxic, even dangerous, learning environment — a sentiment that’s shared by parents nationwide.
“I don’t mind having liberal teachers teaching liberal ideas,” he stresses. “I do mind them shutting down conservative voices to represent only one side in their hiring and classes. They’re saying America is systemically racist, and anyone who disagrees with that is not welcome.”
Earlier in the year, the parents’ resistance group caught wind that Superintendent Freeman had provided How to Be an Antiracist by Kendi to every teacher in the district in grades K–12, at a cost of $6,000. When the parents first confronted the school board about the book, the Republican members confessed they hadn’t read it, but they maintained that it was much ado about nothing and deferred to the administration’s best judgment on it, according to Chamberlain and Cusano. The Republicans — described by the parents as having earned a reputation for rubber-stamping Freeman’s equity-and-inclusion initiatives — were even surprised by the parents’ objections.
By the summer, the parents had reached a breaking point. While airing their grievances at the school-board podium had amplified their voices, they knew that their influence was limited so long as progressives and complacent Republicans controlled Guilford’s school board.
Guilford’s school board comprises nine seats: four for Republicans, four for Democrats, and one swing seat for the highest vote-getter, all of whom serve four-year terms.
Veteran school-board members often have gone unchallenged in elections. So suffice it to say that the pot was stirred when, in June, the three GOP incumbents up for reelection faced a challenge from five Guilford parents who decided to enter the race: Chamberlain, Scarpellino, and Cusano, as well as Aly Passarelli, a biracial education professional, and Bill Maisano, a retired Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) officer for the school district. (The fourth Republican incumbent has two years left in her term and is not up for reelection.) These five kindred spirits, self-titled “watchdogs, not lapdogs,” had one goal: winning back the board and sacking the CRT sympathizers. Knowing that only four of them could potentially win seats, all five submitted bids to maximize the chance of securing a real conservative majority.
They went on to defeat the old guard twice, first at the town’s Republican caucus and later in the Republican primary, advancing to the November general election. At the caucus, the parents’ cohort earned the endorsement of the Republican Town Committee representatives and were set to be placed on the November ballot, until the three GOP incumbents rained on their parade by exercising the primary option.
The obstacles didn’t stop there. The traditional party allocation on the board went out the window when the progressive pro-CRT crowd strategically created a “fusion” slate of two Democrats and three independents, creating the possibility that not a single nominated anti-CRT candidate would win a seat on the board.
Self-anointed “The Good Republicans,” the disgruntled trio of GOP incumbents ran on the slogan “R for a Day,” encouraging Democratic voters to switch their party affiliation to Republican for Election Day and then reverse it the next day, Passarelli and Scarpellino alleged. A few individual constituents told Passarelli and Scarpellino at the polls that this maneuver disgusted them so much that they voted for the five challengers.
Despite the approximately 200 voters who adopted the “R for a Day” tactic, the three GOP incumbents lost again in the primary contest. The newcomers, running on the platform “5 Reasons Why,” won in a landslide, outperforming their intraparty rivals by a three-to-one margin thanks to a record turnout of nearly half of all registered Republicans in Guilford. For Republican parents scared of retaliation, the secrecy of the ballot made it safe for them to be heard, Cusano believes.
After their defeat in the primary, the three Republican incumbents threw a last Hail Mary and entered as independents on the November ballot, but two have since dropped out of the race. Their withdrawal might be an attempt to extend an olive branch and unite the party after so much factional conflict, Passarelli says.
With the momentum building for the band of five, the left-wing members on the board are nervous, the parents say, resorting to predictable epithets and text-message marketing six weeks out to erode the newcomers’ support among the town’s large unaffiliated bloc. Progressive incumbent Moira Rader has vilified the five GOP candidates as “dangerous, anti-education zealots” who will drag Guilford’s superior education “backward.”
Scarpellino believes this is a shallow strategy, proving only that those managing Guilford schools are hostile to intellectual diversity.
Despite the progressive members’ aggressive and well-financed campaign, the five say that their grassroots focus has mobilized dormant parents who’ve woken up to the district’s politicized schemes. They may be at a fund-raising disadvantage, but the parents are doing all they can to bridge the financial gap, going door to door, speaking in video interviews, planting yard signs, and making phone calls to get out the vote. All of them have received numerous anonymous emails from encrypted addresses whispering words of support.
“Pushback is considered white fragility. Anger about being ignored is white rage. Running for the school board to effect change makes you an extremist. They have all their bases covered. You either agree with them, or you are racists that should not have a seat at the table,” Scarpellino says.
While the school political drama has upset the town, Chamberlain says they didn’t start the fire.
“I believe the gauntlet was not thrown by us; it was this administration. They’re the ones advocating wholesale change of the system. We’re the ones trying to return to a classic quality Guilford education,” he says.
And as we know from events in localities around the country, they are definitely not alone.
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