Alarmed by critical race theory and school closures, four conservative candidates decided independently to run for Rapid City school board. They all won.
For six years, Kate Thomas has been a lonely voice on the Rapid City school board, often the lone dissenter in votes on the South Dakota district’s budget, leadership, and academics.
Her colleagues on the seven-member board were good people whose hearts were in the right place, she said. But Thomas had a different, more conservative vision for the city’s schools.
Deb Baker, a retired businesswoman and great-grandmother, had never run a political campaign in her life. But she, too, worried about the direction of Rapid City’s schools, which some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren attended. When she saw a liberal candidate in her area was running for school board unopposed, Baker jumped in the race to stop her.
“I prayed about it,” Baker told National Review. “I talked to my husband about it. He first said ‘No.’ And then I said, ‘If not me, who?’”
Thomas and Baker weren’t alone. Across town, a young mother named Breanna Funke filed to run against the board’s sitting president. And Gabe Doney, an industrial engineer and volunteer firefighter, decided to run against another incumbent, promising to bring transparency to the board and normalcy to the schools after a school year that was anything but normal.
In early June, Thomas, Baker, Funke, and Doney all won their races, knocking off opponents endorsed by the local teachers union, and flipping control of the board. Thomas was reelected to a third term. The others were elected to their first. They were sworn into their seats in late July.
They are among the first wave of conservatives – energized over the last year by national debates over school closures, mask mandates, and radical social-justice activism creeping into classrooms – to succeed in taking over their local school board, hoping to change its direction.
Conservative school board candidates in races across the country are hoping to mirror the success in western South Dakota. But one thing about the plan to take over the school board in Rapid City: It wasn’t really planned at all. There was no wizard behind the curtain recruiting candidates or directing money and volunteers. There was no puppet master.
The candidates, each with their own concerns and motivations, stepped forward independently.
“This Rapid City victory didn’t come from a multi-million-dollar organization with a 20-year game plan for victory. This came from a lot of grass-roots moms and dads, business leaders, members of the community who finally stepped up and said, ‘It’s time,’” said Norman Woods, executive director of the Family Heritage Alliance, a family-values group in Rapid City whose political arm, Family Heritage Alliance Action, endorsed the four conservative candidates.
After six years on the board, Thomas seemingly stumbled into the majority.
“I know that seems like it was a full slated campaign for all of us, but we each had our own individual thinking going on, and our own reasons we were running. And we campaigned separately,” Thomas said. “We ended up helping each other in little ways, but it definitely . . . was not organized.”
There were a lot of concerns bubbling in the community over the last year, from school closures, online learning, and mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic, to worries that concepts related to critical race theory were being injected into schools, Woods said. Administrators deny that critical race theory is being taught in Rapid City schools.
“All the different issues you could point to, they all had a common thread,” Woods said, “and that’s that parents really felt they weren’t being listened to, and that their wishes weren’t being followed.”
Thomas said that after the 2020 elections, there seems to have been an awakening in Rapid City and elsewhere about what can be accomplished in politics on the local versus national level.
“When you realize, I think, that you can’t touch the top, or maybe even your governor, you’re like, alright, I’ve got to start at home,” said Thomas, who first ran for school board to improve educational programming for students with dyslexia, like her kids.
Baker said running for school board or any other political office hadn’t really been on her radar. She retired from her property-management business in 2013. She was still keeping the books for her church, she said, but otherwise “I kind of liked my nice, peaceful, quiet life I had.”
But Baker grew concerned when she learned more about the one candidate for school board in her area, a woman that she described as “very liberal.” When she announced her candidacy, that other candidate didn’t scrub her social-media accounts of controversial posts. In November, she posted a 1992 poem by American artist Zoe Leonard, in which Leonard wrote she wanted a president, “who had an abortion at sixteen . . . lost their last lover to AIDS . . . someone with bad teeth and an attitude . . . someone who crossdresses, someone who has done drugs and been in therapy.”
Baker thought the candidate was out of step with voters in the purple city in the deep red state. Sixty-one percent of voters in Pennington County, which includes Rapid City, cast ballots for Donald Trump last year. Baker decided to run for the seat herself. She won by a nearly two-to-one margin in a low-turnout election.
Baker said she doesn’t think Rapid City schools should be used for “social experiments,” including critical race theory, which she said is designed to teach students that “white people are bad” and to “make our kids hate each other.” The students deserve a stronger education than they’re getting, she said. The district has scored below the state average in English, math, and science on recent assessments. A 2019 South Dakota Education report card found that only 51 percent of Rapid City students were proficient in language arts, 43 percent were proficient in math, and 37 percent were proficient in science.
“I truly believe that all curriculum, every stinking thing that is taught to these kids, should be posted online,” Baker said. “If I had my way about it, there would be a camera in every stinking class, so that the parents can see what’s being taught to their kids. And I think that protects the students and the teachers, as far as I’m concerned.”
Thomas said that, in the coming weeks and months, the new conservative board majority needs to better understand parliamentary procedures, the board’s power, and how to wield that power so they’re not just rubber-stamping the superintendent. She recommends that concerned parents and citizens across the country take a look at their local school board.
“Just watch one meeting and see if it’s something that you as a person would want to help change,” she said.
While the conservative candidates were successful in Rapid City, similar efforts across the country have had mixed results. Conservatives won two seats on the board in Southlake, Texas, in May, garnering national attention for their fight against a critical race theory-inspired Cultural Competence Action Plan in the district. However, conservative school-board slates lost school-board races earlier this year in Anchorage, Alaska, and in a Montana race the Democrat-endorsed incumbents mostly held off conservative challengers.
In South Dakota, Thomas and Baker both said that voter engagement – door knocking and just talking with people – is the key to victory in low-turnout local elections. Baker said that conservative candidates should be prepared to take hits, particularly on social media.
“They just need to stick to their guns,” she said. “They need to be organized. They need to have people help run their campaigns that know what they’re doing.”
Ideally, Baker said, there would be more help for newbie conservative candidates like her.
“People start these elections, they’re like me, who had zero clue how to run an election, and then they fail because they don’t know how,” she said. “The left is very well organized. The teachers union is very well organized, and they’re very alive and well here.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to note that a November Facebook post by Deb Baker’s opponent was the text of a 1992 poem by American artist Zoe Leonard.