Inside the Conservative Campaign to Take Back School Boards from Classroom Closers, CRT Activists

Driven by opposition to school closures and critical race theory, conservatives across the country are fighting for a voice on their local school boards.

W hen Jess Bradbury and her husband moved to their home in Lower Providence Township outside of Philadelphia ten years ago, they did it with education in mind.

The schools in the Methacton School District were some of the best in Pennsylvania, Bradbury said, and the district as a whole was well regarded in the state.

Fast forward a decade. Bradbury’s eight-year-old daughter is preparing to start third grade, and things in the district have changed. She said the school board is pushing political activism over core academics, hurting its rankings. Textbooks have become political footballs. The district hired a consultant to identify diversity and equity problems to solve. At one point middle schoolers were surveyed about their gender identities, Bradbury said.

Bradbury, a technology professional who’d never even attended a school-board meeting before the pandemic, decided in January that she needed to do something. She now is part of a wave of conservatives across the country — moms, dads, grandparents, teachers — who’ve been energized over the last year by national school debates to run for seats on their school board, hoping to change the direction of local institutions typically dominated by the Left.

Many of the new conservative candidates, including Bradbury, initially were troubled by their school district’s reluctance to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. But once they were engaged on that issue, their concerns blossomed. In the wake of racial justice protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death last year, they say they’ve found schools in the thrall of left-wing social-justice activists pushing divisive “anti-racist” dogma and controversial gender views.

“I guess the silver lining with COVID is that it has awakened a lot of us to what’s been happening in the districts that we wouldn’t have otherwise paid attention to until it was too late,” Bradbury said in an interview with National Review.

Too often conservatives have ignored public schools, feeling safe in their communities, and viewing public education as a left-wing issue, said Ryan Girdusky, a New York-based political consultant and writer. Even in deep-red communities, it’s common for the local school board to be dominated by Democrats, he said. In the past, conservatives may have seen troubling education trends on the horizon and thought, “it can’t happen here,” Girdusky said.

“Of course it can,” he said. And as conservatives are seeing now, “It can happen anywhere.”

In May, Girdusky launched the 1776 Project, a political-action committee dedicated to helping conservative school-board candidates across the country. He said that while conservatives have engaged sporadically through the years in debates about public education — school prayer, school choice, Common Core — to be successful, that engagement needs to be sustained.

“I’m glad that some are finally coming around to say, we can’t just move into our little bubbles,” Girdusky said.

Girdusky is not alone in his efforts. In some states, including Pennsylvania, newbie school-board candidates are being helped along by grassroots organizations, whose leaders also have been newly awakened to the importance of school boards.

In January, Philadelphia-area mom Clarice Schillinger founded Keeping Kids in School, a political-action committee that’s helped to recruit and support 94 school-board candidates, including Bradbury, committed to ensuring that schools stay open in the fall. She’s since morphed that original group into Back to School PA, a more streamlined organization working with similar county-level groups across Pennsylvania.

Of the 94 candidates Schillinger’s groups are supporting, 92 won their primary elections earlier this year. Although her group is being supported by Republican venture capitalist Paul Martino, who’s contributed $500,000, Schillinger insists her organization’s efforts are bipartisan.

“These parents on both sides of the aisle are not okay with what’s happening in our public school systems right now,” she said. “And if it’s a Republican that’s going to put their kid back in school, that’s who’s getting their vote. That’s the reality right now.”

In late July, Politico also reported that it’s not just Republicans who are concerned about the direction of the nation’s schools. Politico reporters interviewed Democrat-leaning and politically moderate suburbanites in six states – five of which were won by Joe Biden last November – and found that people “are up in arms over their school systems’ new equity initiatives, which they argue are costly and divisive, encouraging students to group themselves by race and take pro-activist stances.” In places such as Loudoun County, Virginia, a wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb, school-board meetings have turned into raucous affairs.

The National Education Association has tried to smear the conservative school-board movement, asking in an online article “Is QAnon Radicalizing Your School Board?” NBC News took the bait, publishing its own story in early July and asking if running for school board is QAnon’s new plan. The number of school board candidates nationwide who are Q adherents seems to be small. The candidates who spoke to National Review were not Q followers

Jason Saylor, who is running for a seat on the Perkiomen Valley School Board in the suburbs of Philadelphia, said he became concerned about the direction of the district when schools didn’t reopen last fall. Like Bradbury, his concerns broadened. There was the elementary-school principal who was fired last year for sharing conservative memes on Facebook. There was a “kerfuffle” about what he deems the district’s effort to push critical race theory in the schools.

Saylor, who runs a local Little League, is an advocate for refocusing the district’s lower schools on teaching the basics. “We should be talking about English, math, science, the return of civics in the school district,” Saylor told National Review.

Mike Kennedy, a candidate for the school board in the nearby North Penn School District, is a history and marketing teacher in a Philadelphia city school. He has parochial concerns about the district’s discipline policies, spending decisions, and what he sees as a lack of preparedness to teach students who aren’t native English speakers. But he also is concerned about what he sees as a school board that is increasingly dominated by political partisanship.

The board, he said, has become a jumping-off point for local Democrats looking to start political careers. To Kennedy, a school board should not be a hyper-political body, but rather a grass-roots community organization dedicated to making important decisions “about our most precious assets, our kids.”

“They brought politics into our school district, and now unfortunately into our classroom,” Kennedy said of the current board. “And that’s something that I’m adamantly against.”

Girdusky, the founder of the 1776 Project PAC, said he was spurred to help by family members who saw a problem with their schools but didn’t know what to do about it. With his background in politics, and feeling like he could make a difference, Girdusky said he “decided to jump in head first and kind of go for it.”

Over the past two months, he’s raised about $200,000 from about 2,600 small donors. He doesn’t have any large corporate donors yet, but hopes to get some. Right now it’s a small operation, just “me, my assistant, and my dog,” Girdusky said.

Depending on how much money he raises in the coming weeks, he hopes to help anywhere from 50 to 100 candidates with advertising and voter engagement this fall, and to help them to develop a “very positive, patriotic education platform.”

Most of the races he’s targeting will be off-off-year elections, Girdusky said.

“There’s nothing else, in places like Colorado and Kansas, on the ballot,” he said. “If you could just engage 5 to 10 percent of the conservative base, you can win in even the bluest areas.”

So far this year, conservatives have seen mixed results in their efforts to capture local school boards across the country. 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. In Rapid City, S.D., a slate of conservatives won four seats on their school board, defeating two incumbents, including the board president.

However, conservative slates lost school-board races earlier this year Anchorage, Alaska, and in a Montana race the Democrat-endorsed incumbents mostly held off conservative challengers.

Girdusky said getting people engaged on local school-board races is hard, but necessary work.

“People tend to sit there and want to focus on big, national, sexy news stories that get a lot of attention, that raise a lot of money,” he said. “And school boards don’t do that.”