Do We Need Captain America to Protect Our School Boards?
The Poway Unified School Board, which oversees policy and budgeting matters affecting 36,000 students and 4,000 staff members, will be keeping its regular meetings virtual for the foreseeable future.
On September 10th, the board met in person. They were expecting to have a discussion about safety protocols. Public comments would be heard via Zoom.
Via the front page story in the UnionTribune:
According to witnesses, about 25 protesters stood outside district offices in Carmel Mountain Ranch, some carrying signs that read, “Let Them Breathe, unmask our kids,” “Recall Gavin Newsom,” and “Critical Race Theory teaches hate, racism, division.”
Before the 6 p.m. meeting began, some of the protesters forced their way in. The district has photos and videos of protesters entering the building, which will be given to law enforcement to investigate, Paik said.
The board decided to adjourn its meeting after consulting with law enforcement, but protesters stayed in the meeting room. It’s unclear if the district plans to files charges against those people, Paik said.
Some videos on social media showed a few protesters claimed that night to have voted themselves onto the school board.
San Diego Unified will have its own virtual meeting next week, discussing requiring vaccines among eligible staff and students. It’s already clear that the same forces behind the cancellation of Poway’s meeting intend to repeat their performance at the SD District Building on the evening of September 28.
https://twitter.com/TheActivatedPod/status/1439348338508263432?s=20
The 'stochastic terrorist cheerleaders' at KUSI are on the case, whipping up fear, loathing and confusion over the possibility of a discussion about the safety of San Diego’s students.
Since the early days of the pandemic, concierge Doctor (meaning he doesn’t have to see poor people) Jeffrey Barke has been a virtual fountain head of misinformation mixed with alarmist themes, to the point where he garnered a PolitiFact article.
Then there’s the matter of the now-deleted video where he claims a handgun could offer more protection from the coronavirus than a facemask.
Here’s a snip from the Los Angeles Times:
A local physician caused a stir last week when he appeared in a video waving a handgun and saying he’d rather people carry concealed weapons than wear face masks to guard against the coronavirus.
Dr. Jeff Barke, a Newport Beach family medicine physician who serves as board chairman of a charter school in the city of Orange, has been a vocal opponent of mask wearing and has appeared at rallies to reopen schools and businesses.
https://twitter.com/KUSINews/status/1440064851909300227?s=20
Maybe I’m just funny that way, but I’d think common sense would dictate limiting the exposure of this kind of inflammatory talk prior to a public meeting
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School board meetings are, by design, fragile events. Lots of parents whose children represent their most significant contribution to society at large come to voice their opinions about everything.
Having sat through my share of SDUSD meetings I always found it amazing that a group of part-time trustees found the meetings anything less than torture, not because of agreeing or disagreeing about issues, but because of the intensity on display.
Was the person using their two minutes of allotted time to passionately make their case engaging in dramatics to get heard? Or were they engaged in a performative demonstration in advance of an act of violence?
The fact that large numbers of students actually attend school board meetings.probably mitigates some of my concern, but with threats against public officials from poll workers to legislators on the rise everywhere, you have to wonder.
And many of those who’ve offered to step up for the educational needs of the community are having second thoughts. Others are facing recalls for daring to insist on public safety measures.
From the Associated Press:
Police have been called to intervene in places including Vail, where parents protesting a mask mandate pushed their way into a board room in April, and in Mesa County, Colorado, where Doug Levinson was among school board members escorted to their cars by officers who had been unable to de-escalate a raucous Aug. 17 meeting. “Why am I doing this?” Levinson asked himself.
Kurt Thigpen wrote in leaving the Washoe County, Nevada, school board that he considered suicide amid relentless bullying and threats led by people who didn’t live in the county, let alone have children in the schools. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder,” he wrote in July.
Susan Crenshaw resigned from the Craig County, Virginia, school board this month with more than a year left in her term after being “blindsided,” she said, by her board’s decision to defy the state’s mask mandate in a move that she said felt more driven by political than educational considerations.
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The concept of local control of education is embedded in US political history. The Constitution delegates such matters to the control of the States, which have in turn established broad standards to localities.
In the great school reform debates starting in the 1980s local control was increasingly seen as an impediment to excellence.
Charter school advocates and others seeking to tap into a vast pool of public funds used the inefficiencies and amateurish political behavior as reasons to dilute or eliminate school boards as a tool of democracy. After all, how could national test standards and other mandates be implemented if 13,000 boards serving an average of 5,000 students had to be coordinated?
So-called reformers in districts throughout the country sought to dilute board powers by linking them more closely with more pliable state and local elected officials. Locally, a group explored a ballot measure to add appointed members to San Diego Unified Board of Trustees.
More recently, the focus on school boards has included various flavors of opposition to diversity training, anything other than unbridled patriotic representations of US history, and even the mixed race status of Texas principal’s marriage.
Whether it’s the imagined influence of post graduate courses in Critical Race Theory, sex education courses, or mask mandates, these groups all operate with their outrage level set at maximum drawing on a combination of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric.
Guess what? The grassroots nature of these groups is actually astroturf.
From the Associated Press:
A loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower to local activists engaged in culture war fights in schools across the country.
While they are drawn by the anger of parents opposed to school policies on racial history or COVID-19 protocols like mask mandates, the groups are often run by political operatives and lawyers standing ready to amplify local disputes.
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Whether or not school boards are effective or simply tools of the establishment, the nature of the hostility being directed at them needs to be considered in the context of what can only be described as an ongoing attempt to erode the very foundations of democracy.
At some point in the not so distant future, this erosion will have to be addressed in a larger sense, not unlike what has historically occurred with civil rights issues (which are obviously intertwined).
Might we need a League to Protect Democracy? Can we get Marvel or one of the companies in the Saga Media Industrial Complex to capture and expand up this idea? Stay tuned.
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One of the Good Guys has passed.
https://twitter.com/BuffyWicks/status/1440179921628762125?s=20
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