LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – All over Michigan, incumbent and newly elected school board members will be transitioning from campaigning to governing this week as the first meetings of the new year start occurring. And with those new boards convening, there will be a legion of new members showing up to represent the parents and taxpayers in their communities, many of whom were elected to change the trajectory of how their schools are being run.

There have been numerous issues that led to the contentious November elections between the conservative parental-rights candidates and the Democratic union-supported candidates running for office. Many of the parental-rights candidates who ran are new to politics but passionate about what drove them to run including what they found to be oppressive COVID-19 pandemic policies in their schools. In addition to that, school-related culture war debates sprung up all over the country and in Michigan.

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In past decades, no one paid much attention to school board elections. Part of that was because they were held in the summer and taxpayers didn’t even know that they were happening. The Livingston Post reports that participation in those elections were often not more than about 10%. That allowed the teachers unions to dominate the landscape and get their candidates into schools across Michigan. The MEA (Michigan Education Association) could pretty much call the shots and decide who was going to run Michigan schools. The Livingston Post goes on to say that many candidates came from athletic booster clubs and groups like the PTOs (parent-teacher organizations).

Then along came a new law in the late 2000s that put the Michigan school board elections on the November ballots in the general election alongside presidential and gubernatorial elections. Although that added up to some extra votes here and there, there still wasn’t much competition against MEA-supported candidates and the status quo continued.

That all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic came along. Many parents started noticing that schools weren’t doing what they wanted. The schools were shutting down and when they did open again, they implemented mask and vaccine mandates. They were also delving into other things that some parents opposed like teaching critical race theory, enforcing transgender policies that allowed boys in girl’s bathrooms and on girl’s sports teams and offering what some considered to be inappropriate sexual material in classrooms and libraries.

Parents started watching the school board meetings on Zoom and they attended the meetings in person once they were in-person again. They were voicing their opinions loudly and some startled school boards got security protection and others made it harder for parents to attend the meetings at all with new rules for attendance and public comment.

Even as the parents made their displeasure known to the school boards, most still continued to ignore the wishes of the vocal majority, not only in Michigan, but across the country. It became a national issue.

As those school boards continued to ignore the wishes of the parents, and even tell them they had no say in what went on in their children’s schools, parents started to organize groups to fight what was going on. They sought out parents and community members who were interested in running to be on school boards in order to oppose their school’s “woke” agendas.

A national organization called Moms for Liberty was formed with chapters throughout the country including 12 in Michigan. Local groups also popped up at the state and local levels. Some of those groups that appeared in school districts across Michigan including Get Kids Back to School PAC (GKBTS), The Chalkboard Four in Forest Hills, and The Clean Slate in Hartland.

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Although school board races are mandated to be nonpartisan elections, at least on the ballot, politics and ideology took over the races and in most districts, candidates were either backed by the MEA or by a conservative PAC.

Some of the conservative pro-parental slates of candidates with PACs behind them won their elections and some didn’t. It appears to be a mixed bag with some conflicting data.

An initial analysis after the November election by Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan found that only 48 of the 121 candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty and GKBTS PAC won their races. Moms for Liberty had endorsed 74 candidates across Michigan and appeared evenly split on who won according to the analysis.

Nationally, Moms for Liberty Co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich told Michigan News Source, “Over 50% of Moms for Liberty endorsed candidates won their elections to school board, with 76% of them first time candidates for elected office! We plan to continue to work to elect school board members that respect the role of the parent in a child’s life.”

They continued, “At Moms for Liberty we know it’s not enough just to get candidates elected, you have to continue to support them as well. We are building an army of parents to support candidates that are fighting for parental rights. We also work to connect school board members with resources that better help them understand their role as an elected official such as the Leadership Institute and Heritage Action.”

Moms for Liberty did not financially support school board races in Michigan but they said they plan to financially support races across the country in the future.

The MEA had a record-breaking 330 candidates running for local school boards in addition to 11 candidates for community college boards of trustees and six library boards. They claim that 73.5% of their endorsed candidates won but didn’t respond to our request to get more clarification about the details about their races and how much money was spent on the campaigns.

Matt Wilk of the conservative GKBTS PAC told Michigan News Source that his group endorsed 57 candidates in Michigan in the 2020 November election and 21 won. He said “only nominal amounts of money were generally spent on any given race.” As far as additional support, Wilk said, “Yes, I will be providing training and assistance as need be. We were clearly beaten by an organized concentration of absentee voters. We’ll be fixing that as we approach 2024.”

Support for the new board members will be needed as they start the process of governing and that includes legal support. David Kallman of Kallman Legal Group said he has had numerous calls to represent school boards. These new members don’t want to continue with the previous law firms that the board had hired because they are looking to go in a new direction. Kallman said, “We are getting calls from a lot of public school boards because a lot of public school boards have flipped to conservatives.”

Kallman told Michigan News Source, “The conservatives on these various school districts now control the boards and the majority and they are going to start implementing policy that I’m sure will cause some controversy with the more liberal folks in the districts – like on transgender bathroom stuff and showers and participation on sports teams and the critical race theory and DEI stuff that’s going on. They’re going to stop that in their school districts.”

He said the conservative school board members want to get the school back to teaching the basics – teaching the kids to read and write – and stop the the “woke” policies that have been implemented across the state. Because of this, they are “expecting to get pushback from the liberals who don’t want that.”

Kallman continued, “They’re (the new conservative members) planning on making these changes and so they’re looking for legal counsel that won’t oppose them and will support the changes they want to make and defend the board against any lawsuits that are brought.”

He added, “It’s not just defending on a particular case. We’d be helping them with any legal issues that come up with the school district and the board.”

So far, the Kallman Legal Group has had three school boards who have indicated they want to hire his firm, two more who are likely to come on board, and about four others considering the change.

As far as the future of what is to happen with schools in Michigan, Donald Wotruba, Executive Director of Michigan Association of School Boards (MASB), told Michigan News Source, “The elections are behind us and we now hope that school board candidates move from campaign mode to governance mode. The responsibilities of a school board member are important and rarely political so community expectations will be that boards go about the work of governance and continue to move their districts forward in concert with the administrative team at the district. If school boards get mired in adult issues at the board level it will detract from the important work of making decisions related to improving student achievement.”

Wotruba also said that although there is no one at the state level to collect data on how many school board members who won were newly elected, their organization is in the process on getting the districts to update their information and hope to have some more data by the end of January or early February. He noted that typically about 700 members end up as new board members. He believes that there were school board races in every county in Michigan and between 1200 and 1500 school board seats that were up for election in November.

The MASB will also be there to help the new school boards move ahead with their work. He said, “MASB provides access to in-district workshops on roles and responsibilities, we have a monthly webinar series for new board members, we offer training classes, and a number of other options for school board members and school districts.  We also encourage districts to have robust orientation processes in place locally.”

The MASB reports in their “2022 Candidate’s Guide to School Board Elections” that “Michigan public officials annually oversees expenditures of $16.98 billion, sets policies affecting the future of 1.43 million students and makes decisions that impact cultural and economic life in more than 600 communities.”