But that wasn’t the case in Loudoun County where former schools chief Scott Ziegler was indicted last week in a high-profile case in which a teen boy assaulted two female classmates months apart — with no warning to the greater school community after the first attack.

This time, it was Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, elected last year on a pledge to empower parents, who spearheaded the investigation into the district’s handling of the case: Acting on his state Attorney General Jason Miyares impaneled a special grand jury to investigate the school system’s alleged coverup and mishandling of the assaults. Its findings were released earlier this month in a .

Ziegler was fired after the grand jury found he lied to the public about the first incident, which took place in a girl’s bathroom. 

The location sparked outrage among those who believed the assault was tied to the district’s decision to allow students to use the bathroom of their choosing rather than the one that corresponds with their sex assigned at birth. The attacker was wearing a kilt at the time. Despite early rumors, he is not transgender and the bathroom policyuntil long after the first assault.

Both Ziegler and the district spokesperson were with the former superintendent facing multiple misdemeanors, including false publication, and his colleague, Wayde Byard, accused of felony perjury. Ziegler was also charged in connection with a special education teacher who said the district failed to take action after she complained of being and then retaliated against her for speaking out.

Ziegler, in a statement to The Washington Post last week, spoke about the grand jury investigation and said, “I am disappointed that an Attorney General-controlled, secret, and one-sided process — which never once sought my testimony — has made such false and irresponsible accusations. I will vigorously defend myself. I look forward to a time when the truth becomes public.”

Youngkin’s intervention, while unusual, is no surprise. Conservative parents in Loudoun County, riled by the district’s COVID policies, teachings about systemic racism and alleged sexualization of children through LGBTQ literature, have been among the most vocal in the country since the pandemic began. Youngkin capitalized on that during his campaign and came through with his promise to give parents statewide a greater say in the goings-on at their children’s school — starting with Loudoun County.

After the grand jury report was released, Youngkin addressed the backlash to his direct role in setting the investigation into motion.

“I do believe that part of my job as governor is to make the decisions to shine light on circumstances like this,” he told . “And at the end of the day, we were going to … make sure that the facts were clear, and that those that had, in fact, violated their duty would be held accountable. And that’s exactly what happened.”

The grand jury’s recounting of the case seemed to shed more light on the disturbing series of events than the political heat they generated.

The offender, just 14 years old at the time of the first attack on May 28, 2021, arranged to meet a classmate in the bathroom for a consensual encounter only to forcibly sodomize her. The victim’s father, who drove to campus soon after, was chastised by school officials for causing a ruckus at the front office. Administrators alerted parents to his behavior that day — not to the sexual assault. 

Even worse, parents said, school officials were warned more than two weeks earlier about the boy’s troubling behavior: A teaching assistant, writing to a superior at Stone Bridge High School about his infractions, ended with, “I wouldn’t want to be held accountable if someone should get hurt,” the grand jury found.

Parents were even more enraged by what came next: The boy was merely transferred to another school — rather than placed in a more secure setting — where he sexually assaulted and nearly asphyxiated another girl at his new campus on October 6, 2021.

The grand jury blamed the district for the second assault, attributing it to a “remarkable lack of curiosity” and “adherence to operating in silos.” Among the more surprising revelations: A special education teaching assistant walked into the bathroom during the first assault, saw two sets of feet in one of the stalls and did nothing about it.

The report also noted a June 22, 2021, school board meeting in which the superintendent said, in response to a question, “to my knowledge, we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” He was lying, the grand jury found: He and other school staff had already discussed the offense. Ziegler has said he thought he was being asked if they had records of any transgender or gender-fluid students assaulting other students in school bathrooms.

And there was a lead up, too, to the second assault. On Sept. 9, the boy grabbed a girl aggressively, tapped her head with a pencil and asked if she posted nude photos online. He asked another boy in his class “if his grandmothers’ nudes were posted online,” according to the report.

The superintendent, deputy superintendent and chief of staff were alerted to these incidents and knew this was the same boy involved in the earlier assault, the grand jury reported. 

“Despite having a 12-page disciplinary file, wearing an ankle monitor, being closely monitored by the Broad Run principal, knowledge of this incident by the highest administrators in LCPS … the individual received nothing more than a verbal admonishment,” they wrote. 

A juvenile court judge found sufficient evidence to sustain the charges in the first assault in October 2021 and the teen pleaded no contest to the charges in the second assault a month later. The judge to receive treatment, counseling and full rehabilitation at a locked residential facility until he turns 18, noting, “This one scares me.”

Erin Poe, who has three sons in the district, said she was devastated upon learning the scope of school administrators’ dishonesty and ineptitude. 

“I cannot imagine what this has done to the girls’ lives,” she said, adding she laments the district’s “unconscionable” decision to hide this news from families and move the offending student to another campus. “The entire situation was handled so poorly, from the victims to the child who committed these acts. All the way around, things need to change.”

Poe, co-founder of , an activist group, told ����Ӱ�� she’s grateful for the Republican governor’s intervention: She voted for Youngkin and hopes he’ll help expose the district’s wrongdoings. 

“I was happy to see Youngkin was going to make Loudoun County an example,” she said, adding his involvement, “would make it harder for them to do things the way they want — rather than the way it should be handled.”

But Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said Youngkin’s role has gone “above and beyond.” He said the investigation into the district’s handling of the case could have happened without him. 

“I think it’s just part of his politics to continue to come across as the champion of education in Virginia — and a champion of parents’ rights,” said Domenech, who lives in Virginia and has closely watched Youngkin’s ascent and the scandal plaguing the Loudoun schools.

He said both Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who during the pandemic — are “out of line.” 

He cited DeSantis for removing board members from Broward County schools this summer after a grand jury accused them of related to their role in managing a campus security program. DeSantis ordered the grand jury to investigate the district after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018. 

That probe also resulted in the 2021 indictment on felony perjury charges of former Broward County schools Superintendent Robert Runcie, of the hardline governor. Runcie has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

“DeSantis has gotten himself involved in education to a level we have never seen,” Domenech said. “He’s, in a number of school districts, removed board members, appointed board members — which is really a local election process. I’ve been in this business for 55 years and have never seen anything like this.”

In Loudoun County, the parents of the second victim had little use for school leadership across the board, according to a statement they issued after the release of the grand jury’s report.

“The senior leaders at both high schools, along with the Loudoun County Public Schools and the School Board members, should be reminded that our fifteen-year-old daughter displayed more courage and leadership when she reported what happened to her to the Sheriff’s Resource Officer than any of them ever did,” they said. “The ineptitude of all involved is staggering.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story. 

On Dec. 3,  a Loudon County public school student attempted to take his life after school staff failed to take reports of sexual harassment seriously, a lawsuit alleges.

The male student, identified as “John Doe,” was unsuccessful in his suicide attempt and his parents have filed a lawsuit against the Loudon County Board of Education. Their son would not have attempted suicide had staff members at Fort Loudon Middle School followed the county board of education’s sexual harassment policy.

The day before trying to shoot himself with his father’s handgun, the then-8th grade student told his parents that he had been continuously sexually harassed since the school year began. His parents immediately informed school staff, who scheduled a meeting the next day.

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But despite discussing preventative measures, such as stationing a teacher near the student for his safety, the boy reported another assault the same day as the meeting. School staff corroborated the incident through video footage but failed to take the matter seriously, according to the lawsuit.

After meeting with both the victim and the harassers, who admitted to the behavior as “just joking around,” the principal minimized the impact of the behavior. The harassing students “do not have good home lives,” the principal, who is unnamed in the suit,  told Doe.

Later that day, the victim wrote a note to his family, intending to take his own life.

“I love all of you all. I will be by the gas tank,” he wrote.

The Loudon County Board of Education has not responded to requests for comment.

The procedures listed under the Loudon County Title IX and Sexual Harassment policy were not followed at all, said the plaintiff’s lawyer, Justin S. Gilbert from Gilbert Law, PLLC.

The Loudon County Board of Education’s policy for handling sexual harassment  includes disseminating information about what constitutes harassment to school staff, students and parents. Under the policy, anyone with knowledge of sexual harassment needed to report immediately to the appropriate staff member, listed as Matthew Tinker.

Tinker never received a report, according to the lawsuit. Parents were also not informed of the sexual harassment policy, which details how to file a formal complaint.

The school’s sexual harassment policy also allows for an investigation and procedure to allow all involved parties due process. None of this occurred after the initial report of sexual harassment, according to the lawsuit.

Gilbert also believes the male student’s distress was not taken seriously because of discrimination.

“Being male, the assaults were treated too casually. (Doe) felt helpless, thus attempting to take his own life,” he said.

The student’s parents are seeking damages up to the statutory maximum available, or $300,000, under Tennessee law against Loudon County Board of Education. They are also seeking $50,000 for emotional distress.

Lawyers for the student’s parents are not aware the student alleged to have harassed Doe have been reported to the police. The plaintiff has since returned to Fort Loudon Middle School for ninth grade.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on and .

The political impact is increasingly seen in state and local elections, where school board members have faced a historic spate of recall attempts and gubernatorial candidates are familiarizing themselves with the tenets of critical race theory. But new research also suggests that adult disputes can have a measurable effect on how kids learn.

In a study of student test scores, a political scientist reveals damage to math achievement following high-profile controversies around cultural issues in school districts. Fairly modest on average, the effects resulting from debates specifically focused on race and evolution are somewhat larger, and they may result from the strain imposed on educators by enervating fights over competing values.

Study author Vlad Kogan, a professor at Ohio State University, informally referred to the phenomenon as the “Loudoun County effect” — a reference that emerged last year in one of Virginia’s largest districts.

“Almost by definition, the more attention these [controversies] get, the less attention student learning receives,” said Kogan. “We could just be seeing the natural result of that: When adults are focused on other stuff, it’s the student learning that falls through the cracks.”

that Americans are, on balance, satisfied with the performance of their local schools since the beginning of the pandemic. But public discontentment has also repeatedly flared around issues like the inclusion of trans athletes in girls’ athletics, while experts have simultaneously documented steep learning loss resulting from COVID-related school closures.

The study, which has not yet undergone peer review, examines the outcomes of specific episodes featured in the , a publicly available inventory of culturally inflected disputes in K-12 schools. The database, maintained by the libertarian Cato Institute, details nearly 3,000 local controversies relating to “basic rights, moral values, or individual identities.” Those controversies appear in the Battle Map on the basis of local news coverage, and each case is grouped into one of nine broad categories, including sexuality, religion, race and ethnicity, and freedom of expression. 

To assess the academic impact of those incidents, Kogan relied on math and English test score data provided by the . A widely used research tool, SEDA allows comparisons between student performance in roughly 13,000 school districts around the country by indexing different state standardized test results to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

In all, Kogan gathered a sample of approximately 520 local controversies between 2010 and 2018, dropping from the sample any districts that saw more than one controversy over that span and any larger-scale controversies likely to affect all districts within a state. He then compared the trajectory of their academic performance before and after the high-profile battles against a group of control districts that did not experience similar uproars.

The results were mixed: Compared with the control group, school districts that experienced cultural controversies did not see a drop in English scores measured between the third and eighth grades. But math scores among those students did decline in the aftermath of such controversies by an average of .018 standard deviations. (A “standard deviation” is the statistical unit most often used to measure effects in education research; an effect of that size would generally be considered small.)

In the context of the SEDA data — which finds that student math scores increase by an annual average .39 standard deviations between third and eighth grade — that relative downward movement accounts for about 5 percent of a full year’s growth in the subject.

Digging deeper into the results, Kogan also found that the overall math slippage following was driven overwhelmingly by cultural controversies in two of the nine Battle Map categories: race and human origins (including disagreements over the teaching of evolution versus intelligent design), for which the negative impact was three to four times larger. Students of different socioeconomic backgrounds were equally affected, meaning that the scale of local achievement gaps was unaltered by political fights.

Disquietingly, even if political attention dissipates, the apparent academic setbacks don’t disappear quickly. Math achievement still showed evidence of decline in the affected school districts even four years later. 

Serotkin said it was “absolutely true” that his district had seen markedly higher attrition over the past two years, but argued that its cause couldn’t be known in an environment as chaotic as the pandemic.

“I have no idea whether that [turnover] is a result of the national political controversies that Loudoun has become a part of, or whether it’s just because of COVID.”

Dan Domenech, the longtime executive director of the American Association of School Superintendents, said that the most plausible cause for lower scores could simply be that a distracted local education establishment is necessarily a less effective one. Fractured goodwill and divided attention might lead to students getting the short end of the stick in terms of both oversight and learning resources.

“With functional school boards and administration, you can see that they’re providing teachers with the necessary materials — the technology, the books, the teacher training,” he argued. “The parallel to that on the negative side would be that if the board is in turmoil and involved in these culture wars, perhaps they’re not providing teachers with the resources that they need.”

Even so, Domenech pronounced himself skeptical of such a direct connection between controversy in school governance and results in the classroom. 

“From a political point of view, I’d love to be able to say, ‘Stop your fighting — you’re affecting kids’ learning.’ It would be great to be able to say that, but they’re going to ask, ‘Well, how’s that happening?’ And that’s a question I’d have a hard time answering.”

Kogan conceded that the effects measured in the study are comparatively slight, but added that test scores themselves are only the clearest outward manifestation of how political strife affects teaching and learning.

“There’s probably other dimensions of the school environment that are really important to students but that we can’t measure through test scores. So in some ways, this is just the iceberg tip of the underlying dynamics in the districts. The fact that test scores are dropping in non-trivial amounts suggests that there are changes in how the districts are run that really filter down to the classroom level.”

The campaign had been gaining momentum all summer, with green-shirted activists circulating a petition at local concerts and farmer’s markets to remove four members, including Holden. Their complaints stretched back to 2020, when some parents pushed back against the board’s commitment to virtual instruction during the pandemic. Two days before the deadline, at a public meeting in late August, they announced they’d met the legal threshold to trigger a recall election.

Afterwards, feeling “a little disheartened,” Holden went in search of diversion. A contractor by trade, he found it in a late-night remodeling project.

“Sometimes painting is very therapeutic, so I went to work after the meeting and just painted all night,” he recalled. “I grabbed a pan and a roller and a couple of beers, turned my tunes on, and went to town.”

Holden was still a newcomer to public service, winning election just after the first COVID wave largely passed over North Dakota. When he’d voted to of the local Woodrow Wilson High School last December over the 27th president’s racist misdeeds, he expected it would be “the peak of the political nature” of the job. Now, scarcely more than a year into his term, he considered the possibility that it might end much sooner than anyone had thought.

“Never in a million years did I imagine it would happen,” he said.

Holden isn’t the only one taken by surprise this year. According to the nonpartisan political site Ballotpedia, 2021 84 recall efforts targeting over 200 school board members. Those numbers are triple and quadruple, respectively, the average rates measured over the last 15 years, with attempts launched in large and nationally prominent districts like San Francisco and Loudoun County, Virginia.

Compared with better-known recalls, such as the unsuccessful attempt to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, efforts directed at education officials have mostly stayed under-the-radar. The recall process is also a limited mechanism for political change due to its unwieldy nature: Unhappy constituents usually have to collect a large number of signatures; have those signatures be independently verified; and, if they manage those steps, prevail once an election is held. As a consequence, only one board member in the country has been successfully recalled from office this year.

But the increased willingness to trigger an unorthodox and rarely used process is a reflection of the unprecedented scrutiny directed at school boards this year, and parents’ outrage over COVID mitigation measures and the teaching of controversial subjects — a far cry from the miniature tempests that usually draw parents to board meetings — demonstrate how the themes of national politics have trickled down even to the local level. 

Joshua Spivak, a researcher at New York’s Wagner College , said that the “explosion” in attempts this year are the direct result of COVID-19. While state and municipal politicians of different types have faced public opposition to their pandemic response, the fundamental and long-lasting disruption to K-12 schools has made board members a particular target.

“The school board is maybe the most obvious candidate for a recall in this situation because their impact is very clear: The schools are shut down, or there are masking requirements, so the [effect] is right there,” he said. “And there are parents who are ready to be organized in a very real way.”

A 74 analysis of Ballotpedia’s recall data shows that over half of the would-be recalls are related to either the pace at which districts returned to hosting in-person classes or boards’ willingness to mandate mask-wearing in schools. A smaller percentage spring from allegations that districts are teaching “critical race theory.” The rest pertain to an array of local concerns ranging from financial mismanagement to board members’ trouble with the law.

Caught in the middle are the everyday people sitting on boards, who largely serve in a part-time capacity while juggling other personal and professional commitments. Tom Gentzel, an education consultant who served as the CEO of the National School Boards Association until 2020, said that the tough decisions typically facing board members might center on merging elementary schools or firing a football coach — not national debates about public health or civil rights.

“They’re not part of some larger agenda at work, and they’re not politicians. I’ve often teased school board members that if they’re planning a political career, school board is probably not a great place to start.”

Progressive outrage in San Francisco

San Francisco, where critics of the local school board election to be held in February, is one of a few places in the country that contradicts Gentzel’s characterization. It’s also located in California, the perennial leader in recalls around the country because of around the practice. Twenty-five recall attempts against school board members have been initiated in California this year. (Wisconsin took second place with 11 attempts so far, while Arizona has seen 10.)

Crucially, the city is home to a large district where K-12 politics can take center stage and education officials frequently climb the ladder to higher office. Two former commissioners of the San Francisco Board of Education now sit on the city’s Board of Supervisors, itself a springboard into state and national politics whose alumni include longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Newsom.

Politics in San Francisco, a national byword for left-wing organizing, are also substantially influenced by national conversations within the progressive movement. In February, the board competitive admissions criteria at the prestigious Lowell High School, arguing that its entrance exam unfairly advantaged white and Asian-American students at the expense of their Hispanic and African American peers. For over two years, a majority of commissioners have also waged a controversial fight to either destroy or cover a set of murals commemorating the life of George Washington in a high school named after the first president. 

Rachel Norton, a three-term board member who declined to run for re-election in 2020, said that during the Trump presidency, “the national political climate really did spill into” local races to an extent that surprised her. Public anger directed at Washington , culminating in a further leftward swing in a city where Democrats already dominated the political scene.

“Voters in San Francisco wanted to send a message, and in a place where your politics are basically ‘blue versus bluer,’ it’s hard to send a message by punishing the red team,” Norton said. “So I think we ended up with an electorate that was willing to vote much further left, and much less moderate — by San Francisco standards — than we’d seen in the past.”

The increasingly activist bent of the new board became apparent in due course. Gabriela Lopez and Alison Collins, two members elected in the “blue wave” year of 2018, were chosen as the board’s president and vice president at the beginning of this year. A few weeks later, as the culmination of a process begun in 2018, to rename 44 schools throughout the district, including buildings named after Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln.

The announcement generated local and national uproar, particularly after that the panel charged with leading the renaming process had committed historical errors after using Wikipedia to research school namesakes. Even Mayor London Breed excoriated the board for prioritizing the renaming process over developing a plan to reopen schools during the 2020-21 school year. By April, a vote was held to .

But the reversal to stop an attempt led by parents to initiate a recall election against three commissioners, including Lopez and Collins. Over six months into the campaign, the causes cited by its organizers extend past the renaming decisions. In March, Collins was discovered to have derogatory claims about Asian Americans, and after being stripped of her vice-presidency by the rest of the board, she opted to file an $87 million lawsuit to force the school district into state receivership. 

The medley of distractions represented “a testament to [the board’s] failure to prioritize and center students in their governance,” said Cyn Wang, a board member of the San Francisco Parents Coalition. Formed last year to advocate for safe reopening of city schools, the group has not been involved in organizing for the recall, but recently for causing “harm to our students and public schools.”

Wang said the coalition was composed of “San Francisco families with San Francisco values,” and that they believed in masking and following the recommendations of public health experts. But she added that the commissioners’ lengthy delays in allowing children to return to in-person classes — from hiring a reopening consultant last spring — had taken an academic and emotional toll on her daughter, who spent half of kindergarten and all of her first-grade year learning from home.

“I saw her plummet into depression,” Wang said. “I saw her staying in her room for long periods of time. I saw the impact personally, and we’re very lucky compared with some other families. That really propelled me to get involved in this issue, and it woke me up to the general dereliction of duty of this board.”

Earlier this month, that the petitioners had cleared a huge hurdle by submitting over 50,000 verified signatures of city residents in favor of holding a recall election; that automatically triggered a vote that will be held on February 15. Spivak said that the procedural challenges surmounted by the board’s detractors, along with the national political relevance of the campaign, made San Francisco perhaps “the most notable” school board recall in over 60 years.

The next test will be whether voters will actually cast enough ballots to remove board members elected just three years ago. The same three members facing the recall are scheduled for regular re-election bids next November, and Norton said the February vote will change education politics in the city no matter its outcome.

“I do think there’s a scenario that, even if all three of them or some number of them survive, there will be a big conversation in the city about who should be on the school board,” she argued. “Candidates that otherwise would have had trouble breaking through might get more attention because of the recall.”

‘Critical race theory’ erupts in VA

In Loudoun County, Virginia, the nationally publicized quest to remove five members of the local school board will not hinge on how the voters respond; state law holds that such fights are adjudicated by a circuit court once sufficient signatures have been submitted. But that quirk has done nothing to calm the local political waters. 

One of the members in question, Beth Barts, earlier this month after a judge ruled that her proposed removal could move to a full trial. Fight for Schools, the political action committee spearheading the attempt, it has gathered enough signatures to file removal petitions against two other members. 

The stated reason for the campaign is that the members in question participated in of “anti-racist parents” that strategized about how to combat racial inequity in Loundoun County Public Schools, the third-largest district in the state and one of the wealthiest in the country. The board’s detractors argue that without an announcement and the chance for public comment, that action violates the state’s open meetings laws and is grounds for removal. But the substance of their complaint reaches back to last summer, when many parents began to agitate for the 2020-21 school year to begin with a return to full-time, in-person learning.

Ian Serotkin, who is among the members targeted for removal, said that the public’s frustrations began to “bubble over” in late 2020. In a normal board meeting, he said, the public comment portion would attract 10-20 speakers. As the reopening debate wore on, that number swelled to the hundreds, with meetings stretching late into the night. Soon, viral videos began to circulate depicting enraged community members pleading with the board to bring kids back to school; raucous scenes from the proceedings became a reference point in media coverage of the anger and occasional intimidation being directed against school officials throughout the country.

Observers also noticed the volume of emails and speeches devoted to the controversy around how schools in Loudoun County addressed controversial subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. A dawning fixation on “critical race theory,” amplified by President Trump during last fall’s presidential race and repeated in conservative media, began to take over the conversation.

Serotkin said that critical race theory is not taught in Loudoun County, and the district’s recent initiatives to address racial disparities in discipline and academic achievement — including paying to the California-based consultancy Equity Collaborative to help guide its efforts —  were being “intentionally conflated” with indoctrination in the classroom. Nevertheless, he said, critics had succeeded in harnessing the community’s existing anger.

“The conversation took a turn away from just being about COVID, and the organizers of these political efforts started capitalizing on that with a captive group of parents who were very engaged in school issues about COVID,” Serotkin said.

Whether or not the analytical discipline of critical race theory is literally being taught in the classroom, some members of the community have raised concerns about the district’s actions over the last few years. After the board to change the admissions process of the district’s esteemed STEM magnet programs with the intent of accepting more Hispanic and African American students, , claiming that the revision discriminated against Asian students. This April, a county teacher in the conservative Federalist website calling the district’s equity trainings “leftist institutional racism.”

The effort to remove the board members began in March, after the existence of the private Facebook group became public. In a short-lived project that drew widespread condemnation and later from the county sheriff’s office, a few members of the group began to assemble a list of local parents who were part of an “anti-CRT movement”; that steps be taken to hack or otherwise infiltrate those parents’ websites.

Ian Prior, a former Trump administration official and Fight for Schools’ executive director, said that he objected to some aspects of the district’s focus on social justice, but that his group’s real grievance was against what he described as bungled and biased leadership from the board. The prolonged closure of schools due to the pandemic, along with the close-up view that parents received once learning went online, had engaged many parents in local politics for the first time.

“The big picture, as I see it, is that this pandemic served to awaken parents to the need to be more engaged at the local level — certainly in elections but also in making sure their voices are heard and their elected officials are held accountable. For too long, we’ve seen people focus at the national level, on these big issues being debated on the national stage, and neglecting local issues.”

But what started as a clash among parents at the county level is now playing an outsized role in state politics. Virginia will elect its next governor tomorrow, and while Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe has been considered the front-runner for much of the race, polls have tightened over the last month as his Republican rival Glenn Youngkin has focused more closely on K-12 issues. A successful businessman and first-time candidate, months ago to ban the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia classrooms on his first day in office. More recently, of both the Loudoun board and interim Superintendent Scott Ziegler over their handling of an alleged rape of a girl in a high school bathroom.

On Thursday, gave Youngkin an eight-point lead among likely voters. Among respondents who identified as parents, the Republican enjoyed a 14-point advantage. , released on Friday by the Washington Post, found McAuliffe one point ahead. Twenty-four percent of respondents said that education was the most important issue in the race — the largest share of any single issue, and a nine-point jump since September. The state of the high-profile contest, one of just two major statewide elections being held this fall, President Biden to campaign for McAuliffe personally. Another national figure, former Trump administration advisor Steve Bannon, on school board races as the opening skirmish in next year’s midterm fight for control of Congress.

Barts, whose resignation was welcomed by Prior, did not respond to a request for comment. In resigning, she joined of around the country who chose to quit in the face of possible removal. Their departure suggests that recall attempts, whether or not they succeed in their aims, can alter the focus of school boards and serve as a warning even to members who aren’t themselves targeted.

“I think that is absolutely something that happens: They might think, ‘Okay, I don’t want this to happen to me,’” Spivak said. “It could inhibit behavior.”

A return to normalcy in Fargo?

Both the San Francisco and Loudoun County recall efforts remain ongoing after months of work and thousands of signatures collected, which is somewhat remarkable in itself: Even in a normal year, the majority of recalls fall short of the ballot due to the considerable organizing demands of recruiting volunteers and activating ordinary citizens who often pay little attention to local politics.

Despite the “enormous amount” of attempts this year, Spivak noted that just one board member has been ousted so far, in a small district in southwestern Colorado. The source of the public’s disapproval came not from the man’s position on mask mandates or critical race theory, but rather .

Most would-be recalls instead follow the pattern that ultimately played out in Fargo. Less than a month after Seth Holden soothed his nerves with a night of home improvement, found that there were not enough valid signatures to bring a question to the ballot. North Dakota law stipulates that Holden and his colleagues cannot be subject to another recall effort for the remainder of their terms.

Jim Johnson, another member targeted in the campaign, said he wasn’t particularly concerned about the recall campaign. A vice president of business development at a Minnesota-based insurance brokerage, he won his seat in 2000 and has prevailed in five successive reelection bids. The current debates over COVID mitigation and cultural politics are the most contentious he can remember during that time, burning even hotter than past disputes over Common Core or No Child Left Behind.

Still, he added, while the emotional tenor both inside and outside of board meetings has been heightened over the last year, it has been more in the spirit of “North Dakota Nice”; generally cordial, with a few exceptions.

“There were a couple of board members in particular that I think had some false accusations hurled at them on social media, which is unfortunate,” Johnson lamented. “I reached out to them and said, ‘This is the nature of politics, just let it roll off your back.’ But the vast majority of the people, even those involved in the recall effort, were being pretty civil the entire time. It was just a handful of people who let their emotions carry them away.”

Some degree of public concern has abated over the last month, with the recall scuttled and students having long since returned to classrooms. The North Dakota legislature strictly limiting requirements around facial coverings — but since it only applies to state officials, it has not affected Fargo’s mask mandate, recently voted to keep in place.

For the moment, Johnson looks forward to turning to more prosaic issues. Enrollment at Fargo Public Schools is up slightly this year, and the board needs to consider whether to build a new facility to house the former Woodrow Wilson High School. Other decisions, related to staff salaries and the supervision of recess periods, await as well.

“We’re a growing school district, and we’ve got to figure out where to buy land for future buildings, figure out where we’re going to hire our next set of teachers, make sure we have a teacher contract we can get ratified every two years,” Johnson said. “That’s really my game plan. Eleven thousand kids came to school today in Fargo, and they need to be educated.”

Lead Image: People protesting against critical race theory being taught in schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, on June 12. (Getty Images)