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But I think it takes having a good representation of all to really make a school what it can be.”īonnie Anderson, a Katy school board candidate who made national headlines last year for her attempts to ban the graphic novels “New Kid” and “Class Act” by Jerry Craft, has repeatedly accused another candidate, Eliz Markowitz, of being a “predator.” Markowitz, the only openly gay candidate seeking a board seat in Katy, has spoken against attempts to ban books featuring LGBTQ characters and storylines. “The current school board has more liberal type, leftist views, which there’s nothing wrong with that. “My conservative views right now are not represented on the current school board,” Ashley McCombs said in an interview. Her husband, Jason McCombs, is also running for one of three open seats on the board in a joint campaign promising to bring “ Christian, conservative values” and transparency to the board. “More and more, you see these national partisan issues showing up in races down ballot, and that’s especially true of school boards.”Īshley McCombs, a parent of six and president of the Williamson County Republican Women club, was inspired to run for a seat on the Hutto Independent School District board of trustees, in a suburb outside Austin, in part because of the district’s handling of Covid and the creation of a diversity and equity task force, which McCombs has criticized. “You know the old saying, ‘All politics is local.’ That increasingly is not so true,” said Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Political observers, meanwhile, are watching these races as a test of whether battles over racism and LGBTQ issues will continue to drive turnout heading into the November midterms. In several races, parents who showed up at board meetings last year to argue against Covid safety measures or to read sexually explicit passages from LGBTQ-themed library books are now themselves seeking seats on school boards, often with the backing of newly formed political action committees and endorsements from state Republican officials.
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One year after conservative parents began packing school board meetings nationwide to protest lessons on racism and library books dealing with sex, sexual orientation and gender, those issues are dominating May 7 school board elections across Texas, especially in the booming and fast-diversifying suburbs outside Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.Īn NBC News review of school board elections in 20 suburban Texas school districts revealed more than 40 candidates running campaigns focused, at least in part, on culture war issues that have monopolized national politics. And in Mansfield, a suburb southwest of Dallas, a newly formed political action committee sent mailers alleging that “woke” policies were to blame for a mass shooting in the district and endorsing four school board candidates who would “protect our children” and “keep critical race theory out of our classrooms.”