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Monday, July 24th, 2023

How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country

Author:     Nicole Carr and Lucas Waldron
Source:     ProPublica
Publication Date:     July 19, 2023
 Link: How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country
Stephan:  

American education is in crisis because not only is it being attacked by politicians, it is also being attacked by ordinary MAGAt citizens who are trying to take over school boards and impose their version of the culture war. This is all part of The Great Schism Trend. and it will have a generation long effect, with the Republican controlled Red states having a less educated population than the Blue states. This will have all kinds of implications for decades to come in Red states. There will be less technological innovation in Red states. Less educated people tend to vote Republican so this distortion of education, will perpetuate that bias which, of course, is the goal. It will strongly effect the wellbeing of states that do this in a negative way.

Time and again over the last two years, parents and protesters have derailed school board meetings across the country. Once considered tame, even boring, the meetings have become polarized battlegrounds over COVID-19 safety measures, LGBTQ+ student rights, “obscene” library books and attempts to teach children about systemic racism in America.

On dozens of occasions, the tensions at the meetings have escalated into not just shouting matches and threats but also arrests and criminal charges.

ProPublica identified nearly 90 incidents in 30 states going back to the spring of 2021. (That’s when the majority of boards resumed gathering in-person after predominantly holding meetings virtually.) Our examination — the first wide-ranging analysis of school board unrest — found that at least 59 people were arrested or charged over an 18-month period, from May 2021 to November 2022. Prosecutors dismissed the vast majority of the cases, most of them involving charges of trespassing, resisting an officer or disrupting a public meeting. Almost all of the incidents were in suburban districts, and nearly every participant was white.

In the course of our analysis, […]

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