It wasn’t even close. School board candidates, riding a wave of revulsion against critical race theory and the sexualization of the curriculum, won up to 71% of the vote in some locations as the backlash against CRT continues.
“We knocked on 9,000 doors. So you can imagine we had literally hundreds of conversations with parents, whether they just moved here or lived here for a long time [or] were empty-nesters,” Carroll ISD school board trustee Andrew Yeager told Fox & Friends First.
“And they would see what was happening in neighboring school districts. ‘Please tell me we don’t have — our school here, that we love, with the tradition of excellence with or — age-inappropriate material in our schools.’ It was the greatest concern.”
Retired teachers looked at the anti-CRT candidates in disbelief when informed of what was being taught in their schools today.
Candidates backed by conservative political action committees won their races in Fort Worth area suburban school board races.
Patriot Mobile, a Grapevine cellphone company that calls itself “America’s only Christian conservative wireless service provider,” poured $500,000 into a PAC to support candidates in the Carroll, Grapevine-Colleyville, Keller and Mansfield school districts, where the races included debates about critical race theory and what books are on library shelves.
Every one of its candidates won, according to unofficial results early Sunday with all vote centers reporting.
The same was true in the Grapevine-Colleyville school board.
Micah Young defeated incumbent Craig Allen 63.41% to 36.59% in Place 1. In Place 2, Joni Shaw Smith won with 56.12% of the vote to Julie Nors’ 32.23% and incumbent Karina Davis’ 11.65%. Sandi Walker won easily in Place 3 with 69.25% to James Duncan’s 30.75%
Like other Conservative candidates across the school board races, Young said he wanted to keep politics out of the classroom and ensure fiscal responsibility. His platform also included support for special education and teacher retention.
One of Smith’s visions is “curbing politicization of curriculum,” according to her website. She also wanted to increase parent, teacher and student collaboration and increase transparency.
Related: Florida Targets Math Textbooks for Including CRT
Carroll ISD school board candidate Alex Sexton said that education needs to get back to the basics, and “virtually every parent” wanted teachers to focus on the fundamentals. “That is what we ran on. We have strong messaging and the community responded to it.”
Of course, they did. And another theme that ran through the successful school board races is teaching kids how to think and not what to think. This proved to be a winning issue across the board.
Parents don’t want their kids to be mindless automatons parroting the latest dogma from the left. The best teachers always prove to be the most inspiring, challenging students to think for themselves.
Besides bearing a winning message, the candidates running in the Fort Worth area school board races were very well funded and wore out shoe leather hitting the pavement and going door to door. That’s usually a formula for success in politics.
