Education What happened when I ran for school board in Virginia By Ilya Shapiro December 02, 2021 11:00 PM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print Education What happened when I ran for school board in Virginia By Ilya Shapiro December 02, 2021 11:00 PM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print About a year ago, when schools were still closed in northern Virginia and parents were fretting about learning loss, the school board in my small town of Falls Church voted to change the names of Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High. That decision, and the board’s abdication of responsibility over pandemic policy — deferring repeatedly to the superintendent, who kept moving the goal posts on reopening — eventually led to my running for a seat this fall. I lost, but the experience taught me about the practicalities of campaigns, the vagaries of politics, and the limits of local governance. It’s vital to be the change you want to see in your little neck of the woods, but often, institutional factors are such that higher-level reform is essential even to residents of the second-richest “county” in the country . (Falls Church is an “independent city” of fewer than 15,000 people , a bedroom community of lawyers, lobbyists, and other professionals that’s the nation’s smallest county-equivalent municipality.) What possessed me to run for office? Local governments do all sorts of silly things, and being on the school board...