As students prepare to return to classrooms in the fall, battles over critical race theory and mask mandates are resurfacing at school board meetings nationwide.
Parents packed into auditoriums and parking lots for meetings this week to protest various school policies as the first day of classes quickly approaches, reviving the chaotic scenes that closed out the spring semester earlier this year.
In Loudoun County, Virginia — the site of one of the fiercest fights against left-leaning school rules — more than 150 people lined up to speak at a meeting to weigh in on a transgender policy.
The Tuesday meeting dragged on for hours due to comments from parents, pushing the final vote to Wednesday.
During the lengthy and emotional speaking period on Tuesday, a woman who said she was a Loudoun County teacher resigned over the proposed rule, which would compel school staff to use a student’s preferred pronouns and grant transgender students access to the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
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Despite fierce objections from many local parents, the board passed the transgender policy on Wednesday evening.
The Loudoun County School Board implemented new rules for the fall after its final meeting of the previous school year in June, which devolved into chaos amid protests of the transgender rule and the school’s embrace of curriculum that opponents describe as critical race theory.
But the burst of activism aimed at school boards in multiple states is not limited to critical race theory — parents are also passionately arguing against mask mandates and other areas they see as public schools as overreaching.
At a school board meeting in Williamson County, Tennessee, on Tuesday, parents shouted, waved signs and gathered in a crowd outside the building to protest a mask mandate in the county’s schools. The meeting drew hundreds of people chanting, “No more masks,” according to local news.
The board voted to impose a mask mandate for elementary schools despite the opposition.
In Waconia, Minnesota, on Monday, the Waconia School Board voted to keep masks optional after parents flooded the meeting with opposition.
In Burlington, Wisconsin, on Monday, the local school board delayed its vote on a mask mandate because the debate got too intense, with parents railing angrily against a proposed requirement for face coverings.
The scenes are likely to repeat at school board meetings nationwide as parents and teachers turn their attention back to education after a summer with declining COVID-19 cases fell — before rising again and sparking new concerns about pandemic precautions in the classroom.
Some Republican governors have set up possible showdowns with local school boards over mask mandates and critical race theory by attempting to ban both at the state level.
Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have issued statewide prohibitions on mask mandates that local school districts are already attempting to challenge.
Public schools in Dallas and Austin moved this week to impose masking requirements in defiance of Abbott’s executive order.
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The school board in Broward County, Florida, which includes some of the Miami area, voted on Monday to require all students and teachers to wear masks in the classroom in a rebuke of DeSantis’s ban.
DeSantis’s office warned earlier this week the Florida Education Board of Education could withhold the salaries of school board members or district officials if they attempt to impose mask mandates and violate the state’s rules.
