Texas resident Scott Henry had never run for any sort of political office and had no political aspirations of any kind.
But last week, he was one of dozens of parents across the country who won school board races by campaigning on providing a voice to parents concerned about critical race theory, school mask mandates, and the lack of transparency from school board members.
A successful businessman and parent who regularly volunteers at his local Baptist church, Henry says he only decided to run for the school board of Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, based in a suburb of Houston, when he realized that the “gentlemen and ladies” on the board were ignoring parental concerns.
CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATES FLIP SCHOOL BOARDS ACROSS THE COUNTRY
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Henry cited “the lack of transparency and accountability in our board” as the catalyst for his decision to run.
“A board should be open to the public and responsive to the public’s needs and wants,” he said. “We’re here for the parents first and foremost.”
Henry ran against incumbent Don Ryan and handily defeated him last Tuesday with over 17,000 votes, more than twice Ryan’s totals, according to elections website Ballotpedia.
Ryan had signed a September 2020 resolution declaring that systemic racism existed in the school district and that the district needed to “conduct an equity audit that will lead us to develop an equity policy/policies so we can better strive to close the gaps of opportunity and achievement among ethnic groups, races, genders and those of low socioeconomic status and learning differences.”
“Our message resonated because parents wanted change, they wanted better changes in our policies in Cy-Fair and they wanted to ban CRT,” Henry said, mentioning transparency from the school board as a policy that especially resonated with parent voters.
CRT is an academic theory that says racial minorities in America are continuously oppressed by systemic racism built into American institutions and culture. Its presence in public schools has been the subject of heated debate nationwide, particularly at school board meetings.
Henry’s campaign, which was backed by the Harris County Republican Party, knocked on over 24,000 doors over its course, a number that he said was greater than the get-out-the-vote effort in the area during the 2020 presidential campaign.
“Our message was simple and resonated with the majority of CFISD voters,” Henry said in a victory statement he provided to the Washington Examiner. “They wanted a much-needed change, better support for our teachers, respectful family boundaries, a renewed focus on academics, and transparency in our policies.”
Across the state, in the Dallas suburb of Southlake, Andrew Yeager, a businessman and adjunct professor who grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, emerged victorious in a special election to fill a vacant seat on the Carroll Independent School District’s school board, cementing a 4-3 conservative majority on the board for the first time that he could remember.
Yeager, like Henry, had no political ambitions, but an “overreach” by liberals on the school board to, among other things, police “intended and unintended microaggressions” and the suggestion of a fellow community member prompted him to run.
“I started speaking out against these radical ideas,” Yeager said, “trying to just have common sense solutions, and then someone asked me, ‘You know, you’re very even-tempered, you’re trying to bring the temperature down, you’re about common sense solutions — would you consider running?’ And that’s kind of how it happened.”
The father of three daughters, two of whom graduated from a local public high school and the third a current high school student, Yeager said that his election is “a chance to serve my community and give back because we felt the school prepared those two daughters for their careers.”
Yeager said he realized that his electoral victory was part of a nationwide trend, which he said is a good indication that “if you’re going to be a candidate for school board, you have to be in touch with parents’ concerns.”
The race saw a record voter turnout for a special election, Yeager said. The local ABC affiliate, WFAA, reported voter turnout was a mere 10% below the 2018 governor’s race in the state. Yeager won with over 65% of the vote.
“Is the answer to have radical ideas or common sense ideas?” Yeager asked. “And that’s where I think the community came out and voted, very strongly, to say, ‘Let’s have common sense ideas.'”
While Yeager and Henry won races in the Lone Star State, to the north, in Lansing, Kansas, Amy Cawvey won her race for school board on a similar parent-focused platform.
She says she was motivated to run after seeing the school board display little care for parental concerns on COVID-19 restrictions and critical race theory.
“I noticed the schools were not reacting and listening to what the parents wanted,” she told the Washington Examiner, before adding that this was especially the case with COVID-19-related restrictions and noting that the school board just barely, by one vote, elected to have in-person learning during the 2020-21 school year, nearly defying a survey of district parents that showed 80% wanted a return to the classroom for in-person instruction.
Cawvey said she has three children, and while only one is still of school age, she’s noticed a substantial difference in what the older two learned in school versus the youngest.
Chief among the differences has been the incorporation of critical race theory into school materials. Cawvey said the difference was noticed in no small part because COVID-19 school closures allowed parents to see what their children were learning.
“I’ve seen over the years that things from the East and West coasts come to the Midwest later,” Cawvey said, citing critical race theory as the latest coastal idea to find its way inland.
“Our governor has not banned CRT in Kansas,” she said, referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. “So the last line of defense is the school board.”
“I really think you need parents … on the school board,” she went on. “Just having educators doesn’t speak for everyone, especially the taxpaying parents.”
Three board seats were up for election last week in Lansing, with Cawvey finishing third out of six candidates to secure her electoral victory.
Cawvey was one of dozens of candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project, an anti-CRT political action committee founded by Ryan Girdusky, who said Cawvey and others the PAC endorsed were just “average parents concerned about the direction of public education.”
Girdusky said he founded the PAC to fund school board candidates during the throes of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 as he noticed that, with online schooling, parents were having their eyes opened to the realities of public school curricula.
“I couldn’t start a school,” Girdusky said. “I don’t have the academic background for that. But I can do school board elections.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The vast majority of the candidates Girdusky’s PAC endorsed fit the same profile as Cawvey: parents living previously private lives who decided to take a plunge into local politics, concerned that their voices had not been heard.
