Counting up the damage
When he talked to the Moms for Liberty convention back in July, Jordan Adams explained how new conservative board members could use their first 100 days to hit hard, flooding the zone with a kind of shock and awe. The conservatives of Pennridge School District board, Adams’ single client for his fledgling consulting business, may be rethinking his advice this morning as they contemplate their defeat in Tuesday’s elections.
Pennridge is in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, a county that has been ground zero for the Moms for Liberty style installation of far right policies in school boards. Since acquiring a majority, Pennridge has pursued a host of right wing policies. They had trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they removed DEI policies).
Pennridge’s conservative board also hired Adams, with close ties to conservative Christian Hillsdale College, to scour through their curriculum and remove all things woke. This was a new business model, a proof of concept for retooling a school’s curriculum along more conservative lines. He was, he told the Moms for Liberty crowd, the “fox in the henhouse.”
Now the henhouse is under new management. As of this morning, it appears that all five open seats on the board were won by candidates who ran on opposition to culture wars, secret agreements, poor policies, and the adoption of the curriculum recommended by Adams.
The backlash was also felt in Central Bucks district school board race.
Central Bucks has drawn national attention for implementing a wave of conservative policies. They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute (“Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.”) They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a “gender identification procedure”. No student name changes allowed without a note from home.
The conservative shift drew enough attention that Penncrest school board on the other side of the state treated Central Bucks as a model.
The race drew spectacular amounts of money, particularly from Paul Martino, a venture capitalist who had put half a million in 2021 Pennsylvania board races. This year he chipped in $279,000 (out of a total $600,000 for both sides) in support of his wife’s campaign for a board seat.
The campaign was brutal and, if one followed it on social media, mean. But the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this morning that the Democratic candidates swept the election, including the defeat of Martino’s wife and Dana Hunter, incumbent board president.
It will take a day or two to assess how the election went for all school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty and similar conservative organizations. But Bucks County was a flagship area for these groups, not just for implementing far right school policies, but also for using school board elections as an attempt to create some leverage with which to move a swing state into the red for 2024.
In 2021, Moms for Liberty claimed credit for winning 33 seats in Bucks County. This year, they were much quieter about their endorsements, suggesting they were already aware that the Moms for Liberty label could be a liability. As with abortion, conservatives have to deal with the reality that their preferred policies are not always popular at the ballot box.
School boards may have seemed like a soft electoral target, quiet elections that don’t draw much attention and therefor an easy entry point for conservative politics. But in the past few years, a pattern has emerged; voters may sleep through one school board election, but implementation of radically unpopular policies will wake them right up again.
