Opinions expressed in the Op/Ed section of The Knight Crier are not necessarily reflective of the views of the entire staff of the KC. 

The rampant and severe politicization of our educational institutions has placed a staunch distrust in the hands of those tasked with representing student and parental interests. Elected officials serving on a school board of directors are supposed to be the upholders of decency within districts, defining the ways which can better our students and children as a whole. Instead, boards across the country, Pennsylvania, and even within North Penn are now spending valuable time diverting from such duties in order to defend themselves from harassment and blatant bullying. With board meetings being the breeding ground for such events of incivility and feuding, schooling has turned into an utter game, with young students and teachers as the pawns.

The National School Boards Association, a body that has represented school boards dating back to 1940, made an unprecedented appeal to the federal government last month as a call for protection.

“Threats of violence and acts of intimidation” were pivotal examples noted by the association as a justification for their subsequent request for federal investigations using “existing statutes, executive authority, and other extraordinary measures.”

These predisposed threats of violence and intimidation are reactionary responses made largely by social conservatives as a retaliation to any form of Covid-19 response and supposed teachings of critical race theory, a favored buzz phrase of the year. The screaming matches possessed by these indoctrinated parents include verbiage relevant to these hot topics, with radicalized conspiracy theories spewing from the foam of their mouths.

“When does this end? When we the people don’t comply,” said Dana Blazo, a Mom’s for Liberty advocate, in a public comment at a North Penn board meeting on Thursday, October 21. “When people wake from their slumber, it’s going to be biblical,” she continues.

“It’s anti-American, it’s anti-family, and it’s a poison to our community,” emphasized John Gannon (according to the October 27th edition of The Reporter), a North Penn community member protesting at North Penn High School on that same Thursday, addressing his grievances regarding book choices cherry picked from North Penn libraries. 

With these board meetings having a literal ‘open-mic’ aspect to them, it’s inevitable for rampages regarding their politics of petulance to be on full display. In moments when American culture takes a form of progressive turn, conservatives consistently blame public education systems as the culprits for their said indoctrination.

Conservative coalitions additionally have made it increasingly popular to only call out partisanship when it doesn’t benefit their one-sided agendas, it being convenient to “keep politics out of the classroom,” a popular term coined by the North Penn Stronger Together school board candidates, when the politics in question don’t fit a conservative consensus. 

A coalition such as the North Penn Stronger Together team with a figure like Jessie Bradica at its forefront has no pedestal to dictate lines of apoliticism, as Bradica tries to infiltrate the North Penn School Board like those she assembled with on January 6, 2021 who attempted to do so with the United States Capitol. Attending an event of domestic right-wing terrorism doesn’t convey a state of non-partisanship like this coalition persistently champions. 

A common defense by these reactionaries include an utmost dedication to strive for non-partisan forms of learning for children that benefit each pupil accurately and accordingly. Yet, while pleasing at first glance, this is a stark contrast to their actual interior motives.

The Central York School District School Board of Directors is a republican-backed board representing a south-eastern Pennsylvanian district. Their campaign motives primarily focused on typically expected conservative topics such as banning “critical race theory,” or whatever definition of critical race theory they were subscribing to that particular week, prioritizing in-person learning, and individual choice over conjoined Covid-19 response. All of these subjects pertained to what they would deem as serving children with an unbiased and productive learning environment.

So far, that board has made a decision to ban over 100 resource materials from the educational curriculum, all being classified as sources with subject matters signifying “critical race theory.” Most being student-read books, articles, videos, and documentaries, diminished from the eyes of learners in the face of their false notion of nonpartisanship. The board has gone to the extent of categorizing the banned materials, some being labeled “categories of color” with 27 children’s books, and “authors of color” with an additional 19 books. That ban was then rescinded after an insurmountable amount of community backlash. 

This is not about bias control, nor is pertaining to the eradication of partisanship within the classroom setting. It is a clear gambit in the ever-changing advancement efforts of white supremacy. 

The influx of these ultra-conservative boards are not newfound. They may be formed as a reaction to new social issues, or social issues that are created in their own minds, but reactionary conservatism taking over a classroom can be dated back to the last 50 years.

Conservative disconcertment has a precedent surrounding public schooling. A noteworthy example includes a parents uprising in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, against a curricular introduction of literature textbooks that were deemed as anti-American, which resulted in hysteria and outrage. Opponents of the textbooks shot up empty buses and classrooms, bombed the school board building, and pelted rocks and parents who still decided to send their children to school.

Is this what ignorance has the potential to lead to? Are these the borders social conservatism has to cross in order to fulfill provingly unpopular agendas? There is nothing more hypocritical than opponents who pride themselves in defending children subsequently using them and their education as political pledges. 

Favored phrases within these settings always mention the “children,” the ultimate subject within these conversations, or eruptions, when in all actuality, this a parents war. The children are props, symbols, and talking points in which they have no actual voice to convey their opinion. A face mask is not the shield covering children’s mouths from expression, it’s a common sense measure. Perhaps the most intrusive mask is the oppressive hand of these parents concealing the mouths of their children in question, exploiting them for political gain.