I’ve been making my way through your emails about school board activism stories in your various necks of the woods. And I have to say, keep them coming, if for no other reason than the immense entertainment value just to me. But seriously, for many other reasons too. I’m digging into them and trying to figure out which ones to report out first. But there are a few points that stand out in advance of that.
One of those points is something I’m half being reminded of, half learning, which is that there was a pretty big backlash against “anti-woke” school boards in 2023. It’s not universal certainly. But it’s not just the story I’ve been telling you about for the last few days in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There are examples all over the country. (I’ll be coming back to Bucks. Holy Crap, there’s a lot.) This morning I’ve just been reading up on one in a very backwoods part of Idaho, The West Bonner County School District. A lot of the same stuff: a bunch of freaks get washed in in 2021. They do all the anti-woke stuff and other stuff that’s more just being against public education generally. There’s a successful recall. The board brings in a new superintendent who is a former state legislature whose career went south when it turned out he might not actually live in the state. (Really.) The bigger problem is that Branden Durst had no background in education and didn’t even have the minimal accreditation the state requires for superintendents. He hung on for like three months before he had to resign. That was back in September.
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