Progress Without Profit: Stop violence at school board meetings

A  few years ago, I signed up for the social media app, NextDoor, for an inside scoop on all my neighborhood gossip back home. What can I say? I’m nosy. Recently, however, I’ve found the posts less entertaining as the site became a battleground over coronavirus safety regulations. I wanted to laugh at a few overdramatic parents, not worry about the country’s future.

Even more worrisome, anti-vaccine sentiments posted on NextDoor don’t live purely online but have very real, tangible consequences — consequences that hit a little too close to home. In September, anti-vaxxers barged into the school board meeting for my school district in San Diego and refused to leave. Police advised the school board members to evacuate, which led to the anti-vaxxers attempting to swear themselves in as the new board. Most of the intruders did not have children who attended schools in my district. 

School board meetings should focus on funding and improving educational opportunities, but anti-vaxxers transformed them into sites of political contestation, ripe with misinformation and threats. School should strengthen democracy through knowledge, not undermine it. 

Escalations in my former school district represent a widespread, dangerous problem throughout the country. Last month, the nonprofit National School Boards Association published a letter imploring the federal government for help during school board meetings. The letter asserts that school board members and teachers are threatened with violence “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” It details numerous instances across the country of school board members receiving hate mail and threats and encountering angry mobs that prematurely adjourned meetings.  

Although NSBA later apologized for unspecified strong language in its letter, I don’t believe they should’ve. School board members face unwarranted violence that prevents them from doing their jobs and have every right to not only seek federal assistance but also highlight the issue’s severity. 

In Ohio, for example, a school board received a letter reading, “We are coming after you … You are forcing them to wear masks — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.”  

In Michigan, an individual yelled a Nazi salute to protest mask requirements in two separate meetings. It is impermissible that scientifically proven attempts to maintain public health have led school board members to fear for their own lives.

Some Americans love to throw around the term “free speech” to dismiss any form of accountability for words. However, these threats cannot be dismissed as merely free speech when they threaten a person’s life. 

In North Carolina, the chair of a school board resigned because of death threats over his decision to vote to require masks in school.  In Arizona last month, a man brought zip ties to the principal’s office in an attempt to make a citizen’s arrest after his child was forced to quarantine. I wouldn’t call the insurrection at the Capitol “free speech,” and I wouldn’t label the displays at school board meetings as harmless expressions of rights either. These threats are not empty words.

Unsurprisingly, conservative politicians weaponized this outrage over vaccine mandates at school board meetings to further their agenda. As a result, they conflate protests against vaccine mandates with another conservative talking point: critical race theory. 

In Douglas County, Nev., Adam Laxalt, who is not a county resident but a prospective Nevada Senator, attended a school board meeting to call for critical race theory’s permanent ban. Other attendees, some of which don’t have any children in the district, cheered him on. For reference, although the uproar might make you think otherwise, critical race theory is not even taught in Douglas County public schools.

In fact, the NSBA letter explained that propaganda fuels protests against critical race theory, despite its absence from all K-12 public schools.  The chaos stems from fear-mongering among conservatives because of critical race theory’s concept: children learning a more complex, historically accurate portrayal of race relations in the United States. 

Politicians such as Adam Laxalt use school board meetings as campaign rallies, caring more about potential votes than students’ well being. Students in Douglas county schools claim the disruptions at meetings prevent the school board from dealing with urgent problems such as the lack of substitute teachers and the struggles of returning to in-person learning. 

In Virginia, riots resulted in a person’s arrest, another’s ticketing for trespassing and a third’s injury — all because the school board discussed the difference between current curricula and critical race theory. People invade school board meetings without conducting proper research beforehand. They seek to undermine an institution and a curriculum that can educate future generations on detecting and avoiding misinformation. Consequently, their actions perpetuate an ugly cycle of people who learn from a few clicks on Facebook rather than in a classroom. 

We depend on education to create an informed population that understands both the vaccines’ value and centuries-long racial inequality in this country. School boards should focus on cultivating an environment that allows this knowledge to take root. Instead, they spend their valuable time and energy worrying about their physical safety, all because politicians value their political careers more than the country’s future. 

Sophie Roppe is a senior writing about nonprofit organizations and social justice. Her column, “Progress Without Profit,” runs every other Monday.