Only NOW our school board races are political?

(Because Leftists are losing!)

Elections are so unfair when your side loses. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is indignant about how “partisan” school board races have become. Because conservatives won a whole bunch of them in the liberal newspaper’s back yard this April.

Have you heard of WisRed? It’s a Republican organization that has held enormous sway in school board elections in Waukesha County. For a county that has traditionally voted conservatively, that might not come as a total shock. — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Republican Party wins 80% of school board races.”

Of the 138 candidates WisRed promoted — judges, mayors, alders, county board, and school board, only 10 were defeated. Of its 42 school board candidates in 22 school districts, 37 were elected. The Journal Sentinel continues: “It’s an extreme example of a nationwide trend.” 

“But what’s interesting is that the organization has been so deeply committed to placing Republicans on school boards, that candidates with WisRed’s backing have even replaced long-serving school board members like Craig Thompson, a two-decade veteran of the Arrowhead School Board who considers himself conservative but also felt the role should be nonpartisan.“

 Dwindling are the days for Woke enablers!

Mr. Thompson may consider himself conservative, but the voters did not. When the nine-member Arrowhead school board required parental permission before students could change their names and pronouns — on the quaint notion that parents of minor children have the right to know what’s going on with their kids at school — Mr. Thompson was the only No vote.

The local high school distributed “safe space” stickers “intended to let students know the classroom is free of judgment.” The school board reacted with a policy banning all political signage — whether LGBTQ+, Black Lives Matter, or “Thin Blue Line” pro-cop messages. Mr. Thompson voted against the signage ban. Had he prevailed, Arrowhead‘s‘ classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias might have resembled the Hamas riot at Columbia University. “From the River to the Sea” anyone? The Journal Sentinel laments:

Thompson and others in Waukesha County said they’ve seen a dramatic transformation in how school board campaigns are run. Dwindling are the days when they could win elections by knocking on doors and running on their records. The pressure is high to align with a party to secure their voter lists, mailers and ideological endorsements.

Those days dwindled in Dane County a good 30 years ago. In tandem with the teachers union and unionized labor, the Dane County Democrat(ic) Party has been muscling into office progressive candidates who, among other achievements, defunded school resource police officers and dumbed down honors classes.

In the last contested Madison school board election, the Democrat(ic) Party endorsed one Blair Mosner Feltham, who proclaimed “Our schools are products of white supremacy.” The Wisconsin State Journal also endorsed the Woke candidate, even after one of its education beat reporters proclaimed that critical race theory “isn’t taught in any of Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.” Yet, District officials acknowledge that the NY Times’ 1619 Project is taught in Madison classrooms.

Endorsing Ms. MF over a working immigrant father, The State Journal quoted a UW-Oshkosh professor who maintained that Issues like Covid lockdowns, critical race theory, and classroom chaos are “pretty disconnected from the reality of being a school board member.” Maybe that was the problem.

→ Inconvenient headline: “Democrats spend [$230,000] on Wisconsin school board races, overtaking Republicans” (Read & Weep!)

Blaska’s Bottom Line: WisRed did not politicize school board elections. When a jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty in 2021 after the young man defended himself in Kenosha’s George Floyd riots, WI School Superintendent Jill Underly played the CRT race card: “This case is a blatant example of the injustice that we see in our communities, in our laws and policies, in our policing, and in our judicial system.” But that’s not politics.

Who first politicized school board races? Class?