From book bans to gender-neutral bathrooms, culture wars have found a battlefield in Western Pennsylvania schools.

National politics increasingly are influencing school boards, as party lines are splitting members over hot button issues such as sex education, trans rights and the appropriateness of classroom materials.

School boards’ once-marginally attended monthly meetings now, in many districts, are drawing animated crowds.

As voters prepare to head to the polls Tuesday, school boards have joined traditionally higher-profile races as ones to watch.

“There has been a divide since covid masking that has made it a political situation,” said Bart Rocco, executive director of the Tri-State Area School Study Council at the University of Pittsburgh. The council helps school districts, intermediate units, vo-tech schools and charter schools to keep pace with evolving administrative, legal and instructional issues, and is part of Pitt’s School of Education Department of Teaching, Leading and Learning.

School board arguments that once focused on budgets and dress codes have devolved into pitched battles over what’s being taught in the classroom, what books are on library shelves and which students can compete on athletic teams.

“These issues that were national issues, like critical race theory and book bans, now are being brought to the local level because people are watching their selected news channels and becoming entrenched in a certain position,” Rocco said. “It’s created a dichotomy, and we need to look at how much is too much and a detriment to the system.”

Rocco grapples with the topic because, he said, parents need to be involved in their child’s day-to-day education. Parental participation translates to a high rate of success, he said.

Seeing schools being thrust into the center of issues — whereas years ago they were just “folks trusted to do the right thing” — is frustrating, Rocco said.

From national to local

At Hempfield Area, debates over book selections began in 2022. A faction of parents challenged the inclusion in the high school library of two books: “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson and “The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person” by Frederick Joseph.

Johnson’s book chronicles his journey growing up as a queer Black man. Joseph’s book reflects his experiences with racism.

Parents and residents spoke for and against, many bringing signs reading “Bans off our Books” and other anti-censorship slogans. Others called out the board for the books’ descriptions of sex and said the books groomed children for promiscuity.

Jennifer Stape, a stay-at-home mom who is running for Hempfield Area School Board, said it’s obvious the district has been impacted by politicization.

“This external pressure is coming from entities that are very powerful, including bigger government agencies but also education affiliates and special interest groups, in influencing the decisions of school boards at the local level,” she said. “I called this a tyrannical stronghold in one of my addresses to the school board this past year.

“It presents a monopolized education system that restricts freedoms of the people: freedom for the students to learn, freedom for teachers to teach, freedom for the parents to parent and freedom for the community to be fully represented by their elected school board officials.”

Board member Jeanne Smith, who is up for reelection, said times are different — not just for school boards but all elected officials.

“It seems as if people are bringing federal politics into our local races, which really don’t belong here,” Smith said.

Sherri Smith, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, said having to engage in politics creates a difficult job for educators.

“We certainly should be listening to the concerns of elected officials, but the question is how to manage the concerns without interrupting other processes,” she said.

A school board’s priority is education and programming, and those who are concentrating on political issues are missing the mark, Sherri Smith said.

“The fact is that anyone who is running for political reasons soon realizes that there’s not one issue that they can concentrate on. There are millions of other issues,” she said.

The school administrators association works with superintendents and offers workshops that help combat potential issues, like political divisions, before they start. They discuss responsibilities of the school board and processes to meet those goals, all before new board members are sworn in in December.

“The goal is to better understand how to work as a team,” Smith said.

“If we follow down that path (of disruptions and bullying at board meetings), I’m concerned about who wants to step up to that path anymore. We already have a shortage, and then what will we do?”

In Plum, a mailer by the borough’s Republican committee touted its candidates for school board under the banner of “Education not indoctrination.”

The mailer appeals to voters to elect candidates who support their “values.”

“There are a lot of controversial topics and issues out there that may not be in the best interest of kids,” said Republican committee Chairman Steve Schlauch, a former Plum School Board member who is running for borough council. “Kids should get a great education. We don’t want them to be indoctrinated with controversial topics and issues.”

In the Pine-Richland School District, a group of parents turned out Oct. 25 to lobby for banning certain books they said they believe include sexually explicit language.

“People finally are catching on to this scam called public education and lack of parental rights and lack of transparency and covert fake committees with handpicked members to bring in whatever the team of one wants to convince the rest of the team of nine about,” said former school board member Therese Dawson of Wexford.

Last year in the Norwin School District, the minority school board faction was able to pull the plug on broadcasts of CNN 10 from the intermediate school schedule. They argued CNN is one-sided.

The same group sought to have a presentation by a speaker who claimed on Fox News that the U.S. education system was teaching socialism. That vote deadlocked 4-4.

There also were debates last year over whether critical race theory was being taught in the high school. Critical race theory centers on the idea that racism is systemic in institutions and that the nation’s institutions function to maintain the dominance of white people.

Norwin School Board member Alex Detschelt criticized Assistant Superintendent Natalie McCracken for belonging to a professional education association whose website had a link to an article about diversifying a school workforce.

Not always a local issue

In the Allegheny Valley School District, candidates say divisive issues gaining national attention haven’t yet reached the local level.

Likewise, Highlands School District candidates said they feel politics have been kept mostly out of the board’s decision-making process, but at least a few mentioned issues are right under the surface.

“I do not think the board is overly politicized right now, but it definitely has the potential to be in this election cycle,” said school board candidate Autumn Monaghan. “We have a responsibility to represent every person living and learning in the district regardless of political affiliation.”

Mackenzie Christiana, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, noted a trend of elections becoming more politicized and contentious, while others have simply seen a greater number of people engage as education reemerges as a key issue in communities.

Rocco, who worked in public education for nearly four decades and served 10 years as Elizabeth Forward School District superintendent, said if the hostility continues, districts will lose people who care.

The loudest voice isn’t always representative of the majority, he said.

“Sometimes the people that come to the meetings become the dominant position, but we need to be mindful of the voice of all parents,” he said. “There is a need to be receptive and have civil discourse. We should be modeling behaviors that we want our children to be having. We need people to help nurture our children. Do we want to teach belonging and understanding or create dissension that alienates children and counters what education is about?”

Hempfield’s Tony Bompiani has spent 16 years on the school board but is not seeking reelection.

There’s more polarization and campaigning on the school board now than when he ran in the 1990s and early 2000s, he said.

“I’ve served with probably 50 different school board members, and other than one or two, I couldn’t even tell you what party they were,” he said. “People weren’t arguing party at all. It was all about the kids and all about how to help them.

“I’m not saying it’s not like that now, but it’s definitely polarized. Definitely, you know where people stand. Definitely, you know who is an R and who is a D.”

Staff writer Brian Rittmeyer contributed to this report.

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