Turning the tide
One place to reverse our slide toward a post-Constitutional nation.
I’ve talked about this regularly for the last few years since moving to Delaware, but it’s that time of year for voters in the First State to begin considering who will be on their school boards.
However, I wasn’t really going to make a big deal out of it in this new Substack forum until I got an e-mail a couple weeks ago from my old associates at iVoterGuide with a special announcement on reforming schools: the formation of a School Board Victory Fund.
I chipped in a few dollars right away because that was a concept I proposed in Rise and Fall as part of TEA Party 3.0: a focus on school boards and their elections. We can have all the backing and vetting we want from local patriot groups, but these local school board elections are won and lost on name ID, and the left-wingers know how best to build that up - it’s called money. For all the hoopla that’s put out there about parents trying to take over the system, don’t forget the other side has its own agenda and adherents who have that monetary advantage and are running in “historic numbers.”
But while I got the initial e-mail, I was disappointed to find that iVoterGuide wasn’t making news about this beyond its e-mail list, which is probably only in the five- to six-figure range. As they note, “The fund will be strategically targeted to fuel our research, education, and get-out-the-vote machine in battleground school districts where conservative voter turnout is most urgently needed. In fact, our research experts are already at work identifying these key districts and races.”
Unfortunately for us, conservative voter turnout is needed everywhere. Sure, that can get a little bit of seed money together to do some of the higher-profile races (such as in Texas, where iVoterGuide is based) but what about the activist in little ole’ Delaware? One reason I wrote this piece in the first place was noticing how few had filed when the deadline is next Friday. The woman who is on my local school board now hasn’t even filed for re-election. However, I will caution that the public disclosure of who has filed is a lagging indicator in Delaware because the state had to do some background checking of would-be candidates before they become “official” and they may not be through it yet with everyone.
But here in Sussex County, there are only eight filed total for seven available seats, and if that keeps up there will be no elections here in Laurel in May. (The current school board member won by acclamation in 2018. According to the state Board of Elections, that was the middle of a three-year run here in the Laurel district where only one filed for office, so there was no need for an election.) As of yesterday when I checked again, only Delmar and Seaford have a contest this year. And no one yet in Laurel.
However, if anyone was to begin such a fund in Delaware, it would have to have two purposes: one, to elect good conservative school board members, and, secondly, to elect legislators willing to reform the school board election calendar to an every-other year balloting where an equal-as-possible portion of the school board membership is elected. (Using the five-member Laurel board as an example, under my proposal there would be three elected in 2023 and two in 2025.) The state did part of this in going to four-year terms beginning last year, but they did not finish the job, resulting in a weird rotation here where we elect one of the five members each year until 2026, where two will be on the ballot. But from 2027 to 2029 it’s back to one member.
I think this strange Delaware system was intentionally done to maintain the status quo as you may elect one outsider but the other four can constrain the attempts at reform. In my vision, it would take less time for a board to be turned over, perhaps even one election. It’s the system I grew up with in Ohio, and I thought it worked pretty well for the purpose of adding new voices occasionally. It would certainly work more quickly to bring needed reforms to our system, although that’s only one prong of the approach: they would need a lot of assistance from the state in implementing school choice by money following the child wherever the parents want to utilize it.
Public schools should be able to compete in a robust educational system instead of being the only option for those who need the choice most. That’s how we got into this quandary, and if we’re to survive as a Constitutional republic we need to find our way out.