Culture warriors suffer defeat in local school board races across Ohio

Ohio voters on Election Day, for the most part, said no thank you to candidates who signaled that they would push the culture wars into local school board meetings.

The Nov. 7 election results seem to mark "the end of the stealth school board candidate," said University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven. School board races used to fly under the radar, allowing "folks with pretty far-out-there views" to run without much scrutiny, he said.

The emergence of formal, organized efforts backing the candidates has helped them win races but also drawn more attention to their views, he said.

“It was a lot easier to present yourself as a concerned parent or concerned taxpayer or civic minded and not ever be confronted with ‘do you want to ban books? Or do you want to alter the curriculum or inject police into the schools?’ And now the effort is so much more brazen that it’s kind of a double-edged sword. They’re working harder to do this, but they’re almost at cross purposes with themselves.”

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Across Ohio, candidates backed by conservative organizations including Moms for Liberty, the 1776 Project, and Ohio Value Voters lost scores of school board contests on Tuesday.

In central Ohio, several conservatives ran on promises, such as keeping transgender girls off girls' teams, protecting parents’ rights, limiting diversity and inclusion efforts and curtailing sex education. Eight of 10 of them lost.

The Moms for Liberty chapter in Stark County endorsed nine candidates for local school board seats. Julie Barkey, an incumbent on the Northwest Local School Board, was the only winner.

In the Cincinnati area, two of eight candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won and two others backed by Ohio Value Voters scored victories.

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With more than 600 school districts statewide, it's difficult to track what's happening on the ground with all the local board elections. But Red Wine & Blue Ohio, a liberal leaning grassroots political group, said that "extremists" lost 73% of school board races in 25 key districts.

Where did conservative candidates win?

Still, candidates who want to engage in the conservative battles over LGBTQ rights and curriculum design made headway in some school districts.

Two candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project, which wants to emphasize pride in American history and eliminate teaching the 1619 Project, appear to have won close races in the South-Western School District in suburban Columbus, according to unofficial results.

Two groups that support parents' rights and protest school curriculum that discusses diversity and the LGBTQ+ community − Moms for Liberty and Ohio Value Voters − scored a handful of wins in Cincinnati-area school districts.

Ohio Value Voters controls the Protect Ohio Children Coalition, which collects anonymous tips that Ohio schools are indoctrinating kids on critical race theory, comprehensive sex education and social and emotional learning.

Four of their candidates won one seat in each of the districts of Northwest Local Schools, Oak Hills School District, Little Miami Local Schools and Lebanon City Schools.

That almost guarantees that battles over LGBTQ students' rights, curriculum design and parents' rights will ramp up.

Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based nonprofit, said 50 of the 139 school board candidates it endorsed across the nation were elected. The group’s track record for the entire year is only slightly better. Overall, the group said 44% of the candidates it has endorsed this year won.

The 1776 Project said 58% of the candidates it endorsed across the country – many of them in conservative areas – won. “Considering the national environment, we view that as a strong result,” said Ryan Girdusky, the group’s founder.

Reversing course

In the Cincinnati area, Forest Hills School District and Lakota Local Schools board meetings teemed with discord and arguments after the 2021 school board elections.

Forest Hills banned Diversity Day at a local high school and painted over a mural celebrating racial diversity and the LGBTQ+ community at a middle school. In Lakota, outspoken anti-diversity school board member Darbi Boddy trespassed into school buildings to take photos of student projects and teacher decorations that support race and gender diversity. She also compared suicide prevention lessons to Nazism.

In Lakota, Boddy regularly debates diversity and gender policies that typically don't go anywhere with the rest of the school board. But those conversations have taken up hours of the board's meeting time. On Tuesday, voters elected one of Boddy's loudest opponents: parent Douglas Horton.

Horton said election results "reflect Lakota families taking back control of their district from outside forces and political influences."

In Forest Hills, voters elected two candidates who ran together on a platform of embracing diversity.

Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro said voters in those districts signaled that they don't want the focus on divisive issues.

“They lost this time. I think sometimes the election of those types of candidates can be a wake up call for a community. Rather than deterring others from running and serving, it actually motivates people to step up and serve,” DiMauro said.

Niven agreed.

It's one thing to have a partisan fight over the federal budget but people don’t want that kind of fight over what time high school classes should start or which neighborhoods feed into an elementary school, he said.

“The kind of tactics that might work in national politics just backfire in local politics.”

Information from USA TODAY is included in this report.

Laura Bischoff is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Conservatives promising culture war fight in schools lost key races