Parental rights candidates had mixed results in polarized NJ school board races

Results tallied so far from last week’s school board races show that movements to inject parental influence and conservative values in K-12 public schools took a beating in some districts but maintained control in others, as culture wars continue to polarize school elections.

Candidates campaigning on the parental rights platform ran against opponents who call themselves pro-public education in hotly contested races in some of the state’s nearly 600 school districts.

Nationally, too, parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty suffered losses in several states, including Iowa and Kansas. In the famously partisan Central Bucks County school district in Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped the Republican school board.

New Jersey’s school board races are nonpartisan, so partisan win tallies are unofficial and posted by local groups. Pro-public education candidates have performed strongly this year compared with 2022, but neither side demonstrated sweeping wins.

Parental rights candidates adopt a wide range of issues, from promoting school vouchers to opposing sexual themes in curricula and in school libraries. They object to policies mandated by state law that prevent schools from informing parents about a student’s gender expression without the child’s permission.

Meanwhile, pro-public education candidates support teachers’ unions, oppose vouchers and say school trustees should focus on operating schools, leaving decisions about classroom material to the administrators.

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Two of the most polarized school board races in North Jersey — Westwood Regional in Bergen County and Sparta in Sussex County — saw parental rights candidates losing. In Sparta, two incumbent candidates on a parental rights slate that swept the school board last year lost to a candidate they routed.

In Basking Ridge in Somerset County, a four-member parental rights slate with one incumbent was defeated.

Parental rights controls Ramapo-Indian Hills board

In the Ramapo-Indian Hills Regional School District, parental rights candidates won two seats, ousting pro-public education incumbent Vivian King and her running mate. But voters also reelected an incumbent, Brian DeLaite, who has opposed the board’s parental rights members.

“It changes everything for us,” board member Aaron Lorenz said after DeLaite was reelected. “Just watching this board drive out incredibly talented administrators … was really disconcerting,” Lorenz said. The district’s business administrator, Tom Lambe, resigned in July because of the atmosphere on the board, he said. The superintendent, Rui Dionisio, resigned in August. Both have taken positions in other districts.

The board’s parental rights majority has been maintained at 5-4. Lorenz has publicly criticized initiatives that included racking up high legal bills, firing the board’s longtime law firm, and engaging in conversations that excluded the board’s minority members, resulting in “surprises on the agenda,” Lorenz said.

The two winning parental rights candidates, Audrey Lynn Souders and Melissa Kiel, ousted pro-public education board member King, who votes with Lorenz on most issues.

Moms for Liberty in Morris County

The Morris county chapter of national parental rights group Moms for Liberty saw three endorsed candidates win by a tight margin in Parsippany, with one projected winner leading by just 50-odd votes.

But another Moms for Liberty-endorsed slate in the Pequannock school district was losing by a nearly 10% margin to three winning candidates by over 200 votes. Chapter head Nikki Lois declined to comment for this story or say how many of its endorsed candidates won.

Mail-in and provisional ballots were still being counted in some counties; the deadline for receipt of timely mailed mail-in ballots to county boards of election was Monday.

Parental rights candidates also won in Chester and Roxbury school board races, with Moms For Liberty having a strong presence in Republican-leaning Morris County, said Darcy Draeger, executive director of the political action committee Districts for Democracy.

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Districts for Democracy, formed by former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, released an unofficial analysis of wins on both sides. The pro-public education organization tracked candidates endorsed by New Jersey Project and Moms For Liberty, both parental rights groups.

Of 20 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed, eight won, Draeger said, based on lists the organization published on its website before the elections. Those lists are no longer on the organization’s site, and the numbers could not be independently verified.

Of 327 candidates supported by Districts for Democracy, 65% won, Draeger said in an interview.

The group supported candidates only in contested races.

New policies to 'reflect what the parents want'

Another pro-public education group, the New Jersey Public Education Coalition, joined hands with Democratic-aligned SWEEP New Jersey. Of 536 candidates it supported statewide, 61% won, it said.

“We're very pleased, because this is the first time that the coalition and SWEEP NJ have been totally active for an entire election cycle, and it is a huge improvement over last year,” said Michael Gottesman, founder of the New Jersey Public Education Coalition.

Still, the parental rights group New Jersey Project endorsed 470 school board candidates and 68% won, said Nicole Stouffer, who founded the group.

Where the races were contested between parental rights candidates and their opponents, 58% of 311 candidates endorsed by New Jersey Project statewide won, according to Draeger’s analysis.

Stouffer said her group had big wins in Monmouth and Hunterdon counties. Candidates “took over at least one seat” in many other towns, she said, including Ringwood, Teaneck and New Milford.

“I see the news stories about how parental rights candidates had devastating losses, but that isn’t the case in New Jersey," she said in an email. "This will be proven next year when the schools start changing policy to reflect what the parents want. We are already working on that plan now.”

Parental rights candidates overall were “quite successful again” compared with last year, said Joshua Aikens, who won as a parental rights incumbent on Sussex County’s Lafayette Township school board.

Aikens, a former consultant for the parental rights group Arise NJ in 2022, said he would be “fully engaged” next year and “not on partisan issues.”

Statewide, a total of 1,804 candidates ran for 1,487 open school board seats, and there were 745 uncontested seats, according to the New Jersey School Boards Association — so the percentage of candidates endorsed by advocacy groups was still relatively low.

Partisan groups involved in nonpartisan elections

Even though school elections in New Jersey are nonpartisan, candidates on both sides of the culture wars have leaned on partisan and politically affiliated groups for support.

Districts for Democracy did not make financial contributions to pro-public education candidates but used funds to support them, Draeger said. It also sent out about 450,000 text messages in two waves to 250,000 voters in the week before the election, encouraging them “to vote for school board candidates who will fight back against censorship and book bans,” she said.

The text messages, provided by Draeger, said, “Extreme MAGA groups who support banning books are trying to take over school boards.”

Districts for Democracy tried “to discredit candidates with their highly partisan text messages,” Stouffer said.

Several Republican Party organizations and politicians campaigned on parental rights platforms, including the Monmouth County Republican Organization, which posted ads for school board members on its social media pages.

Groups like New Jersey Project gave some Democratic-leaning candidates the moniker “bad apple” for adopting the “black apple” logo used by the pro-public education group Action Together New Jersey.

The state’s largest teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association, which funded legislative races using its political action committee, hailed legislative wins. It said 96% of NJEA PAC-endorsed state Senate candidates and nearly 90% of Assembly candidates won. “Whether a candidate is running for school board or Senate, the votes they take and the policies they pursue will affect what happens in our public schools,” the union said in a statement.

Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, reelected in a district where parental rights is a big issue, is also the chair of the Senate Education Committee. “The Republican machine tried hard to confuse parents that inappropriate things were being taught in the classroom," he said. "What these politicians missed is that New Jersey parents know everything that’s going on with their children … and can’t be tricked.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Parental rights candidates mixed results in NJ school board races