Will school board elections change much with political parties involved? | Opinion
The reservations people have locally about making school board elections partisan is an understandable concern.
National and state politics hinge on the two-party system, and the government in Washington D.C. has regressed to a situation of nothing happens on Capitol Hill unless there’s some kind of deal made between legislators that represent the different parties in a “scratch my back in this issue you don’t care about as much as I do, and I’ll scratch your back when the roles are reversed later on down the road” kind of way.
And if a deal can’t be reached or some kind of compromise can’t be agreed upon, well then nothing happens and cans get kicked down the road, issues affecting millions of citizens go unaddressed for years or the government actually shuts down.
The only reason we don’t see that kind of gridlock at the state level right now is because the Republican Party has a super majority in the legislature, so unless there’s some kind of massive disagreement between the Gov. Bill Lee, House Speaker Cameron Sexton or Lt. Gov. Randy McNally or other members of the leadership.
And honestly, at the local level, one could make the argument that gridlock sometimes happens (how many decades have the temporary trailers been at Pope School?), but it’s not often that gridlock happens because of who all on the county commission has an R or D by their name as much as it is commissioners not wanting to get something done in another district if they feel their own district has been slighted in some way over a period of time.
And Larry Lowrance’s comments last week about partisan elections giving the voters a chance to be more informed about the candidates they’re voting for, but the argument to that is how many voters will simply vote for all the candidates because of that R or D next to their name without really giving thought to the candidates themselves?
Sure, a conservative-minded person who leans to the right politically may agree most of the time with a Republican school board candidate, but what if that Republican school board candidate has multiple children that didn’t go to public school so there’s no indication there of how much they really support or care about public education in Madison County?
Or a left-leaning person may typically vote with the Democrat party, but what if that Democrat school board candidate is running with only one issue in mind and doesn’t care much about any other concerns any of his or her constituents have with the system?
It’s a dangerous path the Jackson-Madison County School Board could be going down with this. Now the last couple of years or so have been a time of peace that seemed impossible three years ago when there were regular public arguments between board members about long-standing issues, new issues brought up seemingly random at a meeting or even board members who’d served together for two years not even knowing each other’s name.
Could adding partisan primaries to the mix upset the apple cart Superintendent Marlon King has worked hard to settle for the past year-and-a-half while also dealing with a global pandemic and getting two schools built?
It’s a reasonable question to ask at this point, but JMCSS history over the past three decades suggest that’s not needed to upset.
Elections may not have been partisan specifically because of national political parties per se, but division over local issues already fell close to party lines before the state legislature’s bill last fall.
Brandon Shields is the editor of The Jackson Sun. Reach him at bjshields@jacksonsun.com or at 731-425-9751. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at editorbrandon.
This article originally appeared on Jackson Sun: Will school board elections change much with political parties involved? | Opinion
