New York 1776 Project is trying to impose right-wing politics on Kansas school boards | Opinion

The 1776 Project is back.

You might remember the right-wing “anti-woke” group, a New York-based national outfit that two years ago backed a slate of board candidates for the Olathe and Blue Valley school districts in Kansas. A lot of those candidates won, and the results have been about what you might expect.

In Blue Valley, 1776 Project members were the lone votes to ban LGBT-themed books last year. And one of the Olathe winners — Brian Connell — this spring was censured for his “pattern of outbursts, yelling and storming out of meetings.” District staffers said his behavior made them feel unsafe. So things are going great, obviously.

Now it’s school board election season again and the 1776 Project is weighing in.

The group last week released its endorsements for races in Pennsylvania, Ohio and (naturally) Kansas. There’s a new slate of four candidates for the Blue Valley board, of course. But the group’s ambitions range beyond Johnson County and its suburban environs — it also endorsed a pair of candidates in Lansing, four more in Chanute and three in Baldwin City.

“On November 7, parents’ rights are on the ballot in all of these states,” the 1776 Project political action committee said in its online endorsement announcement. “Our PAC is going to work hard to ensure they win.”

In other words: Let the culture wars begin again.

I don’t want to spend too much time here critiquing the 1776 Project’s conservative ideology. You’re either on board with its agenda of “promoting pride and patriotism” while “abolishing critical race theory and (The New York Times Magazine’s) 1619 Project’” from school curricula or you aren’t. I’m not. Most Americans who are paying attention to the news probably know where they stand on those issues.

Still, it’s odd to see these endorsements. Baldwin City, Chanute and Lansing aren’t exactly hotbeds of progressivism crying out for reactionary change. (Although, yes, there was a hubbub in Chanute a few years back when a portrait of Jesus was removed from the local middle school.)

Mostly, though, it’s dreary and depressing to see local school board races nationalized in this way.

In most small Kansas towns — places like Lansing, Chanute and Baldwin City — serving on a local school board doesn’t have much to do with the Democrats-versus-Republicans partisan warfare that plays out on our screens every day.

Our national political scene is seemingly custom-designed as a rage production machine. Get people angry about something they see on TV or social media and they’ll turn out at the polls or watch your show. But you don’t get people angry by being dull.

That’s why a reality TV star like Donald Trump and a host like Tucker Carlson have risen to positions of power and influence. They’re not just politicians and pundits. They’re entertainers.

Serving on a local school board, meanwhile, is often blessedly boring.

Consider some of the agenda items of the most recent meeting of the Baldwin City school board, just to pick one example. Members discussed pay rates for substitute teachers, meal prices for school lunchrooms and an agreement with a local church to rent space at the local junior high school. They also reviewed a form to be used if school staffers have to administer naloxone, a medicine given in the event of an opioid overdose.

What’s the 1776 Project going to say about that stuff?

Don’t get me wrong. The items on the Baldwin City agenda are important. They are not, however, the kinds of issues that fit neatly into our national political debates.

But they do represent most of what a Kansas school board actually does — not big debates over so-called “critical race theory” — a specific legal term that conservative activists have used as an umbrella description for just about any discussion of the United States’ unsavory racial history.

Board members do the nitty-gritty and unglamorous work of democracy. They’re performing public service to their communities and kids, in that term’s purest and most unironic sense.

They’re our neighbors. We shouldn’t need a national PAC to tell us if they’re worthy of service.