A Peek inside a Conservative School Board Candidate Training.

This week Twitter introduced me to Julie Vassilatos (@JulieVassilatos), a public education advocate and edu-blogger from Illinois. Last week she published a post entitled “An old-school conservative goes to a school board training seminar with Awake IL.” It is worth reading.

On September 25th, Vassilatos attended a Leadership Institute training in suburban Chicago, designed to train “conservatives” to run for seats on local school boards. The training was sponsored by Awake IL and Moms For Liberty.

The Leadership Institute, established in 1979, provides trainings for conservatives, teaching them how to succeed in politics, government, and the media. Earlier this year, the Leadership Institute announced the launch of a new program to train the next generation of conservative candidates for the nation’s school boards, urging “Patriotic Americans” to take back the schools. They insisted “the best way to fight Critical Race Theory and leftist indoctrination in America’s schools is to elect more conservatives to local school boards across the country” and “the Leadership Institute teaches conservatives how to do just that.” This was one of those trainings.

Awake IL, one of the sponsors, is a local organization which grew out of opposition to COVD-19 mitigation efforts and has become one of the highest profile opponents to LGBTQ activities in Illinois, especially in the suburbs of Chicago. Awake IL supports the whole array of “parental rights” issues: anti-CRT, marching against the “sexualization” of public school children and harassing children’s hospitals that provide gender affirming care. They regularly use terms like “groomer” and claim that drag threatens children. Their founder and president Shannon Adcock is currently running for the Indian Prairie District 204 School Board. She announced her candidacy just days after she attended the same Leadership Institute school board candidate training Vassilatos wrote about. Adcock’s Election Day is in April 2023.

The other sponsor, Moms For Liberty… well you already know who they are. Interesting fact: Sarasota County school board member, Bridget Ziegler, an original founder of Moms for Liberty, is now employed by Leadership Institute. Her title: Director of School Board Programs.

Vassilatos described the training as very practical, providing important information for anyone running for office or working on a political campaign. Some of the information can be seen here. The goal was to elect Republicans to school boards and the mantra was “The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat.”

Vassilatos spends some time explaining why she calls herself an “old-school conservative” and how the statement,”The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat,” reinforces that in today’s conservatism what matters is NOT character, values, or tradition: “The only thing that matters is power.”

She says that what groups like Awake IL and Moms for Liberty, are advocating for “is not based on truth, or principle, or a belief system; but it is based on lies, and requires assenting to lies to participate.” She goes on to expose the claims they base their organizing on as “objectively, verifiably false.” Claims like:

• NAEP scores have fallen because of pandemic school closures/Covid Mitigation but also because of SEL (social/emotional learning) curriculum.
• Teachers, administrators, and staff such as librarians are hell-bent on harming our kids, with “porn” accessible to children in libraries and sex education in classrooms.
• Medical professionals treating gender dysphoria in children are doing so either for profit or, perhaps, hatred of children and society in general.

All of this is false.

Vassilatos says when you take “away unwarranted concerns about test scores, SEL, parents’ rights, and porn, this is what is left: vitriol, threats, and violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, minorities, immigrants, and “globalists.” She says, “When you’ve swept all the lies aside and stare objectively at the will to power that drives the right, you can begin to see a few more things clearly. Like who is using these Moms For Liberty and Awake IL parents:”

The goal of the folks funding these groups is the same as it has been for decades–to get rid of public school. Since Brown v. Board of Education, the right has been attempting to destabilize public education through white segregation academies (the rise of Christian private school), disinvestment and defunding, privatizing, charterizing, and yammering about how school choice is the new civil rights (it’s not). The goal of the right has long been to weaken public ed to the point of death, and get rid of the entire federal Department of Education for good measure. 

Now all these Moms might not be aware of that. They might. But I can promise you that many of the parents that they’re sweeping up in their campaigns to crash library board meetings, threaten childrens’ hospitals, and run for school boards do not know this. They like their public schools. As most Americans consistently do. 

More ominously, these parents getting swept along by the right wing activist current may or may not understand the rising fascism these groups represent. What does it look like? Awake IL requires an enemy (alternately “the gays,” immigrants, “globalists,” libraries/librarians, and/or school employees or board members), they require assent to obviously disprovable lies, they require silencing dissent and punishing those who do not uphold their vision, and they envision this punishment being inflicted by an authoritarian power. 

The Leadership Institute keeps training folks all the same despite the elephant in the room: that “conservatives” are now fascist-leaning, conspiracy theorizing, violence-prone Christian nationalist cult members. Getting these people on school boards will only increase the speed with which our schools, and all our public institutions, are defamed, defunded, and dismantled. It will only erode long standing conservative–and American–ideals. In the guise of helping parents, these organizations are misleading and misguiding the very parents they purport to aid. And with its non-partisan, very effectual, and complicit training seminars, the Leadership Institute is merely putting lipstick on this pig.

https://cpfinsider.substack.com/p/an-old-school-conservative-goes-to

Election Day 2022 is Tuesday. If you have a school board race on your ballot, please research the candidates. Vote for the candidate that supports public education and NOT the one whose campaign slogans are based on partisan talking points and lies.