Kansas Board of Education shifts right for first time in 18 years. What it could mean
Debby Potter believes Kansas public schools should offer parents another option if they don’t want their children to be taught evolution.
She and Connie O’Brien, another Republican elected to the state school board last week, both say they hope President-elect Trump makes good on his promise to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
Social conservatives captured two new seats on the Kansas State Board of Education, gaining a 6-4 advantage over moderates and raising questions about how the board’s changing priorities could affect local school districts.
“The statements that some of the incoming board members and the current board members have made regarding public education, regarding arming teachers, regarding support for vouchers, concerns me as a parent,” said Jennifer Jarrel, a Kansas public schools activist.
Potter and O’Brien join fellow social conservatives Michelle Dombrosky, Cathy Hopkins, Dennis Hershberger and Danny Zeck in the majority of the 10-member board. They say Kansas students are being exposed to obscene materials in public schools and deride social-emotional learning standards as liberal indoctrination.
Potter said Kansas public schools don’t do enough to prepare students to succeed in the world.
“To be frank, I think everybody in the whole system is set up to fail,” she said. “I think the teachers are set up to fail. I think the students are set up to fail.
She said she’s open to the idea of redefining what public education means. “A hundred years ago, our schools didn’t run like this. We’re the ones that change the public education,” she said.
Jarrell said she hopes to avoid a repeat of the highly publicized fights over teaching evolution that played out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time social conservatives controlled a majority on the state board.
“We don’t need a crackpot state board of education. No business or industry is going to locate in this state, no small business startups are going to want to be here if we are the laughing stock of America . . . We don’t need to go back to those days,” Jarrell said.
From homeschool to the state board
Potter, who was elected to represent parts of south-central Kansas including western Sedgwick County, decided four years ago that she would run for the state board. Since then, she’s attended every meeting she can in Topeka.
“They know me as the crocheting lady in the audience,” said Potter, who went maskless at meetings during the pandemic years, citing a medical exemption for asthma.
“I felt our society’s going into a cultural war and I wanted to look out after the children. I felt that was the answer to my prayers. That’s what God wanted me to do,” said Potter, 59.
The Garden Plain Realtor homeschooled her children before moving to Kansas in 2005 and enrolling them in the local public schools where she did some substitute teaching.
Potter describes herself as “not very political at all.” On Facebook, she bemoans “self-proclaimed Christian pastors” who support “LGBTQ+ agenda” candidates and shares conspiracy videos casting doubt on Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity, including one where she commented that Harris has “not a drop (of) black ethnicity.”
Potter came to her door last Friday wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “I no longer identify as a conspiracy theorist. From now on I want you to refer to me as the girl who was right the entire time.”
Potter said she “offended the education people” last year when she questioned why a subcontractor hired by the state board to help develop new teacher training materials stated on its website that existing training curricula are often “too white.”
“I don’t even know what too white curriculum looks like,” Potter said.
Retiring Republican state school board member Jim McNiece endorsed Potter’s Democratic opponent, Jeff Jarman, to succeed him in District 10. Potter won that contest by 29 percentage points.
McNiece, who has served on the board since 2013, said any efforts to establish a school voucher system would be detrimental to the public welfare. A foray into taxpayer subsidized private education would require action from the Kansas Legislature.
“There’s a lot of people who are disenchanted or just don’t like public education and think it should be privatized in some way,” McNiece said. “You’ll never meet the needs of all the students or have any chance of meeting the needs of all the students if you do that.”
‘Strings attached’
Not every social conservative running for the state school board was victorious this cycle. Democratic incumbent Betty Arnold bested Republican Jason Carmichael in District 8, the other newly redrawn district that represents part of Sedgwick County.
In northeastern Kansas, O’Brien won her race by 2%. The former state representative previously served as director of religious education at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Tonganoxie.
O’Brien said dismantling the U.S. Department of Education would remove the “strings attached” to federal education dollars.
“The federal government was never intended to control our education system,” O’Brien said.
“What the federal government does is say, ‘OK, we’ll give you a hundred million dollars if you institute this policy. And if you don’t institute it, you don’t get the money . . . That’s where you come in and you get the DEI, you get social-emotional learning.”
Kansas adopted social-emotional learning standards in 2012 with the goal of improving students’ mental health outcomes and equipping them with soft skills that employers say make potential hires attractive.
“They twist it and pretend it’s not about teen mental health and it’s not about business skills, and I think they’re going to try to do away with it, and I think that’s a step backwards,” said Judith Deedy, whose pro-public schools advocacy group Game on for Kansas Schools campaigned against far-right candidates.
David Westbrook, a member of the Shawnee Mission school board, said the state board of education is rightfully in charge of establishing student achievement standards. But it’s up to local school boards to “embrace curriculum and teaching techniques” that fit their communities, he said.
He said now is “a time for vigilance” as the state school board undergoes a shift to the right.
“Of course, I’m concerned if people want to make schools into something other than a place for learning and growing and becoming equipped to compete in a very, very challenging future,” Westbrook said. “But I think the power remains with local school boards and I think people in their community will be more vigilant now, more engaged now than they were before.”
This story was originally published November 15, 2024 at 4:33 AM with the headline "Kansas Board of Education shifts right for first time in 18 years. What it could mean."
