Why did Missouri school boards break from national group without asking Kansas City?

Missouri school boards are supposed to be nonpartisan and free of political pressure. But you wouldn’t know it by the Missouri School Boards Association’s recent decision to part ways with a group that serves a similar role at the national level. The MSBA’s executive board of directors jumped the gun by withdrawing from the National School Boards Association, an unnecessary move fraught with hypocrisy.

And we can’t help but wonder if board members bowed to political pressure from top Republicans from Missouri and right-wing rhetoric on mask mandates and what they dishonestly denounce as “critical race theory” in the process.

In October, the NBSA asked President Joe Biden’s administration for federal help in responding to the growing number of threats directed at local school board members across the country. The Missouri association left the national group shortly after.

The state group objected, saying executive board members were not consulted or advised on correspondence to the Department of Justice that unnecessarily compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists.

So what did the MSBA do in response? The group voted unanimously to separate from the NSBA without consulting several school boards from the Kansas City metropolitan area that pay tens of thousands of dollars in dues with taxpayer money.

The MSBA executive board is heavily populated with members from rural Missouri. School boards in Belton, Center, Raytown, Grandview, Lee’s Summit and others near Kansas City were not notified of the state group’s intent to separate from the national group.

Kansas City School Board Chair Nate Hogan is a MSBA board member. But he was absent from the Oct. 22 special meeting and did not have an opportunity to vote for or against the withdrawal.

“I do not believe the NSBA values that were represented by their letter to the president represented those of districts in Missouri,” Ruth Johnson, MSBA vice president and a member of the Raymore-Peculiar Board of Education, wrote in an email. “They did not have the processes in place for a letter such as that to even be sent so it showed me a lack in leadership.”

The Lee’s Summit School District Board of Education was not consulted about the departure, school board president Ryan Murdock said. The body will discuss the issue at an upcoming meeting, Murdock said.

What’s worse, the Missouri School Boards Association disassociating itself from a national group or being hypocritical in the process?

The NSBA’s description of dissenting voices at contentious public school board meetings across the country was extreme and uncalled for. The national group rightfully apologized for the loaded language. But the MSBA has made its position clear, joining Republican-leaning states Ohio, Pennsylvania and Louisiana by withdrawing its membership from the national association.

No one should be compared to a terrorist simply by exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. Parents should speak up for their children and against policies that they don’t agree with. But no one deserves to be threatened or fear for their safety for sitting on a local school board.

The departure came weeks after Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden, a Republican from Columbia, asked the MSBA if board members “believe concerned parents from the great state of Missouri are domestic terrorists?”

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, two of the top GOP officials representing Missouri, followed with similar rhetoric.

Threats of violence against school officials, staff and teachers, fueled by extremists’ views over mask mandates and objections to how history is taught, are real. Yelling and screaming over mask requirements and school curriculum unmasked does nothing to prevent respiratory droplets from spreading COVID-19.

Missouri Republicans rejoiced when former President Donald Trump unveiled the Operation LeGend anti-crime initiative that saw local and federal law enforcement officials work together to target violent criminals in Kansas City, St. Louis and other cities.

Is it really such a bad idea to ask the feds for help to address threats and violence against local school board members?