Parental guidance suggested: Virginia anger shows in Johnson County school board wins
You could see this coming all the way from the East Coast: Parental anger that animated the governor’s race in Virginia and led to the Republican’s win appears to have reared its head in Johnson County Tuesday.
Hotly contested school board elections in Olathe and Blue Valley went mostly to conservative, back-to-basics candidates: Two of three races were won by conservatives in Blue Valley, while conservatives won all three Olathe contests.
One of those Olathe winners, Robert Kuhn, said a friend even saw Kuhn’s name pop up on CNN Tuesday evening.
“He was like, ‘You’re on national television, not just local channels.’ I know that, nationwide, we were being watched out here for what would happen,” Kuhn said.
From my conversations with several of the winners, I can tell you they worked hard to get the vote out. And county turnout of 24.62% is indeed higher than usual for such local races. Similar races in 2019 and 2017 inspired turnout of just over 17%. That’s nearly a 50% bump this time around.
Yet there’s no doubt that Virginia-borne parental angst over COVID-19 protocols, controversy over how the history of race relations is being taught and the Department of Justice’s announced monitoring of angry parents at school board meetings lit a fire that reached Kansas City’s suburbs.
“School-aged parents, for sure, woke up,” says Jim McMullen, who won a school board seat in Blue Valley along with fellow newcomer Kaety Bowers. “We heard that over and over and over again: ‘I’ve never voted in a local election, but I’m paying attention now.’ I probably heard that a couple hundred times, just knocking on people’s doors.”
“We’re not isolated here in Johnson County. We are connected,” adds Brian Connell, another newcomer who won a school board seat in Olathe. “What happens here doesn’t happen in a vacuum. What happens (in Virginia) doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Everybody’s fighting the same battles. We’re all just fighting them disconnectedly. But seeing that others are doing it matters.”
Connell calls it a win for our republican form of government.
“Everybody on all sides was pretty much involved,” he says “That’s huge. We’ve needed the community, one way or another, to get involved and stay involved. I really see it as a win for our schools and the whole county and the region — and the country, really. They showed up — people finding their voices.”
But McMullen says it’s a special win for parents who want schools to get back to the basics, a key pillar of his own platform. “There’s a growing — let’s call it ‘difference of opinion’ — in our community on the direction our schools should go.”
McMullen and the others no doubt benefited from the culture skirmish whose ground zero was in Virginia Tuesday.
“It seems to be a dominant area of concern — cultural shifts that are going on,” he says.
“Absolutely,” Connell agrees. “I’ve seen it everywhere, I’ve heard it everywhere.”
Failed Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe famously opined at a debate that, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Parents all over the country took great offense to that.
Yes, there are limits to what involvement parents can logistically have in public education. But those limits are rarely stretched, and if anything parents need to be more involved. As Connell told me, there needs to be a partnership between parents and schools.
Parents may be less of a silent partner today.
This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 12:29 PM.
