WFAE's education reporter Ann Doss Helms joins the Inside Politics podcast team to talk about the politicization of school board races this election year, particularly in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board race.
Steve Harrison: We've got intense school board races here locally, but this is something and this is not unique to Charlotte, I think it's safe to say. Right?
Ann Doss Helms: It definitely is safe to say this is going on across the country. Very similar things happening at school board meetings, whether that's challenges to how race is discussed and taught or whether it's questions about sexually appropriate material in books. We are definitely seeing national politics bleed into local school boards.
Harrison: And it kind of started, I think, with the San Francisco election, which I think was maybe last year, earlier this year, when they, you know, maybe America's most progressive city in a way, kind of turned on its board or some members of the board. And it's, I think, in a way that kind of kicked it off.
Helms: And the Virginia governor's race, where education became such a big theme and helped the Republican win the election.
Tim Funk: I think like everything else, the school's issue has been polarized and politicized. I mean, we just live in that time. You know, Moms for Liberty, at least nationally, have kind of allied themselves with the Republican Party. If you go to their website there, you'll see Ron DeSantis. You'll see words like woke. But, you know, the Democratic Party has been allied with teacher unions forever. So it's just one more battlefield, it seems to me.
Jim Morrill: You know, school board races in Mecklenburg County, and Ann knows better than us, but they used to be pretty sleepy affairs. And now all of a sudden they're not. And for incumbents like Carol Sawyer, who appears to be the target of a lot of this is sort of like a perfect storm. You have national groups, national conservative groups that are coming in like Moms for Liberty. And you also have headlines about low test scores and how badly students are performing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and how wide the equity gap still appears to be. And there's still hard feelings, I think, about the former superintendent and how he was fired and given a raise before he was fired. And so it's like all these factors sort of coming together.
Helms: Yeah. And I've been covering CMS school board races for 20 years now and people are always mad. It's a mess, but usually, incumbents get reelected. I have only seen two incumbents be defeated in those 20 years. Once in 2003, in a general at large election and once in 2013 in a district race. So generally, people are mad that they go and they vote for their incumbents. And I'm not sure that will be the case this year. Like you said, there are all these factors affecting the way people feel about CMS. And you have, whereas they are normally in an odd-numbered year with the municipal races' lower turnout. This year you have CMS on the ballot with these huge high-profile state and national races. You have new districts. So people who maybe have won before in a district are now running with different voters. And all of the incumbents have, I think, viable challengers. Often they draw either no opposition or token opposition. There are people who are viable candidates and have gotten endorsements from some of the groups that traditionally back incumbents.
Harrison: And I think there's a lot of different issues like CRT and LGBT issues and things like that, and, you know, the superintendent. But I think a big undercurrent under all this goes back to the decision in Charlotte-Mecklenburg to have mostly virtual school for 2020, 2021. You know, I think that kind of got the fire going a bit, among one faction. I mean, there's other groups that don't really particularly talk about that much, but it has, I think, kind of the Moms for Liberty, a more conservative side, I think that was that got the fire going.
Helms: I think you're right. But it is worth noting that there were many people, parents and teachers who were at that time saying 'we don't feel safe going back.' And this was a pre-vaccine era when some of these decisions were made. So I think what the board would say was 'we did the best we could with the information we had at the time. We're ready to move this forward.'
Nobody is running on a platform of everything's great, I support the status quo. Everybody says, yes, these test scores are dismal. Yes, we need to get better. It's who can actually make that happen.
Funk: In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, correct me if I'm wrong, it doesn't seem like Moms of Liberty would probably have as much pull as in some of these conservative counties. But I think it seems like what you're seeing them do is endorse challengers to the incumbents to try to beat Democrats with other Democrats.
Helms: Actually, that's not technically right. They did not endorse anyone except Shawn Strain, who is an incumbent in District 6, even though he's kind of running as an anti-incumbent and ...
Funk: Not even a wink-wink kind of endorsement.
Helms: Oh, well, and individuals, I think, they support. Brooke Weiss, the chair, has been very vocal about saying she would like to see Carol Sawyer replaced. She has said Stephanie Sneed, one of the two Democratic challengers to Carol Sawyer, would be the best way to make that happen. But what they would say is that as far as formal endorsements, they did very little of that.
Funk: In my neighborhood, I saw, in one yard, I saw a sign for Stephanie Sneed and another sign with Carol Sawyer with an X through it so it's getting kind of intense.
Helms: Yeah, she has definitely become the focus of the angst that's out there from the right. But this has been a weird year in that the kind of criticism that they've always gotten from Republicans, they're getting some pretty intense criticism, the board as a whole, has gotten some very intense criticism about many of its decisions from African American Democrats.
Funk: Now, has Stephanie Sneed welcomed the endorsement, or not endorsement, but the support of some people in Moms of Liberty or she not?
Helms: She did not fill out their endorsement. They sent questionnaires and she did not fill it out. She says she did not seek it. She's not publicizing it. There were people on Twitter who were calling for her to renounce it, and she did not do that either because she said, I just, you know, 'why would I do that? I don't go around denouncing people.'
Morrill: And why did Carol Sawyer become the focus of all this?
Helms: Well, you know, that's a great question and one that I think we'll probably be discussing with some of our guests. She is one of the most liberal members of the board. Jennifer De La Hara, whom we'll be talking to, also gets a lot of that criticism, but she's not on the ballot. She has a challenger who is well known. But yes, in many of the cases, what she's done has been what the majority of the board has done. What she says is she has become a target because she's so effective and her leadership.
Funk: I liberal good or bad in Charlotte-Mecklenburg?
Helms: Oh, that's a good question. You guys are the political reporters.
Funk: Well, I think it's more acceptable here than, say, Gaston County or ...
Morrill: Union County.
Funk: Union County or some of the other counties around. So that might not be a ...
Helms: And that's part of the question is when you see billboards, are you see really active Twitter wars or whatever, you have to wonder, are they just speaking within an echo chamber or are they speaking to the people who will actually make the decision in that district? Because bear in mind, the way the district elections work here, you're not voting in six races. You're voting in the one for the district that you live in. And people need to know about that and be informed about that. But if the people in District 6 are mad at Carol is District 4, that's too bad, they can't vote.
Harrison: And I'll just say one more thing before we get started. You know, this race happened, Stephanie Sneed and Carol Sawyer, happened before four years ago. Carol won easily like six percentage points. It will probably be closer this time. I think probably everyone would agree on that. But I think the main thing is there is also a third candidate. And to beat the incumbent, the third candidate is that's a big problem because this is a race to get to 50% and the third candidate is going to draw votes. And, you know, that is going to make things hard for Stephanie Sneed to get over the hump.
Helms: That's right. And there was also the whole redrawing of voting districts to take into account the 2020 census data that was delayed. And there were two competing maps. One of them was drawn by Carol Sawyer. One of them was drawn by Sean Strain. Carol Sawyer's version split up the three south suburbs, which Sean Strain currently represents. If he is reelected, he will have to be reelected by the voters of Pineville and southwest Charlotte, which may be a little more challenging. Matthews and Mint Hill now fall into different districts, and I think that created some bad blood. So again, some of the people who are big fans of Sean Strain are really not big fans of Carol Sawyer.
Subscribe to the Inside Politics podcast to listen to the full conversation coming on Tuesday, Nov. 1.
