Fairfax County Democrats are hosting an open election for school board endorsements pointing to increasingly politicized and partisan education politics.
As Harold Sims Jr. knocked on doors for his school board campaign, many of the Northern Virginia residents on the other side didn’t know there was an election in May.
On Saturday, the only day of in-person voting in the party’s endorsement election, Sims’s opponent Mateo Dunne stood outside a local government center in a bright blue T-shirt printed with his name. He and a handful of volunteers eagerly handed out fliers to a single voter. By mid afternoon, the polling site had only seen 17 voters.“You try to get as many people as you can to sign up to vote for you,” Dunne said.
That idea was thrust into the national conversation when the coronavirus pandemic hit, turning attention to school boards as they managed reopening and masking in schools, Crawford said. That tension has continued to build into culture wars issues like transgender student policies, teachings on race and racism, and equity in schools — all debates that have raged in Virginia.
The county school board, which oversees about 198 schools serving more than 180,000 students, is made up of 12 members. All 12 school board seats are on the ballot this year. The party automatically endorsed seven Democratic and uncontested to the party in 2022 with concerns that the process was confusing, poorly publicized and exclusionary.The endorsement vote in Arlington, and under Fairfax’s new process, is open to any registered voter who signs an oath pledging to support the Democratic Party endorsee.
“It’s almost next to impossible when you have candidates endorsed by the party,” Walker said. “In effect it’s 1,300 members putting people on the school board.”Walker remains critical of the process, arguing that many of the people who vote in the endorsement race tend to skew whiter and wealthier.
Baker, the party chair, said that the endorsement process is an important step to ensure that the party can get Democrats into open seats. Multiple strong Democrats on the general election ticket could split the vote and make it easier for a Republican or Independent to win the seat, he said.
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