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Ah, the end of summer: a time for students to trudge back to school, and for public school boards—perhaps among the country’s most unsung governing bodies—to ramp up their work. 

In recent years, media headlines have painted a picture of school boards across the country embroiled in heated politics. Candidates for school board elections are certainly raising more money than ever before: In Denver alone, groups spent $2.2 million during the 2023 school board elections, according to news reports.

But Anna Deese, a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at CU Boulder, said that most school board meetings are still, at least on the surface, pretty dry events.

“We hear stories about fist fights breaking out, and people shouting at school board meetings,” she said. “But that is probably not happening as much as we think. There are 13,000 school districts in the United States, and most of them are pretty sleepy.”

Deese, a former high school science teacher and Army National Guard soldier, served on a school board in a Montana district with fewer than 2,000 students. She gives her take on why school boards matter and on some common misconceptions about these entities.

What was your experience like serving on a school board?

I served for three years in Whitefish, Montana, from 2016 to 2019. It was a really rewarding experience, but not entirely what I expected. I thought that we would be making all these interesting policy decisions, having these deep conversations. But you learn very quickly that, as a board, there are a lot of ways in which you're restrained. That's not necessarily a bad thing. 

OK, school board 101: What powers do school boards have?

What a school board can do varies from state to state. In general, all school boards are going to hire their superintendent and then monitor that superintendent's progress. They are going to enact and debate policy.

They should be looking at the financial records of the district. They should understand what's happening with enrollment, the status of their buildings and, of course, how students are scoring on assessments and other measurements of academic achievement. Issues of equity should also always be kept at the forefront: Are they serving all students equally well? 

What can’t they do?

No school board member has authority on their own. They only have authority as a group and only at the board meetings. 

School boards also generally can't respond in the moment. This frustrates a lot of people at school board meetings. You might have somebody that comes to advocate for a specific policy change. The board, a lot of times, has to just sit there. They might be able to nod. They might be able to ask some questions. But almost always, the board can't do anything at that time because of open meeting laws. 

Do you think school boards are becoming more politicized?

Overall, I don't agree that school boards are becoming more heavily politicized—consider how politicized board meetings must have been around the time of desegregation rulings—but in some places, they probably are. 

Most school board activities should be pretty apolitical. When it comes to approving a budget, a lot of those decisions have been made by the state’s funding formulas and are also constrained by contracts. There’s not as much flexibility as people think.

Where have we seen school boards become caught up in politics?

A lot of the political escalation had to do with COVID, with the opening and closing of schools. That choice affected every part of a community's life, so families certainly got more invested in that.

You’ll also hear debates about CRT. CRT, or critical race theory, is a legal field of study, and it is not taught in K-12 schools. But people have conflated that term with, in general, how we talk about privilege, systemic marginalization and issues of equity in schools. School boards should be talking about equity as they do their work. Unfortunately, in some communities that is seen as too political. Additionally, in some communities there has been an influx of outside money in school board elections. Most board elections, however, are low profile and low spending.

What are the biggest issues that school boards will face in the coming year?

School boards have to be aware of what the political conversation is at the national level right now, with the presidential election coming up.

But probably the biggest issue that most board members are going to face has to do with the ending of ESSER, which is the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Those are funds that came out because of COVID. All those funds need to be allocated very shortly. Schools are already generally underfunded, and we have a lot of places where there's declining enrollment, and that also further stresses the budget. 

Why should people care about school boards, even if they don’t have kids?

We want folks to care because they probably use school facilities and services, whether they know it or not—if people need to rent a field so that they can have a soccer tournament. And school schedules impact our commute times. I promise you, traffic is going to change at the end of summer.  

Schools are also such an important part of direct democracy. You can walk down the road and see a governing body making policies. These policies will impact an entire generation, so it's important to pay attention.