School Boards Are No Match for America’s Political Dysfunction

It should have been an unremarkable community gathering. At first, it looked as though it might be. On October 25, a cold wind whipped against the cars filing into the East Middle School parking lot in Grand Blanc, Michigan, for a school-board meeting. The audience piled into the six-feet-apart, gray folding chairs in the cafetorium. A group of unmasked community members slid their chairs closer together; a few women stepped to the side to pray.

The meeting began with a single bang of a gavel. The board and its constituents stood in unison to pledge their allegiance to the flag before observing a customary moment of silence. Then things deviated from the standard script.

“The board of education is gathered here tonight to conduct school business,” the president of the board, Susan Kish, said, reading aloud from a prepared statement. “Please keep the board’s need to conduct school business in mind as you observe our meeting tonight.” If the audience could not abide by the board’s rules, she said, the room would be cleared for a recess. If there were additional interruptions, the meeting would be adjourned.

School-board meetings do not have a reputation for excitement. But since the early days of the pandemic, school boards have become the center of some of the most explosive fights in American life—over book bans, mask and vaccine requirements, and how and whether the history of racism is taught. The cost of these fights is immense: The basic functioning of one of the workhorses of the American system—an institution whose thankless and typically invisible work powers the country’s schools—is impossible when it is swept up in the nation’s divisive politics.

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Grand Blanc’s experience has been no different. Though nothing particularly divisive was on this agenda, recent meetings had featured verbal disputes between board members and jeers from the audience, as well as raucous public-comment periods when masking policies, “,” and vaccines were discussed, and when audience members trained their ire on others in the crowd as much in August for threatening the county’s health director, who had issued a mask mandate for students in kindergarten through the sixth grade.