Conservatives are targeting suburban Chicago school boards. And the elections are becoming political battlegrounds
Two years ago, at the urging of her teenage daughter, clinical psychologist Donna Marino ran for school board in far west suburban Oswego, Illinois, thinking her background in mental health could help students recover from the isolation, stress and trauma brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the actions taken to slow its spread.
But less than a year after winning election and being selected by her peers to chair the board, Marino abruptly quit. She said she feared for her and her family’s mental and physical health following threats from some parents opposed to the district’s continued masking mandates as well as how culture, race and sex education were being addressed in the classroom and in books in Oswego’s elementary and high schools.
“I was excited to be able to contribute that mental health lens after all our children have been through. I wanted to be a catalyst for rebuilding our community and crossing that divide. I had high hopes. But I underestimated the severity of that fracture,” Marino wrote in her resignation letter when she stepped down from the board of Oswego Community Unit School District 308, recounting how she’d been called a “coward,” “F----n scum,” a “low IQ knuckle dragger and worse.”
“Unfortunately, the vitriol, politics and threats on myself and my family have taken its toll and is just not something I am willing to live with,” she wrote. “I know that bullies will feel they have won, but they lost big time by not having me on the board to defend their children. The only way they do win is if I allow them to take away my joy, the safety of my family, and allow their abuse into my life.”
Marino’s experience reflects how, at one of the most divided times in recent history, school boards across the country have become targets of both the ire and political ambitions of conservatives and far-right groups as they argue schools have been overtaken by teachers unions and other forces pushing liberal agendas.
Anger over pandemic mandates has morphed into outrage, injecting Washington-style polarization into discussions among neighbors about what kids are being taught in the classroom and what’s available on school library shelves.
The Chicago suburbs have become a key battleground. From Oswego to Wheaton to Barrington to Lockport and beyond, tens of thousands of dollars are pouring into several ostensibly nonpartisan races ahead of the April 4 balloting as what have historically been low-interest elections are roiled by debates where Republican talking points such as “parental rights,” “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” are taking center stage.
It’s a national playbook, written primarily by conservatives and the GOP, aimed at gaining a political foothold, particularly in increasingly Democratic suburbia, by getting like-minded candidates elected to what are traditionally among the easiest and least expensive offices to win.
The rallying cry of parental rights, in particular, has a long history in American public life, dating back at least to the landmark 1925 trial of John Scopes, a high school science teacher in Tennessee who volunteered as the defendant in a test case challenging a state law banning instruction on the theory of evolution, said Jon Hale, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“There have been these sorts of claims throughout time. And I do think a lot of it has been misguided because in the United States, we allow for this discourse around local control and local government. Well, you can interpret that in a number of ways. Parents throughout history have oftentimes said that means parents and families, they should make the choice,” Hale said. “But just the language is a little
