Stopping culture wars in their tracks: How one city did it
The police officer gives Marlon Styles’ driver’s side window two reassuring pats once he’s safely inside. Mr. Styles rubs his freshly buzzed head, takes a deep breath, and then fishes his keys out of his suit pants pocket and drives away from the school board meeting. It’s the latest he’s ever left – nearly 1 a.m. – and this time, unlike all the rest, he is not wondering how to get more community members involved. He is wondering how to grapple with a potentially toxic animus in his fairly harmonious town. The culture wars have just come home, and Mr. Styles, the first Black superintendent of Middletown, Ohio, has to figure out what to do.
In America, school boards have become something of a canary in the coal mine of democracy. Trust has been lost in our public institutions, including that most foundational of them: public schools. In a recent Gallup Poll, only 28% of Americans said they have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in public schools.
It’s news to no one: School board meetings are broken. In cities and towns across the country, the public comment period has morphed into yelling, and sometimes even physical violence, over national hot-button topics like critical race theory (CRT), mask mandates, and basic recognition for transgender students. The National School Boards Association has fractured. In an official communication, the former executive director suggested that CRT-bashing and other strongly worded complaints might qualify as “domestic terrorism,” and most of the red states formerly in the association dropped out. In early October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland warned the FBI and federal prosecutors that the Justice Department would be responding to “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” toward school personnel and board members.
Some public servants are preparing for more conflict by wearing state-of-the-art bulletproof vests to meetings. But there are others, like Mr. Styles, who seek out the protection of the oldest technology there is: trusted relationships.
the blinding political spotlight shines
