How a far-right, Christian cellphone company took over 4 Texas school boards

It's like all the boomers in this thread didn't go to school in the 50s and 60s.

 

Also point out that we keep in hearing “Conservatives” going apoplectic about companies getting involved in political or cultural issues. For example on DeSantis’ punishing Disney or the GA legislature going after Delta. Yet here is a case of a company whose existence is literally to interfere in politics and culture.

 

This situation is a bit more nuanced than that though. I live up here and know many teachers in these districts. Here are some considerations before immediately jumping to the conclusion that the Democratic Party is to blame here:

A. The non Trumpers go out of their way to have NO party affiliation. They do that for good reasons. So the Democratic Party has no ability to help candidates like this:

https://beckyforplace2gcisd.com/

This is an example of non nutcase school board member. This lady in particular is or at least was a Republican in her personal life but on the school board she actually just focused on school issues. Think of Liz Cheney running against a Trumper in Wyoming. The normal candidates who normally run for these seats are in the same spot Liz Cheney was in.

B. The school board elections this year were at the most random times, and very hard to know when and where to go vote. This was on purpose obviously but won’t be an issues next year because there’s the sense up here that they snuck it in there this year but going forward the community is hyper aware.

C. The group “Tarrant County Democrats” was a joke up to last year. I knew the treasurer and the party essentially left it alone. But because of Beto’s campaign infrastructure the Tarrant county Dems are not basically rolled into that larger group and are now building up a decent organizing unit. Even then the Tarrant county Dems never had candidates that took their extended hand to get help because they wanted to be non-partisan.

That didn’t work out, and I think the main issue moving forward is the non partisan school board folks will have to make a decision to essentially be a Democrat. So we’ll see what happens next year with the candidates but one things for sure…. Patriot Mobile and the GOP backers aren’t going to be able to take advantage of the situation like they did this year. They’ve been exposed in a big way.

 

This is how great nations fade into mediocrity.

 

Update on GCISD. Two yrs ago the crazy board lowered the GCISD tax rate for property owners by quite a bit. Now they've been running deficits for the past 2 years into the millions of dollars. This district operated with a balanced budget and a surplus for years before the Patriot Mobile board came in. Finally now they claim to have a "balanced budge" for the upcoming year but it depends on passing a very small tax increase (about 1/10th of what they lowered) AND it also includes no raises or step ups in pay for teachers. This is the first time in over 30 years that teachers in GCISD will not be getting their annual step up in pay. Colleyville is an upper class city with the average home worth $1.3 million dollars. So the school board believes that it is more important to give rich land owners a tax cut than to give struggling teachers a raise.