Conservative school board hopefuls win seats in Texas; major city rejects abortion, marijuana decriminalization
Conservative school board candidates saw mixed results in Texas elections last weekend and voters in one large city overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure that would have decriminalized abortion and marijuana.
The 1776 Project PAC, which describes itself as “a political action committee dedicated to electing school board members nationwide who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history” and works toward “abolishing critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from school curriculum,” announced on Twitter Sunday that five of its six endorsed candidates in Tarrant County won their races Saturday.
Tarrant County is one of the most populous counties in the state and home to the city of Fort Worth.
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Yesterday, our candidates won 5/6 school board races we worked on in Tarrant County, Texas.
— 1776 Project PAC (@1776ProjectPac) May 7, 2023
Congrats to our winners:
Eric Lannen: Carroll ISD
AJ Portillo: Grapeville-Colleyvine ISD
Mary Humphrey: Grapeville-Colleyvine ISD
John Birt: Keller ISD
Chris Coker: Keller ISD
Only one of the group’s supported candidates in Tarrant County, Richard Newton, failed to win a spot on the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD’s school board.
All others won, including Eric Lannen won a school board race in the Carroll Independent School District while AJ Pontillo and Mary Humphrey secured spots on the school board of the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, and John Birt and Chris Coker won seats in the Keller Independent School District.
However, the group did not have as much success in Collin County, another major population center located north of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
1776 Project PAC-endorsed candidates Reed Bond and Susan Kershaw failed to secure the votes required to become trustees in the Frisco Independent School District, while Brittany Hendrickson, Rachel Elliott and Jim Westerheid came up short in their bids to become trustees of the McKinney Independent School District.
The 1776 Project PAC had a much higher success rate in electing its preferred candidates to school boards in Texas in last year’s May elections when 15 of its 16 endorsed candidates won their races.
A handful of the victorious candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC last year won races in areas where the advocacy group’s favored contenders failed to break through this year, including the Collin County-based Frisco Independent School District.
Last summer, candidates supported by the 1776 Project PAC helped flip the makeup of school boards in several large Florida counties from majority progressive to majority conservative. In the general election last fall, the group had a success rate of slightly less than 50% when it came to getting its preferred candidates elected and turned in a similar performance in school board races that took place in Illinois and Wisconsin last month.
In recent years, parents and community members across the United States have descended upon school board meetings to express outrage over the inclusion of controversial content in public school curricula.
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— 1776 Project PAC (@1776ProjectPac) May 5, 2023
Tomorrow is Election Day and your school board is on the ballot.
Saving our country starts at the local level and you have a chance to elect school boards that will put parents first and keep left-wing indoctrination out of the classroom.
Get out and vote. pic.twitter.com/J67pGisjjO
For example, in 2021, Stacy Langton, whose son attends Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, read aloud the sexual material in two books available in her son’s high school library that “include pedophilia” as well as depictions of “sex between men and boys” at a school board meeting.
Mayor Craig Shubert of Hudson, Ohio, called on the local school board to resign in 2021 for allowing a book containing sexually explicit writing prompts to make it into the curriculum of a college-level English class at the city’s high school.
In addition to school board races, voters also decided the fate of several other local offices and ballot measures throughout Texas last Saturday.
Voters in San Antonio defeated Proposition A, which, among other things, would have decriminalized abortion and marijuana while banning no-knock warrants and requiring police to issue citations to those responsible for low-level, non-violent crimes as opposed to making arrests.
Proposition A failed overwhelmingly, with 72% of voters in the second-largest city in Texas rejecting the proposal and just 28% voting to approve it.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
