INDIANA — While conservatives managed to sweep the State of Indiana and turn historically Democrat St. Joseph County to the GOP, school board races across the state were a major disappointment in local conservative circles. This is despite hot botton educational issues like Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory and inappropriate sexual content being taught to children that fueled partisan Republican races and helped Republicans across the board win their elections. Aside from Hamilton Southeastern Schools (located in central Indiana), where the conservative slate of candidates swept the school board, wins for conservative candidates on the school board level were fewer than expected. The question is why.
NON-PARTISAN RACES
School board races are non-partisan, meaning the candidates do not run on a party ticket. With that being said, many voters simply don’t know who to cast their ballot for and make their choice based on name placement or if they like the spelling of the candidate’s name. This is not fair. School boards are partisan and it’s time for it to be shown on the ballot.
St. Joseph County went overwhelmingly to the Republican Party on Tuesday with historic wins across the board. Voters chose a straight ticket ballot for the GOP 22,427 times compared to the 21,085 straight Democrat tickets. St. Joseph county voted for the GOP at a 52% clip. Still, in the Penn Harris Madison School Board race, two conservatives lost to leftists candidates by approximately 13% and 20%. The numbers don’t add up. School boards need to become partisan in order to allow the voter the opportunity to make a more educated decision.
I am confident the majority of voters on Tuesday do not realize they cast their votes for candidates who support Critical Race Theory, secretly transitioning the genders of children, providing young kids pornographic material and a lack of curriculum transparency.
HOUSE BILL 1182
This is not a new issue. In fact, during Indiana’s last legislative session, a bill was introduced that would have made these races partisan already. However, House Bill 1182 didn’t make it out of committee and was never voted on.
RNM is told there was no support for the bill while it was in committee, with nearly two dozen witnesses speaking to the committee against the bill. Virtually no witnesses spoke in favor. Essentially, it was poor political planning and execution by the bill’s author.
2023 SESSION PLANS
A lack of support for a partisan school boards bill doesn’t seem like an issue this go around. Highly organized parent groups are already planning to push for this legislation. And, RNM is told by several state lawmakers, this type of legislation is already being discussed as a priority for the 2023 session.
RNM wholeheartedly supports this push. This should be the rally cry for every conservative parents’ group from now through the next session. This is how we save our schools and ensure voters truly know who they are voting for.
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Please support this legislation! School board members make more choices based on their personal ideology than any other functional position like Auditor, Assessor, Treasurer, etc which are partisan offices. This needs to happen!
Can you post a list of who were the R or conservative school board members on all the school boards in our area. I didn’t vote for them as I didn’t know who the non-Communists were. South Bend schools board is who I would have voted for.
Good luck with that. Part of the problem. I was a school board candidate this year. Didn’t make it but came close. You cannot declare an affiliation formally, and school board candidates are generally careful to disguise their affiliation since it theoretically shouldn’t matter. But it does.
We need this change going forward.
You’re also be pretty helpful if maybe instead of running Billboards at say the names of our candidates, we have Billboards that talk about the problems with those we are opposing.
Also, Matt Chaffee was the only one of our candidates who had a Slogan, “Back to the Basics”. The rest of our candidates just said, vote for me.
So we need to keep that in mind next election cycle.
Don’t do billboards at all. They don’t work and are a massive waste of campaign funds. Use that money for something else.
If a voter doesn’t know who they’re voting for, that’s on them.
It’s on the candidates to overcome voter disinterest/laziness and get their identity and message out.
Of course, that would take actual work by both candidates *and* voters, and we can’t have *that*, can we? Better to make the race partisan, so that straight-ticket voters don’t have to bother with, you know, actually doing their homework…