How school boards became the frontline of the culture war

Welcome to Season 4 of Meet the Press Reports, our opportunity for a much needed break from the constant news churn to take a deeper dive into important topics and trends and how they impact the nation.

This season, we’ll examine key issues like misinformation, race and the climate. And we start with our first episode by looking at how and why the nation’s political divides have turned public schools into a new flashpoint in the culture war.

You’ll be receiving this newsletter each Friday throughout our eight-week season, learning more from our reporters on the ground about what they saw and what to watch for going forward.

We hope you learn as much watching and reading as we have reporting on these important topics. Be sure to catch us on NBC News NOW live Thursday nights at 10:30 p.m. Eastern and Peacock on demand.

First Read: On the frontline of America’s hottest culture war

By Kate Snow, Sarah Dean, Ben Kamisar and Sasha Marquez

Local school board elections have long been bastions of community politics. But as the nation’s culture war has intensified, it’s injected a new level of emotion and division into the education debate.

School districts across the country are trying to reconcile deep disagreements over issues like masking in schools, as well as about how to teach topics like race, racism, sexuality and gender identity.

Florida, where the GOP-dominated state government has clashed with districts over many of these issues, has emerged as one of the most combative fronts.

So we traveled to Brevard County to bring the story to life through conversations with the parents at the center of the debate. The county is the birthplace of at least two activist groups: Moms for Liberty, the conservative parental rights’ group that’s now gone national, and Families for Safe Schools, which has organized against them.

The two sides are warring factions in the county on questions like banning certain books from libraries, whether students should be masked, and about the state’s new bill that would limit the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity and other hot-button issues.

The debate has spilled out into the ballot box too — Moms for Liberty was started after a conservative school board member was ousted in 2020 and has grown into a national movement that just formed a super PAC to play in political races.

It’s all led to a new level of hostility in the community. One school board member who opposes Moms for Liberty says protestors picketed her house, calling her a child abuser and a pedophile. Tensions got so heated at a school board meeting last year that the board members had to kick the whole audience out of the room.

Even if the climate may be getting more hostile, we still found parents in the county who lamented how politics has injected itself into the debate and were willing to have nuanced and peaceful discussion.

But there are two things almost everyone can agree on.

The pandemic served as a catalyst for it all — in a county that attempted to defy Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-mask mandate order, debates over masking in schools helped to supercharge the politicization of schools and school boards.

And now with these issues roiling communities across the country, no one expects the temperature to cool off.

“The election process is nonpartisan. The seats are nonpartisan. But the people aren’t nonpartisan”

—A Brevard County father, speaking to NBC News about the school board debate.

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Data download: The school board fight by the numbers

34: That’s the number of states in which the conservative Moms for Liberty have chapters.

10: The number of books on the Brevard County Chapter of Moms for Liberty’s list of books they would like to see removed from public school libraries

75: How many formal requests to ban books from libraries NBC News found after records requests to nearly 100 school districts in the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin regions this year.

3: The number of San Francisco school board members recalled earlier this year by a landslide.

220: How many examples of threats to school officials Reuters found in a sampling of districts across the country.

Learn more: Book Banning in 21st Century America

The library has become a key front in this battle, as parents, educators and activists debate which books students should have access to in libraries.

Emily Knox, author of “Book Banning in 21st Century America,” joins the Chuck Toddcast to talk about why book banning has ticked upwards in the lsat few years.

Click below to listen to the full conversation.

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ICYMI: How did we get here?

Washington Post: Moms for Liberty has turned ‘parental rights’ into a rallying cry for conservative parents

NBC News: Here’s what Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill would do and what it wouldn’t do

EdSource: California becomes first state to require ethnic studies in high school

Orlando Sentinel: Teachers get caught in the middle of Florida’s culture war bills

The Atlantic: The meaning of San Francisco’s school-board recall

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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images file

Where is this story going?

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