Peach Tree Times

Ballotpedia researched school board elections from last fall, trying to determine how much a candidate's view on several key topics affected the resulting make-up of school boards, including one school district in Georgia.

Ballotpedia looked at the results of elections in 96 school districts (with a total of 302 seats) across 16 states, looking at the winners' opinions on: race in education/critical race theory (CRT); responses to the coronavirus pandemic (mask/vaccine requirements); and sex and gender in schools, both in terms of the curriculum and facilities. 

The website also tracked whether the elected board members were incumbent and the total number of recall efforts, the organization said. The 96 districts were chosen for research because conflicts over CRT, COVID-19 and gender issues had been detected before the election.

One of the districts surveyed was the Marietta School District in Cobb County, where four of the seven winners opposed CRT in schools.

Nationwide, 27% of successful candidates opposed CRT, while 53% did not oppose CRT and 13% had an unclear stance. Results were still being finalized in the remaining 7% of seats in the study. The research notes that districts that elected at least one candidate opposed to CRT were likely to elect multiple members with that stance. In Marietta, for example, four of the seven winners said they opposed the teaching of CRT.

The research also found that 45% of 2021 school board candidates were open last fall, up from 26% in 2018, meaning that the number of incumbents deciding against running for re-election increased. Ballotpedia discovered that incumbents lost their races on 33% of occasions, which is nearly double the average loss rate for an incumbent from 2018-2020, the organization reported.

In a year where school board elections have drawn an increased amount of attention, research from Ballotpedia found that the average number of candidates competing for a given seat in 2021 increased 22% from 2018. Ballotpedia also reported that the number of recall efforts initiated in the past year has skyrocketed, totaling 84 separate efforts against 215 school board members. The previous high was 38 efforts in 2010, less than half the amount in 2021, the report said.

A July Association of American Educators survey of more than 1,000 teachers in the country found that most K-12 schools are not requiring them to teach CRT, NBC reported, adding that CRT is most often a course taught at the collegiate level.

Ballotpedia is a website home to 330,000 pages covering all aspects of American politics at the federal, state, and local levels.