During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ohio parents and community members showed up in droves to their local school board meetings. They took to the podium to debate masking, learning loss and curriculum.
School board members across the state characterized the time as defined by uncertainty, protests and hostility, according to a recent study published in the American Education Research Association Open by Kathleen Knight Abowitz, a philosopher of education at Miami University and advocate for public schools.
Abowitz conducted interviews with 18 Ohio school board members to learn how the local institution evolved during this tumultuous time of misinformation, culture wars and conflict.
“This timeframe helped demonstrate both the strength of the local school board as a form of democratic governance in a decentralized education system, but it also helped reveal some of the weaknesses of this institution,” Abowitz said.
1. Trust is eroding in school boards
In her interviews, Abowitz said board members from rural, suburban and urban districts all described the COVID-19 pandemic as a period of chaos and uncertainty. A school board member within the study described it as difficult to sort out facts from fiction.
“I feel like with COVID we were just kind of putting out fires. I don’t feel like we could focus on education at all,” said a board member of a rural district featured in Abowitz’s study.
And, these issues didn’t disappear as the virus subsided. Abowitz said this period of widespread misinformation has had a lasting impact on trust of school boards and eroded the institutions’ trust with the public.
“Ohioans largely still value their public schools very much, but there are a lot of harmful falsehoods that circulate that do tremendous damage to people's willingness to support their public school with their presence and with their time and with tax dollars,” Abowitz said.
In addition, Ohio’s push toward privatizing education, through the continued expansion of private school vouchers, may mean that less community members feel they have a stake in their public schools.
“If you have more and more parents who are pulling their kids out to go to private school you're going to have fewer parents who are supporting school levies so it's going to be harder to get levies passed.”
2. Even so, local governance is still important
Despite all these challenges, Abowitz said school board members across the state all talked about the value of local governance. Although their perception of its role changed based on the demographics they served.
Rural school boards valued local governance as a way to protect the uniqueness of their communities and small town culture. While in suburban and metro districts, school board members described the role of local governance as a means to protect the health and safety of students.
"I think really we should be ... a link between the community and the school district. Visible, open to speaking to everyone, obviously respectfully, supporting the administration. But also giving our opinion and having our own goals of where we see the school district going and working together with the superintendent to make that happen."School board member interviewed by Kathleen Knight Abowitz
Either way, Abowitz said the board members, unsurprisingly, agreed that local governance still had a vital role to play in communities. Some members criticized state leaders for passing legislation that supplants this local control.
“There's a lot of disbelief and unhappiness around the ways in which our state is trying to intervene instead of offering resources and support that help them do their job the right way.”
3. The role of school boards is misunderstood – and under threat
In spite of all the renewed attention on school boards during the pandemic, Abowitz said some school board members felt like their role was misunderstood by the general public. Board members recounted incidents of parents demanding changes to school administration that board members felt they had no control over.
“It’s wild to me that the community believes that … we’re doing the day-to-day work of running a school district. None of my fellow board members or I are educators, this is not where we have expertise. I can’t make a curriculum,” one school board member who was interviewed stated.
Abowitz said this misunderstanding fuels distrust. And that leads to an existential issue for school boards: fewer people are running to be a part of them in some areas of the state, according to Abowitz.
“If you can't get people to run, it means that races will be less competitive and people who maybe have ill intentions are going to be elected,” Abowitz said. “From people who want to fire the football coach … to people who have a profound misunderstanding of what school boards do.”
Abowitz called for more training support for those who are elected to better understand their role in the community.
