Like many school board races this year, the one in May in Corvallis, a left-leaning college town in the northwest corner of the state, was especially contentious, swirling around concerns not only about the coronavirus pandemic but also the teaching of what Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh called the “dark history” of America’s struggle with race. Even months later, Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh, the chairman of the school board, is still taking precautions. He regularly speaks to the police and scans his driveway in the morning before walking to his car. He often mixes up his daily route to work. . . . .“I love serving on the school board,” he said. “But I don’t want to die for it.”
Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh is not alone. Since the spring, a steady tide of school board members across the country have nervously come forward with accounts of threats they have received from enraged local parents. At first, the grievances mainly centered on concerns about the way their children were being taught about race and racism. Now, parents are more often infuriated by Covid-19 restrictions like mask mandates in classrooms.
It is an echo of what happened when those faithful to the Tea Party stormed Obamacare town halls across the country more than a decade ago. In recent months, there have been Nazi salutes at school board meetings and emails threatening rape. Obscenities have been hurled — or burned into people’s lawns with weed spray.
While there has not been serious violence yet, there have been a handful of arrests for charges such as assault and disorderly conduct. The National School Boards Association has likened some of these incidents to domestic terrorism, though the group eventually walked back that claim after it triggered a backlash from its state member organizations.
Sitting at the intersection of parenting and policy, local school boards have always been a place where passions run high and politics get personal.
Some protesters who have caused a stir at school board meetings in recent months have defended themselves by saying that they were merely exercising their First Amendment rights and that schools are better when parents are involved, arguments echoed by Republicans in Congress and in statehouse races.
Parents who have been vocal in their opposition to the Corvallis school board said they were unaware of any threats against Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh or other board members. They said it would be counterproductive to their cause to threaten violence because it would allow school officials to paint dissenting parents as hateful bigots.
While acknowledging that parents have a right to be heard, Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh and other school board members have argued that the recent rash of menacing disruptions is different from the occasionally heated conversations that have long marked the relationship between school board officials seeking to set rules and people looking out for their children.
“What’s happening now, and what has been happening,” Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh said, “is much more serious than simply listening to excited parents who want what’s best for their kids.”
The federal government apparently agrees. In early October, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a memo announcing that the Justice Department would respond to what he called “a disturbing spike of harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school board members and administrators. In the memo, Mr. Garland ordered the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors to work with local law enforcement officers to monitor threats against people working in the nation’s 14,000 public school districts.
The memo suggested that federal officials saw the issue as the latest example of a troubling trend: ordinary people using threats of violence to express their politics. This summer, seeking to counter a similar problem, the Justice Department established a task force to curb attacks against election workers.
But far from calming the situation, the school board initiative by the Justice Department was seized upon by Republican officials as a political issue.
Republican attorneys general in 17 states published a memo of their own, describing the proposal to monitor threats against school officials as a threat itself. . . . . Republicans in both houses of Congress have also attacked Mr. Garland’s plans, accusing him of treating parents like terrorists, though his memo mentioned neither terrorism nor parents.
Yet those who have been the targets of harassment and vandalism have applauded the move by the Justice Department. Jennifer Jenkins, a school board official in Brevard County, Fla., said she had suffered months of threats, beginning last year when she unseated an incumbent member of her school board.
At first, Ms. Jenkins said, parents angered by the district’s transgender bathroom policy began to appear at board meetings, waving Trump flags and calling members “pedophiles.” But that soon escalated, she said, to angry groups of people shouting on the street outside her home.
Then in July, after the district put in place a mask mandate for students, a Republican state lawmaker posted Ms. Jenkins’s cellphone number on his Facebook page, and her voice mail filled with hateful messages. Not long after, she said, someone burned the letters “FU” into her lawn with weed killer and chopped down the bushes in front of her house.
In California, school board members have received so many threats that Vernon M. Billy, the executive director of the state School Boards Association, wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking for help. Near Sacramento, he wrote, one entire school board had to flee its chamber after protesters accosted the members.
Republicans are using extremist parents and misleading others into acting as the equivalent of brown shirts to silence views not consistent with the GOP's increasingly Christofascist and white supremacist driven dogma. Be very afraid for the future if this effort isn't stopped.
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