Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.
Central Bucks is well known both statewide and nationally for heated board meetings over masks and Pride flags, policies banning certain books and directives to not use students’ preferred names and pronouns. Accusations of discrimination against LGBTQ students have also led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education.
“I couldn’t have my kids in a school district where these kinds of things were happening,” Budden said.
Tl;dr: 3rd biggest school district in PA (after Philly and Pitt) did the book ban thing after being empowered by MAGA BS. Then Dems beat them out this week.
I didn’t even read the article, I just live in the state and know what it was going to say anyway lol
Good enough for me.
Are the outskirts of Philadelphia that MAGA red or was deception used to get the MAGA board members elected in the first place?
So, every one of Philly’s surrounding counties (four of them, not including the ones in New Jersey) elected majority Dem commissioners last week, although they haven’t all been reliably blue in recent history. Obviously Philly itself is incredibly blue, to the extent that a third party beat out the GOP for the few commissioners seats reserved for a minority party. Central Bucks (the school district in question here) includes the county seat for Bucks County, which is more blue, but also some pretty wealthy areas that are more red. Bucks is also most of Brian Fitzpatrick’s district, supposedly one of the most moderate members of the house GOP.
Central Bucks is probably an area that will continue to trend blue, if I had to guess. It’s a lot of college educated white people, which is a demographic that’s trending blue. Bucks county in general is probably the reddest of Philadelphia’s suburbs though.
I thought Erie would have the 3rd biggest school district isn’t it the 3rd biggest city in PA?
CB is pretty big. Bucks’ population is like 650k compared to <100k for Erie. CB is the biggest district in Bucks. Although other counties, like Montco, have a larger population, they have smaller districts. CB has like 3 high schools with 2k kids each, I think.
Don’t let up. We need to turn up every single rinky dink local election and keep denying these fuckheads any scrap of power, no matter how small.
We just flipped a city council seat where I live. Feels good 🤗
Don’t vote Republican if you like having any rights at all
Some of those district lines, It doesn’t matter what your vote is. You could be in the majority for a 30 mi radius and still end up in a deeply conservative zone.
Schools being used as a local political tool is such a weird concept to me.
Why? Influence the education of children and you influence their future votes.
Local venture capitalist Paul Martino bankrolled the Republican campaigns and donated a majority of their funding — $239,000 of the $279,000-plus total. Martino – whose wife, Aarati Martino, ran for the board as a Republican this year – spent a total of $500,000 on school board races across Pennsylvania in 2021.
“Martino declined NPR’s requests for comment.”
Yeah, I bet he did.
Our school district is… 1/3 the size, and spent, I would guess at the finance reports I looked at, 1/10th the money (each candidate spending something like $500-1000 for signs and stuff)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Central Bucks is well known both statewide and nationally for heated board meetings over masks and Pride flags, policies banning certain books and directives to not use students’ preferred names and pronouns.
If there was a question about whether the conservative-led school board’s policies reflected the will of the local community, Tuesday’s election may have provided an answer.
Republicans also lost majority control of school boards in Iowa, Virginia and a historically conservative district neighboring Central Bucks.
“I wasn’t supposed to win,” said Democratic candidate Heather Reynolds, who beat the board’s current president and sole Republican incumbent in the race.
Republican candidate Steve Mass told the Delaware Valley Journal, “The only winners in Tuesday’s elections are the private schools, who will have their enrollment skyrocket in the next few years when parents see what policies are coming into our district.”
Its largest donations came from Turn Bucks Blue, a local PAC that supports Democrats throughout the county, and the Pennsylvania State Education Association.
The original article contains 1,042 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Maybe there’s some hope for the US yet…? Get the vindictive authoritarians out of the political positions and get the adults back to work!
