Clashes over local school board races on the ballot could bring more voters to the polls this year, with some saying they could even potentially overshadow the state legislative races.
The normally sleepy local elections has become highly politicized this summer and fall, as candidates spent the cycle sparring over so-called culture war issues like “parental rights” and protections for transgender students in public schools.
That has played out in communities such as Middletown, where Jacqueline Tobacco, vice president of Board of Education, said parental rights have become a dominant issue: “Parental rights has taken center stage in this election, both for the board of ed and ,I believe, statewide.”
Nikki Stouffer, executive director at the conservative New Jersey Project, said it’s a matter of parents becoming more involved.
“In the majority of cases, parents are the best people to raise their children and to make medical and psychological decisions for their children,” she said. “And we need to have more parents involved in the schools and on the board of education.”
Yet others say the issue has also drawn an abundance of misinformation.
“A lot of Republicans who are running for the state legislature have recognized that if you make people angry and afraid, they turn out to vote,” said Darcy Draeger of Districts for Democracy, a group founded by former Democratic congressman Tom Malinowski. “And so there’s a lot of misinformation about our health curriculum, about our sex ed curriculum, about what it means to discuss gender in school.”
