DALLAS — It was the first school board meeting of the new year in Grapevine-Colleyville and trustees were set to approve a sweeping set of policies that targeted transgender students’ pronouns, library books and the way teachers could talk about race, gender and sexuality.
The proposals drew nearly 200 people who testified late into the night. Then, with limited debate among the trustees, the policies passed on a 4-3 vote.
The next day, school board vice president Shannon Braun published an opinion piece headlined: “What Happened in GCISD Isn’t an Accident, It’s a Model.”
The shift in Grapevine-Colleyville reflects how North Texas may be the testing ground for far-right strategies to influence public education across the state. Newly elected trustees established a conservative majority and, just weeks into the school year, they’re taking action.
The political issues driving divisive fights at school board meetings are likely to amp up as the November elections and legislative sessions nears.
A wave of new school board members in several Tarrant County districts — elected with the money and support of wireless provider Patriot Mobile and other conservative PACs formed by parents — have ushered in swift changes and made national headlines.
Patriot Mobile in spring directed its funding to Grapevine-Colleyville, Carroll, Keller and Mansfield ISDs. The company’s PAC poured more than half a million dollars into electing trustees who aligned with its “Christian conservative values.”
Patriot Mobile brands itself as America’s only Christian conservative wireless service provider. Early this year, it formed a political action committee to expand on goals. The PAC targeted 11 Tarrant County school board seats — and won.
“That was just the beginning,” the organization’s website reads. “The day after these victories Patriot Mobile Action shifted focus to the November mid-term elections.”
This success is revving up Republican officials who call the local moves a model.
“We’ve already won a couple of school board races … but we are gearing up for a tough fight down the ballot to restore power to the parents in November,” Texas party officials wrote in a recent email.
The state GOP is fundraising specifically off the trustees’ moves in Grapevine-Colleyville, asking donors to “bring this conservative policy” targeting pronouns, bathroom access, books and critical race theory to each of the state’s more than 1,000 public school districts.
Tarrant County, the most populous Republican county in Texas, is the focus of significant efforts by Democrats to flip the area blue. Former President Donald Trump — who barely lost the county to President Joe Biden in 2020 — continues to weigh in on races there.
Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said he would expect to see a heightened level of conflict over school board control in areas that are trending from red to pink to purple.
“That’s where you’re going to have a flashpoint,” he said, adding that in low-turnout elections, it’s often those further to the right who do a better job turning out voters.
It’s possible Republicans see a backlash at the ballot boxes, should new trustees champion policies that aren’t broadly popular, said Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. Low-turnout races, like school board elections, are also a poor predictor of bigger election trends, he said.
In Keller, newly elected trustees pushed a policy requiring every book challenged the previous year to be reconsidered even if it was approved after that initial vetting. That meant titles including the Bible, a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary and Toni Morrison’s "The Bluest Eye" were, at least temporarily, removed from shelves.
While the move received nationwide criticism, locally, parents were divided with some praising the new policy.
Kris Kittle, a Keller resident and former school board candidate, thanked trustees during a special-called Aug. 8 meeting. Kittle has been vocal about the need to remove books she views as explicit from campus libraries.
“Thank you for taking on these policies right out of the gate,” Kittle said, adding that community members have long wanted more transparency around how district officials and trustees make policy decisions.
In Southlake, Carroll ISD trustees posed for photos holding donated “In God We Trust” signs from Patriot Mobile that will be displayed in all schools. They later declined a parent’s donation of similar signs featuring rainbow text and “In God We Trust” translated into Arabic. Parents threatened legal action against the district.
Officials for Patriot Mobile, which is headquartered in Tarrant County, could not be reached for comment through email, social media or phone.
Patriot Mobile officials wrote in a blog post that the area is “critical to keeping Texas ‘Red’ and the State of Texas is critical to America electing a future Republican President.”
“Republican candidates have found a constituency already within the base of their party that’s ready to mobilize on these education issues, and they can see this strategy bearing fruit in their takeover of targeted school districts,” Blank said.
Patriot Mobile PAC leadership decided to zero in on the four North Texas districts because they had implemented or considered policies dealing with race, sexuality and gender that Christian conservatives disagreed with, NBC News reported.
Republican pundits are increasingly labeling books about LGBTQ relationships as pornographic and lessons about racism as critical race theory, which probes the way policies and laws uphold systemic racism — such as in education, housing or criminal justice.
The framework — often referred to as CRT — emerged decades ago as a method of legal analysis and largely was confined to the realm of academia. Among the tenets of critical race theory are that racism is commonplace, progress for underrepresented groups is encouraged only to the extent that changes benefit the status quo, and that concepts such as color-blindness and meritocracy are myths to be rejected.
The focus on CRT and policies affecting transgender students — along with the new direction of school boards — are being keenly felt by teenagers.
Roughly 100 students marched out of Grapevine High School in protest of the new GCISD policies that they decried as transphobic and dangerous for kids who are trying to be themselves.
One student hoisted a sign that read: “Keep your politics out of my education.”
GCISD trustee Jorge Rodríguez said he is concerned about the lack of transparency around how the policies were conceived and what the sudden changes signal.
“People need to vote,” he said. “They need to look at what’s going on in our district, look at these policies and decide: Is this the direction I want my district to go?”
At least 10 conservative PACs recently launched in cities across the Dallas area. Bolstered by the Texas GOP’s efforts to double down on local, traditionally nonpartisan elections, they took aim at school boards.
Motivating many of the PACs was a belief that parents should have the ultimate choice in how their children are educated. The groups decry critical race theory and books they consider sexually inappropriate.
Many of them were groups focused on specific districts, such as the Families 4 Frisco PAC or the KISD Family Alliance PAC. They formed as parents across the state crowded school board meetings to testify about their deep concerns over social issues in schools.
Now that those parents are organized — on Facebook, in email chains, via GroupMe — Republican organizers can tap into that energy, conservative strategist Brendan Steinhauser said.
“It’s not just a slam dunk to convert them into the kinds of voters that you may want for the fall,” he said. “One of the things I’m trying to do is encourage these parents — locally, and around the state, in the country — to come out and vote for things like candidates who support school choice and be involved with legislators to support more education freedom.”
Patriot Mobile is also focused on longer-term influence.
After donating the posters to Southlake, the company published blogs outlining its plan to continue donating hundreds more signs to other districts.
“This has become a movement to bring God back into our schools!” they wrote.
It also alerted its customers about an upcoming revamp of social studies lessons, Patriot Mobile vice president Leigh Wambsganss wrote in a recent letter to State Board of Education members.
Company officials circulated a petition at the SBOE’s recent meeting that labeled the proposed new standards as slanted by a “globalist view” and an attempt to push “gender fluidity, sexual orientation, and Critical Race Theory.”
It was part of a broader push by conservative groups to pressure the state board to stop its rewrite of history lessons. It worked: The SBOE members punted the comprehensive overhaul until 2025 — after elections that have the potential to move the board more right.
Meanwhile, education advocacy and student groups are strategizing.
The ACLU of Texas created a Students’ Rights Hub, where people can explore banned books and find tools for reporting censorship or discrimination.
A group of parents from the four North Texas districts challenged the “In God We Trust” posters and threatened to escalate their fight in court should districts not heed their lawyers’ cease-and-desist letters.
“Our schools cannot be places that prioritize a singular religious ideology nor can they become political battlegrounds,” Keller mother Laney Hawes said about their fight against the school boards.
Other members of the “takeover” boards have pushed back against new policies.
During a recent Keller ISD board meeting, longtime trustee Ruthie Keyes expressed concerns that the district’s newly adopted book challenge policies could handcuff teachers or lead to unequal implementation due to vague definitions around what constitutes inappropriate material.
Keyes’ colleague, Beverly Dixon, said the board’s efforts “had gotten too political.”
“We really need to figure out how to bridge this divide. I feel like we’ve created a hostile environment,” Dixon said at the meeting.
Still, conservative groups are watching what happens in Tarrant County, hoping to replicate it.
Southlake trustees, for example, quickly became sought-after public speakers, invited to instruct a crowd at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference about how to follow a calculated playbook to take back districts.
And groups like Patriot Mobile plan to ramp up their spending.
The company wrote in a blog post that it doubled its subscriber base in 2021, and it planned to give more than $1.5 million to Christian conservative causes in 2022.
———
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.)
———
