Two years ago, at the urging of her teenage daughter, clinical psychologist Donna Marino ran for school board in far west suburban Oswego, Illinois, thinking her background in mental health could help students recover from the isolation, stress and trauma brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the actions taken to slow its spread.
But less than a year after winning election and being selected by her peers to chair the board, Marino abruptly quit. She said she feared for her and her family’s mental and physical health following threats from some parents opposed to the district’s continued masking mandates as well as how culture, race and sex education were being addressed in the classroom and in books in Oswego’s elementary and high schools.
“I was excited to be able to contribute that mental health lens after all our children have been through. I wanted to be a catalyst for rebuilding our community and crossing that divide. I had high hopes. But I underestimated the severity of that fracture,” Marino wrote in her resignation letter when she stepped down from the board of Oswego Community Unit School District 308, recounting how she’d been called a “coward,” “F----n scum,” a “low IQ knuckle dragger and worse.”
“Unfortunately, the vitriol, politics and threats on myself and my family have taken its toll and is just not something I am willing to live with,” she wrote. “I know that bullies will feel they have won, but they lost big time by not having me on the board to defend their children. The only way they do win is if I allow them to take away my joy, the safety of my family, and allow their abuse into my life.”
Marino’s experience reflects how, at one of the most divided times in recent history, school boards across the country have become targets of both the ire and political ambitions of conservatives and far-right groups as they argue schools have been overtaken by teachers unions and other forces pushing liberal agendas.
Anger over pandemic mandates has morphed into outrage, injecting Washington-style polarization into discussions among neighbors about what kids are being taught in the classroom and what’s available on school library shelves.
The Chicago suburbs have become a key battleground. From Oswego to Wheaton to Barrington to Lockport and beyond, tens of thousands of dollars are pouring into several ostensibly nonpartisan races ahead of the April 4 balloting as what have historically been low-interest elections are roiled by debates where Republican talking points such as “parental rights,” “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” are taking center stage.
It’s a national playbook, written primarily by conservatives and the GOP, aimed at gaining a political foothold, particularly in increasingly Democratic suburbia, by getting like-minded candidates elected to what are traditionally among the easiest and least expensive offices to win.
The rallying cry of parental rights, in particular, has a long history in American public life, dating back at least to the landmark 1925 trial of John Scopes, a high school science teacher in Tennessee who volunteered as the defendant in a test case challenging a state law banning instruction on the theory of evolution, said Jon Hale, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“There have been these sorts of claims throughout time. And I do think a lot of it has been misguided because in the United States, we allow for this discourse around local control and local government. Well, you can interpret that in a number of ways. Parents throughout history have oftentimes said that means parents and families, they should make the choice,” Hale said. “But just the language is a little different now, where they’re actually called parents rights groups.”
The rise of those groups — many of which have ties to conservative megadonors and dark money organizations — during the COVID-19 pandemic has in turn stirred up Illinois Democrats and teachers unions. Backed by the bully pulpit and bank account of billionaire Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the state Democratic Party is wading into school and library board races in an unprecedented way this year, with a plan to spend nearly $300,000 supporting 84 candidates and opposing 74 across 17 counties. It’s a move that has raised concerns about injecting more money and partisanship into local elections for volunteer positions.
The rifts are being seen nationally as well. A recent poll from Grinnell College in Iowa found that majorities think decisions on materials in school libraries should not be made by elected officials. At the same time, congressional Republicans approved on Friday what they called “The Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would require public school districts to publicly post information about curricula for students, including giving parents a list of books and materials available in school libraries. It is not expected to be considered by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate.
In Illinois, state GOP Chairman Don Tracy, in a Feb. 24 email, thanked candidates running, “especially our school and library board races.”
“Due to the left’s infiltration of our schools through teacher unions and otherwise, it is more important than ever that Republicans become engaged in the hard work of electing good people to public office,” he said. “School and library boards are of particular importance because of their outsized influence on our children, our future leaders.”
Tracy, however, decried the state GOP’s lack of resources to help finance school board candidates. Instead, he said there are “national groups like 1776 Project PAC that endorse and support local school board candidates, and we highly encourage you to apply for that.”
The 1776 Project Political Action Committee funds school board candidates nationally who, according to its website, support teaching “patriotism and pride in American history” and oppose the teaching of critical race theory and The 1619 Project, a piece of long-form journalism by The New York Times that focuses heavily on the role slavery played in U.S. history.
The New York-based PAC has gotten financial backing from a group with ties to ultraconservative GOP megadonor and billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the Uline office supply and products company who contributed $54 million to Darren Bailey’s failed bid for Illinois governor in November.
The 1776 Project — which boasts on Twitter that it “helped elect over 100 un-woke school board members last year” — this past week began sending mailers promoting some of the 18 candidates it has endorsed, including a four-member slate running in Oswego that calls itself We the Parents.
‘Judgment day’
The most outspoken member of the We the Parents slate is Joanne Johnson, a chief critic of Marino when she was school board president.
On Feb. 10 of last year, the day Marino submitted her resignation letter, she opted not to attend a final school board meeting where parents railed against the district’s continued COVID-19 mask requirement. But Johnson blasted Marino in absentia, calling her “a coward” who “wouldn’t even face us.”
Speaking during public comments, Johnson recited a Bible verse from the Book of Isaiah citing God saying “the captives of the mighty shall be taken away” and “I will save thy children.”
And then Johnson added: “God gave us our freedom. It was reaffirmed by our Founding Fathers and the Constitution of the United States. It was not given to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, (then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr.) Anthony Fauci, (the Illinois State Board of Education), any teachers union, any school board nor the school administration.”
“We will all have our judgment day that we cannot get away from,” Johnson said.
Johnson is joined on the We the Parents slate by her husband and two others vying for the four open seats on the Oswego board that oversees the seventh-largest school district in the state, serving nearly 17,000 students from the Kane, Kendall and Will County communities of Oswego, Yorkville, Aurora, Plainfield, Montgomery and Joliet.
They are backed by a local political action committee called the Stamp Act PAC in Yorkville, the Naperville-based group Awake Illinois and the Kendall County Republican Party.
The Stamp Act PAC vows to “fight to preserve our cultural and religious heritage” and “resist attempts by the Left to transform and reshape American society.” Awake Illinois, meanwhile, has gained notoriety for deploying anti-transgender rhetoric in opposing instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in schools and for generating social media outrage over kid-friendly drag-themed events at a northwest suburban bakery and a west suburban library.
We the Parents is opposed by the For the Kids slate, which is made up of two current school board members and two newcomers. There also is a ninth candidate in the race, unaffiliated with either slate. The local teachers union, which typically remains neutral in school board elections, took the rare step of endorsing the For the Kids slate.
We the Parents pledges a “bill of rights for parents” that includes rhetorical language often used by conservatives talking about schools, including, “The right to a public education free from political indoctrination of any kind.” The For the Kids slate touts a “commitment to parents’ involvement,” including promoting the district’s “opt-out” process for curriculum and materials. And it stresses, “We trust parents to know what’s best for their own children and only their own children.”
The election is an important one since the new school board will be involved in selecting a new superintendent to replace John Sparlin, who is retiring after seven years at the end of the school year.
On Jan. 30, the Stamp Act PAC, which is financially supported by the Kendall County GOP, hosted a meet and greet for the We the Parents slate at an Oswego fire station attended by about 50 people. Johnson, who has five children who have gone through the district and has a sixth who is a sophomore, underscored what was at stake in the election.
“We need these four positions on the board in order to be able to make the impact that we are telling you we want to make with all of our hearts and souls. We want that. We will not be bullied. We will not back down. I will die on this hill for my children and your children,” Johnson said. “I ask you, as an education system: Focus on academics. We don’t need you contradicting what our family values are in any way, shape or form.”
Johnson held a copy “Gender Queer,” a graphic novel and memoir that details cartoonist and author Maia Kobabe’s journey of coming out as gender nonbinary and includes a small number of sexually explicit illustrations among its 240 pages.
The book’s presence on high school library shelves has been a flashpoint for anti-LGBTQ sentiment aimed at school boards and district policies and has elicited challenges across the Chicago area and nation, even drawing members of the far-right Proud Boys to a November 2021 board meeting in west suburban Downers Grove.
“As taxpayers, our money should not be spent on this dirt, and it has nothing to do with Christian values,” Johnson said. “It has to do with moral family values, period.”
At a recent virtual candidate forum held by the League of Women Voters Aurora Area, Johnson said, “In no way, shape or form am I for banning books.” Then, she said state law clearly defines what pornography is and “we absolutely have pornographic material in our high school.”
But Mary Jo Wenmouth, an investment consultant from Oswego and a member of the For the Kids slate, said parents already can opt their children out from curriculum or materials parents deem objectionable.
“We have to keep in mind that one parent doesn’t govern for an entire class. So for books being deemed appropriate by the proper parties, and one parent or two parents or five parents who have an issue with it, they have the ability to opt their children out individually,” she said. “At no time do they have the option of removing that book from the curriculum entirely. That’s done by the trained professionals.”
Religious beliefs also play a significant role for other members of the We the Parents slate, even as they seek to downplay them as just “personal beliefs.”
Slate member Richard Gilmore said in a Facebook post he had “no intention of forcing my ‘religion’ on anyone.” That comment came under a picture of him holding a sign of the slate above the words: “Proverbs 28:2 When the country is in chaos, everybody has a plan to fix it — But it takes a leader of real understanding to straighten things out.”
Gilmore also has expressed concern on Facebook about the new history curriculum the district was purchasing and the 2020 election that former President Donald Trump has falsely claimed was stolen.
“It was disclosed that the book will take students right up to the current administration of Joe Biden. Parents what are your thoughts in regards to voter fraud and stolen elections?” Gilmore wrote.
Awake Illinois
As the two slates have campaigned against each other, the role of Awake Illinois has become a focal point. Johnson earlier this year attended an Awake Illinois training session for candidates across the Chicago region and thanked the group for their “commitment to our children.”
On a recent Saturday, Awake Illinois planned an event in Oswego with the We the Parents candidates but moved it to a private residence after a group of parents and Awake opponents announced plans to protest. The protest nevertheless moved forward with about three dozen people denouncing the efforts of Awake and other affiliated groups.
“As a parent, I’m tired of outside influences coming into our school district and trying to elect extremist school board candidates that promote national political agendas,” said Jennifer Stamp, the mother of a fourth grader in the district and a co-founder of the local group Parents for Progress. “To my knowledge, no one on the Awake board has an actual child or residence in my school district. They are choosing candidates and hosting events to advance a political agenda in places where they don’t live and where their children don’t attend school.”
Johnson is just one of several candidates on the ballot this spring who attended the January candidate training by Awake Illinois and the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based organization that has trained conservative activists and candidates since the 1970s and runs a project called Campus Reform that claims to expose “liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.”
The January event was open to the public but only to those who paid the $40 per person entrance fee. Attendees spent a Saturday at an Itasca hotel learning a playbook that has been implemented in races across the suburbs this spring. About 70 people attended, including about 25 of whom identified themselves as candidates. Among the attendees were two Tribune reporters who registered for the event and paid the entry fee.
Aside from Bailey, who before he ran for governor served on a school board, speakers included Awake Illinois founder Shannon Adcock, who launched the group in 2021 after her own failed school board bid in the Naperville area, and the group’s director, Steve Lucie, a western Illinois farmer and former school board member who routinely shares anti-vaccine and anti-transgender messages on social media.
In one recent post, Lucie wrote: “Fauci and many others lied. That destroyed peoples lives and killed untold numbers of people and those yet to come. They deserve a short rope and a tall tree! Period.”
During the training, the Leadership Institute’s Charlie O’Neill coached attendees on how to handle media interviews, offering advice on reframing questions about issues such as gender identity and LGBTQ rights, but also encouraging them to engage with reporters and answer questions honestly.
“We’re right-wingers for a reason — because we’re right,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill also told attendees at the event — the location of which was only disclosed upon registration after calls for protests at the original venue in Oak Brook — that “the beautiful thing about the conservative movement is we have nothing to hide.”
The candidates also heard from Ted Dabrowski, president of the conservative advocacy group Wirepoints and a member of a North Shore group called New Trier Neighbors that has pushed for restricting LGBTQ content in local schools.
Dabrowski emphasized that using the public’s concerns over declining test scores — a statewide and nationwide phenomenon in the wake of the pandemic and associated school closures — was a good way to connect with moderate voters. Conservative school board candidates have been hitting that issue hard this election cycle, with the help in some cases of district-specific infographics produced by Wirepoints and shared on social media.
“That center-left mom, that center-left dad knows something is wrong and will embrace some of these ideas,” said Dabrowski, who also quipped that “there is educational equity in Decatur now because the white kids can’t read either.”
The training also offered candidates an entree to the conservative media ecosystem, courtesy of Brian Timpone, who works with right-wing talk show host and political consultant Dan Proft of Naples, Florida, to publish a network of political mailings and websites disguised as news outlets.
Timpone told those in attendance his publications “can punch back for you,” and added, “If somebody is giving you a hard time, we can fix that.”
In recent weeks, several suburban school board candidates have appeared on the airwaves of conservative talk station WIND-AM 560, which airs Proft’s show “Chicago’s Morning Answer.”
‘Schools are … losing their focus’
A strategy similar to the one outlined at the Awake Illinois training has been playing out in DuPage County, where nine candidates are vying for four seats on the Community Unit School District 200 board, which oversees 20 elementary and high schools for nearly 12,000 studentsfrom Wheaton, Warrenville, Winfield, Carol Stream and West Chicago.
A slate of four conservative candidates calling itself Parents for CUSD200 Children is opposing a more loosely affiliated group that includes two incumbents and two newcomers, one of whom is a former longtime Wheaton City Council member. A ninth candidate, who campaigns as the only person of color in the race, is running solo.
One of the conservative slate candidates, Amanda “Amy” Erkenswick, was at the Awake Illinois training. Erkenswick said she attended because there is a dearth of information available to first-time candidates.
“There’s very few areas where you can even access helpful information on this, so a lot of it’s been by word-of-mouth,” she said in a Tribune interview weeks later.
While acknowledging she was familiar with Awake Illinois before attending the training, Erkenswick distanced herself from some of the group’s more inflammatory rhetoric, such as labeling Pritzker a “groomer” and maligning the gender development program at Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital.
“These aren’t my words, and I haven’t said any of these words,” she said. “So I think this whole guilty by association thing is interesting and funny.”
At the same time, Erkenswick and her three slate mates — Spencer Garrett, David Sohmer and Kimberly Hobbs — have been outspoken in opposing how district schools address issues related to race, gender and sexuality, echoing themes by Awake and other conservative groups.
Each of the slate members has received a positive write-up in the DuPage Policy Journal, which is one of the websites run by Timpone, and Erkenswick has appeared twice on the WIND talk show “Mark My Words with Mark Vargas,” whose host also is editor-in-chief of the conservative website Illinois Review. Erkenswick and her slate mates were included on a list of recommended school board candidates from WIND that was released this past week. It included nearly 70 candidates running in nearly 30 school districts, including Wheaton and Barrington.
The slate’s platform of “academic excellence,” “curricular integrity, “transparency in communication” and “parental involvement” includes a call for lessons that are “ideologically neutral” and “free of political bias” and for creating “opt-in” policies for certain content, rather than the current practice that puts the onus on parents to opt their children out when they find something objectionable.
“Schools are somewhat losing their focus and being asked to pay attention to too much background noise,” said Hobbs, the mother of seven current and former students in the district. “They’re there for the purpose of teaching the academic disciplines and the arts. That has traditionally been their role. And anything else is (the) family’s responsibility, not the school’s responsibility. And when the school attempts to expand its range of influence, they’re getting into things that are not their concern, are not their purview and that detract from their mission.”
For Erkenswick, the mother and stepmother of four district students and one recent graduate, the catalyzing event was “Gender Queer” being on the library shelves at Wheaton North and Wheaton Warrenville South high schools.
Last summer, before voting to retain the book, which as of late May 2022 had been checked out by only one student from either high school library, the board deliberated in closed session, a move the Illinois attorney general’s office later deemed violated the state Open Meetings Act.
“The book … didn’t propel me into running for school board,” said Erkenswick, who said she had not read it in its entirety despite labeling it “lewd, vulgar, pornographic and sexually explicit” during public comments at a September board meeting. “What it did is it encouraged me to open my eyes and to start really digging in and really looking into, ‘What are the issues and what is our school board doing and saying about it?’”
‘Outside the norm’
Among those who also spoke out against the book were Garrett and Sohmer, along with Jeanne Ives, a conservative firebrand who was previously on the Wheaton City Council before representing the area in the Illinois House and mounting unsuccessful challenges to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner in the 2018 GOP primary and Democratic U.S. Rep. Sean Casten of Downers Grove in the general election two years later.
Ives has not publicly endorsed the Parents for CUSD200 Children group — which has come to be known as the “green slate” in reference to the color of its yard signs — but she recently posted a video on her website criticizing “false attacks” on “a slate of parents who got involved to simply arrest declining test scores, tax hikes and questionable content in schools.”
What’s more, of the roughly $26,000 in campaign contributions the slate has reported receiving, more than $18,000 has come from donors who previously gave to Ives’ congressional bid, according to state and federal campaign finance records.
In a private January email to her “network of friends, neighbors and concerned citizens,” Ives, a member of the Republican State Central Committee, wrote that she backed slate members because “they have been engaged in trying to hold the school district accountable for the last two years on everything from declining academic scores to pornographic books in our school libraries to woke instruction in our classrooms,” according to a copy obtained by the Tribune.
Ives did not respond to requests for comment.
Hobbs, who’s running for a two-year seat on the board and is chair of the slate’s campaign fund, said Ives has “no formal role” in the campaign but said she’s offered advice.
One group the slate did not talk to was the local teachers union, opting not to participate in the Wheaton Warrenville Education Association’s candidate recommendation process, something the union has done in elections for more than 30 years.
While the candidates cited concerns about a potential conflict of interest because the union is in the midst of contract negotiations, Garrett, a father of five, said, “If we got an endorsement from the teachers union, our base wouldn’t vote for us.”
Sohmer, the father of nine current and former students in the district who was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the district’s mask mandate, compared the union to “a mob” and said unnamed teachers have told him they can’t publicly support the slate out of fear for their jobs.
Bryce Cann, the union president, said it’s “outside the norm” for candidates not to participate in the process, which includes a written questionnaire, an interview with a panel of teachers and a vote by representatives from each building in the district.
“We wanted candidates who are going to be collaborative with all stakeholders, not just the ones that they necessarily agree with, but we want people who are going to sit down and listen … and try to understand all points and aspects that school districts have to deal with,” Cann said. “Additionally, we want candidates who are committed to equity and diversity, and we want candidates who are committed to delivering a high-quality public education for all students.”
The union endorsed incumbent board members Dave Long and Julie Kulovits, who was appointed to fill a vacancy in August, along with newcomers Erik Hjerpe and John Rutledge.
They are not campaigning as a unified slate but say they share a commitment to relying on the expertise of educators within the district while providing oversight and setting policy from the board level.
“We don’t agree on every view. We actually have, in partisan politics, pretty substantial political differences,” said Hjerpe,who has three children in the district and considers himself moderate, while Rutledge, 78, is a Republican who spent a decade on the Wheaton City Council. Rutledge has contributed to GOP politicians including Rauner, Bailey and former U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam.
“What we found, though, is we have a common way we’ve found to work out differences, to talk through challenges, and honestly that’s going to be conducive to functioning as a board,” Hjerpe said.
Members of the group have bipartisan backers, with endorsements from Casten to longtime Republican DuPage County Treasurer Gwen Henry.
As the lone candidate of color in the race, Anjali Bharadwa, whose parents emigrated from India, said she’s been disturbed by attitudes among the conservative slate toward the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, whether its dubious claims about critical race theory in the math curriculum or opposition toward implicit bias training for teachers.
“Those are things that I am pushing back against,” she said.
‘Our community has values’
Indeed, diversity initiatives as well as social and emotional learning have come under criticism in school districts and become a focus in races across the suburbs, with criticism echoing national talking points from groups such as Moms for Liberty and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
In northwest suburban Barrington, a trio of school board candidates is backed by Action PAC, a suburban political action committee with GOP ties that also is supporting candidates for the Barrington village and library boards.
Action PAC has received nearly $62,000 since last fall, including from former Illinois GOP governor candidate Gary Rabine, as well as the leader of the Lake County chapter of Moms for Liberty and video gambling company Gold Rush Amusements. The daughter of Gold Rush owner Rick Heidner, whose plans for a Tinley Park racetrack and casino were scuttled in 2019 after the Tribune reported on his long-standing business ties to a mob-connected banking family, is running on the PAC’s slate for library board.
Its slate of candidates for the Barrington Community Unit School District 220 board — Katey Baldassano, Leonard Munson and Matt Sheriff — also has been endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC and a group calling itself the Parents’ Rights in Education PAC, which does not appear to be registered with either the Illinois State Board of Elections or the Federal Election Commission. Baldassano helped recruit members for the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, according to a July 2021 email obtained by the Tribune.
Like other school districts, Barrington has been mired in controversies since the pandemic, from school closures and mask mandates to the presence of “Gender Queer” and other books with LGBTQ themes.
Members of the Action PAC slate have said they’re against banning books but also have proposed measures restricting book access, including the “opt-in” policy idea that has been pushed by Moms for Liberty.
“We need parents to have the choice to opt in to content that is X-rated or R-rated because we understand that … some people think school libraries need to have those books, but parents need to be able to decide, ‘I don’t want my kids to have access to those books,’” Baldassano said in a recent interview on WIND.
If elected, the group would make a conservative majority on the seven-member board. Current board member Steve Wang, who was among the minority voting in favor of removing “Gender Queer” and other books, is treasurer of the PAC. Also vying for three available seats are two incumbents and two newcomers.
One of the incumbents seeking reelection, Leah Collister-Lazzari, defended the district’s review process and the board’s decision to retain the challenged books during a recent League of Women Voters forum.
“Our community has values for inclusive education. It’s come out as one of the priorities in our strategic plan for the future,” she said. “That means having culturally relevant literature in our libraries available. We’re going to continue this process.”
‘Facts, not opinion’
Similar debates are playing out across the Chicago area this spring.
In west suburban Hinsdale, criticism of Hinsdale Township High School District 86′s diversity efforts came to a head last year when an anti-racism consultant from North Carolina withdrew her diversity, equity and inclusion training proposal just before she was scheduled to present it to the school board.
The consultant, Valda Valbrun, told the Tribune she started receiving hateful messages the day before the meeting. She said she later determined the messages were the result of a Hinsdale resident seeing her making critical remarks on her personal Facebook page about DeSantis, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and the Republican Party.
“I got several messages yesterday and really think Hinsdale is a dangerous place and would not be physically comfortable there,” Valbrun, who is Black, wrote in a letter that Superintendent Tammy Prentiss read at a school board meeting.
Since those events, public comments at board meetings have regularly circled back to Valbrun and the debate over diversity initiatives. Among those opposing training for staff and students is Andrew Catton, who is running for one of the three open seats on the board.
Several pages of emails Catton sent to the board were uncovered through a resident’s open-records request. In one email from May of last year, Catton called for the firing of those associated with the district’s equity work.
“The real risk from the DEI/ Anti Racist agenda is that it has an active subculture of violence and is a proponent of it, as long as it supports the Antiracist/DEI goal,” Catton wrote to the board. “It’s the formation of a new yet diabolical moral racism acceptance.”
Catton did not respond to requests for comment.
In the south suburbs, a group called We the Parents Illinois is supporting candidates for school and library boards, including a slate for three open seats on the Lockport Township High School District 205 board. In the eight-way race, the group, whose goals include “protecting the classroom from woke and political ideology,” is backing Martin Boersma, Sandra Chimon Rogers and Michael Clausen.
Clausen said the group’s goals mean addressing how students are taught about race and sex education.
While proponents, including education professionals, argue current lessons on race, gender identity and sexual orientation create empathetic students, Clausen questioned what the students would be empathetic toward and said those lessons boil down to opinion.
Most students in high school are minor children, Clausen said, and “we need to be careful how we present that to minor children.”
“Academia should be based on facts, not opinion,” he said. “Children are very innocent. They’re very moldable. We have to be very cautious and careful and pay specific attention to what we’re sharing.”
‘It’s really worrisome’
While relatively unified in their concerns and campaign talking points, conservative school board candidates across Chicago’s suburbs don’t appear to have a unified source of funding, a reality Tracy, the state GOP chair, acknowledged in his letter.
Despite claims on social media about supporting more than 70 candidates across the area, Awake Illinois has reported receiving only a $100 loan to date through its political action committee, though the PAC last fall reported contributing $2,000 to Bailey’s failed bid for governor.
The nonprofit, which is officially nonpartisan but routinely expresses public support for Republican officials and candidates, raised less than $21,000 and spent nearly $17,000 in the year that ended April 30, according to records filed with the Illinois attorney general’s office. During last year’s election, federal PACs affiliated with Uihlein paid Awake Illinois $18,750 to distribute campaign materials supporting Bailey and unsuccessful GOP Illinois Supreme Court candidate Michael Burke.
Officials with Awake Illinois did not respond to requests for comment.
While big-money spending from national groups hasn’t poured in, Pritzker, other Illinois Democrats and local teachers unions are surveying the landscape.
“There are organizations that are anti-LGBTQ, that are racist, that are anti-Muslim, that are supporting candidates for these local boards, and they’re trying to take over at a local level and build up candidates at the local level that they can then run for the state legislature and for other offices. And we’ve seen some of them actually elevated to running for governor,” Pritzker said in early February, making a thinly veiled reference to Bailey, his opponent in the November election.
Weeks later, the governor transferred $500,000 from his campaign fund to the Democratic Party of Illinois, some of which will be used against “candidates who are trying to bring a culture war agenda to schools,” said Ben Hardin, executive director of the state party.
“We’ve identified over 70 districts with some sort of what we’re calling fringe candidate running in them,” with Oswego, Barrington and Hinsdale among the list, Hardin said. “They are trying to style themselves as innocuously as possible, and we are here to educate voters about the true agenda. … It really is an agenda focused on exclusion and regression.”
But as Pritzker consolidates his control over the party under the leadership of his hand-picked chairwoman, state Rep. Elizabeth Hernandez of Cicero, Illinois Democrats also are looking at these races as a way to build a year-round organization and grow their own bench of future candidates, an approach long taken by the GOP.
Because quarterly campaign finance reports aren’t due until after the election, the full extent of the Democrats’ involvement won’t be known for weeks. To date, the party has not reported any direct transfers to school board candidate committees or PACs supporting local candidates, but party spokeswoman Kiera Ellis said Thursday that effort includes more than 300,000 mailers and digital ads targeting more than 380,000 voters.
For some candidates, even those whose political views might lean Democratic, the involvement of the state party in what are supposed to be nonpartisan local elections has raised concerns about increased politicization and polarization in races that should be all about kids.
“I think it’s really worrisome,” said Kulovits, the appointed Wheaton school board member who received the teacher union endorsement. “The funding in this particular school board election, it’s just made it hard for your average parent to run for school board.”
Earlier this month, Pritzker insisted the party’s involvement “isn’t about partisan politics” but that “people who go to vote should know who these extremists are.”
While teachers unions have long played a role in school board races in some districts, such as Wheaton, the current landscape has prompted more local affiliates to get involved in elections this year, from get-out-the-vote efforts to canvassing for specific candidates and funding campaigns, said Bridget Shanahan, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Education Association.
To date, IEA locals have gotten involved in school board races in about 100 districts, up from 39 two years ago and 23 in 2019, Shanahan said.
In Oswego, Marino, the former school board chair, reflected on her brief tenure, acknowledging, “I was really naive.”
“I didn’t realize how deep the divide was,” she said, adding she’s backing the For the Kids slate but bemoans the outside influences trying to decide the race.
“I long for the days where you can have opposite political opinions and talk about it and even getting passionate, but still being respecting and you still know that it’s good-hearted people that just see a different way to get to a common goal,” she said. “We don’t all have to believe the same things but to see the attacks is just sad. It makes me really sad.”
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(Chicago Tribune’s John Byrne, Zareen Syed and Jeremy Gorner and Daily Southtown’s Alexandra Kukulka contributed.)
