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LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: GOP aims to win control of School Board

By Bill Moss, Published: August 23, 2016

Rick Wood made a small bit of history a couple of weeks ago when he switched from the Democratic Party to unaffiliated.

Wood, a two-term School Board member, was the last Democrat to hold a countywide elected position. It’s now been 14 years since a Democrat won a partisan election in a countywide race here, dating back to Tax Collector Terry Lyda’s last campaign.
School Board seats are officially nonpartisan but nothing is nonpartisan anymore in America — from the Academy Awards to debates over T-shirt slogans. Wood’s party switch was not so much an abandonment of Democratic Party principles as it was a last stand for that fast-fading “nonpartisan” label.
“This is an official nonpartisan race and I feel like I should run a nonpartisan campaign and serve in a nonpartisan way and continue to serve in a nonpartisan way as a School Board member if re-elected,” he said.
There’s no question the Republican shift in North Carolina has brought benefits locally.
Our legislative delegation has grown increasingly more influential — and thus able to bring good things to the local economy — as the Republican Party ascended. The Board of Commissioners, which hasn’t had a Democrat since the early 1990s, has governed responsibly under the control of Republicans, even if lately some property owners have taken to putting “tax and spend” in front of their name.
No matter what decency-defying trick he next exhibits, Donald J. Trump will surely carry Henderson County with ease.
All well and good and expected.
The School Board, alas, had for years been the last remaining local board that was not overtly partisan. That began to change four years ago, when local GOP leaders seized upon the old electoral trick of single-shot voting to elect one chosen candidate at a time. It worked. Voters put Josh Houston on the board in 2012 and elected Colby Coren in 2014.
What they did then behind closed doors they’re now brazenly doing out in the open.
The Republican Party is waving the flag and holding a School Board forum with the express purpose of showcasing Republican candidates for School Board and deciding which to bless in the general election. Our guess is hardly a wild one. The GOP will endorse all four registered Republicans on the ballot for the four available seats. If all four win, the School Board will have a 5-2 Republican majority, a new chair and presumably a mandate to run schools the Republican way.
Trouble is, education isn’t subject to partisan manipulation. Both parties have an abysmal record when it comes to “reform.” New ideas invariably place an overreliance on testing and deliver very little of substance underneath.
We agree that the current board seems to rubberstamp a lot of orders from the superintendent. Yet the superintendent receives those orders from the Legislature, which is solidly controlled by … guess who?
Given the county electorate, there’s a chance the GOP’s bold takeover gambit will work. Whether we would get better schools and smarter students as a result is a question voters will really want to examine.