And school boards are the latest arena.”Īs the COVID-19 vaccine became more widely available, some hoped that the pandemic-and the school-board wars-would wane and that the fall would bring some semblance of normality. “Every time I got more data, it seemed like polarization and nationalization was ratcheting up more and more, in state houses and mayoral races and district-attorney races. “I started writing my book about the nationalization of politics in 2014,” Daniel Hopkins, the author of “ The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized” and a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. School-board controversies are increasingly driven by national political trends. They swarmed a meeting, maskless, until it was cancelled then they voted in their own representatives, who immediately rescinded mask mandates. In Vail, a suburb southeast of Tucson, a group attempted a school-board coup. Meetings that were once limited to local audiences are now live-streamed and archived on YouTube an angry rant anywhere in the country has the potential to go viral. In Arizona-and across the country-school boards are increasingly a site of agitation and activism, inflected with the partisan rancor of national politics. curriculum.) On many days, Wray told me, there were hundreds of new comments on the Facebook group’s page. superintendent, Scott Menzel, told me: opposition to mask mandates some parents’ attempts to sniff out critical race theory in classrooms. “They started with an agenda of opening our schools, and then they shifted into a whole list of other topics,” the S.U.S.D. In August, 2020, Wray co-founded the Community Advocacy Network, or CAN, a private Facebook group that soon swelled to more than seventeen hundred members. governing board, urging a return to in-person learning. As the district debated mask and social-distancing policies, she began attending virtual meetings of the S.U.S.D. It’s very regimented and disciplined.” Wray wasn’t particularly involved in local education politics-she didn’t know her school-board members’ names and had never attended a single meeting-until the pandemic. She sent her daughters to a public school that aligned with her values.
Wray, a financial adviser with a friendly, open face, moved to Scottsdale from Texas, in 2015. Invoking the Virginia governor’s race, in which a suburban school district’s antiracist efforts became a statewide issue that may have turned the tide in favor of Republicans, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, called the debacle Loudoun County 2.0. and woke ideologies being taught in their kids’ classrooms,” a One America News anchor intoned.
“As a father and grandfather, I am outraged to learn that this kind of harassment is occurring right here in Scottsdale, Arizona! Brave parents like Amanda Wray are the VICTIMS of this lunacy.” Right-wing pundits seized on the story: “An Arizona school-board president is under major fire for creating a dossier with information on parents who oppose C.R.T. “Parents are NOT the enemy!” Jim Lamon, a Republican hoping to win the Democrat Mark Kelly’s Senate seat, wrote on his Web site. In 2022, Arizona will hold elections for senator and governor in the dossier, Republican political aspirants saw an opportunity for outrage. Within a week, the Google Drive folder, now deemed a “secret dossier,” was international news. But I saw the amount of hours that somebody had spent stalking me, and it made me physically ill.” She updated her Twitter bio to reflect her discovery: “Public school mom, doxxed, harassed and stalked by the Scottsdale Unified School District Board President.” I just started to feel like someone was watching me-irrationally. “Pictures of my kids, pictures of my friends’ kids, pictures of the house I was standing in. There, among a jumble of documents, were folders labelled with her name. Amanda Wray was cleaning her Airbnb property, a mountain cabin two hours north of her home in Scottsdale, Arizona, when a friend texted her a link to a folder on someone’s Google Drive.
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