Voters chat after voting at The Dwelling Place on Redstone Road in Huntsville in the November 2014 general election. (Eric Schultz/AL.com )
After a long, ugly local election, Andrea Alvarez will fill a Huntsville City School board seat for a term.
Alvarez, who ran what she says was an “intentionally” nonpartisan race, will replace eight-year District 3 incumbent Elisa Ferrell, who ran on a nonpartisan ticket in 2014.
Alvarez’s core focus, she has said, was to boost teacher morale, improve literacy and limit state overreach. She defeated Angela McClure, a former Trump staffer and mother of two who promised voters she would rid schools of “liberal indoctrination,” vote against tax raises and fight a longstanding desegregation order.
“It is highly strange,” Alvarez said of McClure’s campaign, shortly before Election Day. “It is definitely for political gain. It is definitely for the Republicans to parasite off of our school board election – to make them look good so that they ‘gain a seat,’ I guess. And that is why they are trying to make it so partisan.”
North Alabama voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, but in Huntsville, the margin was much narrower, according to election data.
Alvarez said she has intentionally kept her political affiliation private and has repeatedly claimed that there was no room in the election for party politics. She frequently posted photos in classrooms or of chats with teachers and school personnel. She wanted to focus on the issues during the race, she said.
McClure said she was doing the same — and trying to keep politics out of school.
“They brought the politics into the schools,” McClure told AL.com in an interview on the day of the runoff. “They brought the wokeism into the schools. And we know it and we see it as parents.”
“I have never, never, never, never said I’m gonna bring conservative issues into the classroom,” she said. “No, I’ve only said I want schools to be about school.”
‘Well-worn playbook’
Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, said increasingly polarized local elections like Huntsville’s could resemble a larger trend in national politics.
In supermajority states like Alabama, he said, the Republican party has grown more and more splintered, and those factions can be seen even in local races.
“There’s less of a need for party unity because you know, the Democrats can’t win on anything,” he said. “And so the coalitions within the party will be more emboldened to distinguish themselves and make their claims. So that’s just kind of a natural phenomenon that happens, but there’s also a lot of fuel feeding this at the national level, of course, with the MAGA versus establishment wing fight that’s going on, too.”
Part of the “playbook,” Fording said, for more radical conservatives involves using cultural wedge issues, and especially those related to race, to mobilize voters based on what elections scholars call “racial resentment.”
“The strategy is to frame something as being a threat to people,” he said. “And when you can frame children as the target of that threat, that’s especially effective.”
Phillipe Copeland, a racial justice expert at Boston University, agrees that conservatives are following a “well-worn playbook,” but noted that the strategy isn’t always successful.
He pointed to local and statewide wins in deep-red states, like Indiana, that overturned an anti-CRT bill with grassroots support. Moderates in Mountain Brook also celebrated a win this summer against a slate of candidates that had vowed to rid the city’s schools of so-called CRT.
“Just like there are parents that are willing to go and be loud and say, ‘Don’t teach CRT,’ we need parents to step up and be loud and say, ‘I support these teachers who are trying to educate our kids,’” Copeland said.
It’s tough to tell how a race like Huntsville’s may impact future elections, but Fording noted that local elections can be strong deciders of how a populace will vote.
“If people participate in school board elections,” he said, “you can be sure they’re participating in every other election above that on the ticket.”
The campaign
On Election Day, McClure said she woke up at 4 a.m. to put out additional signs, campaigned some more and then headed to give a speech to a Republican women’s group around noon. Throughout her race, McClure said she knocked on at least 1,000 doors. She said she didn’t spend much time in schools; she said it was too difficult to get in.
Between spats over custody documents, sign stealing and comments about drag queens, the election became rough.
McClure spent the days leading up to the vote calling herself the only “true conservative” in the race and criticizing Alvarez’s apparent support from a Democratic PAC.
Alvarez claimed the GOP had given McClure $5,000 in individual donations and had provided volunteers to help with her campaign.
McClure also grew increasingly critical of Alvarez’s support of social emotional learning, a behavioral tool that she equated to critical race theory, a high-level legal concept that is now banned in Alabama schools. The state investigated one violation of the new anti-CRT policy in the district: a teacher training that required staff to define concepts like “equity” and “discrimination.”
McClure said she believes schools are too busy focusing on “radical gender ideology” (such as asking students what pronouns they prefer), rather than focusing on raising test scores.
The ‘Ron DeSantis of Huntsville City Schools’
It’s unusual, but not unprecedented, for a nonpartisan school board election to become heavily partisan.
“What is happening now is we have a red state run by the GOP who is putting people into office to force everyone to be compliant with their agenda,” Alvarez said. “And that takes away local politics, that takes away regional politics, and we are doing whatever the GOP wants.”
Huntsville’s run-off followed other tense Alabama elections, like a city council race in Mountain Brook, that included discussions of how the school system was handling discussions about race, religion and sexuality.
A Ballotpedia analysis also tracked spring school board races in Montgomery and Madison County that were largely divided over issues like masking and so-called critical race theory. More than 1000 school districts in 47 states, the analysis stated, involved candidates taking a stance on one of those issues.
Experts say the nationwide debate over school curriculum and policies related to race, religion and gender identity could have the potential to shape both small and large-scale elections across the country – especially with big-name politicians, like Gov. Ron Desantis in Florida, handing out endorsements to local candidates.
“We are now politicizing education to a point where it seems to become more about teaching an ideology in schools and classrooms than it is about ensuring that children receive a high quality education,” Dana Thompson-Dorsey, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of South Florida, said in a recent interview with WUSF.
Florida has, in many ways, led the fight nationally over school curriculum and diversity and inclusion policies. DeSantis, a contender for the presidential race, coined the “Stop WOKE Act,” as well as a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law that inspired Alabama’s bathroom bill, which prevents students from using a restroom that does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.
When McClure announced her run for the local school board this summer, after a failed run for state office, she dubbed herself as a hopeful “Ron DeSantis of Huntsville City Schools.”
“There’s not a single bill that he has presented that I’m not 100% for,” she told AL.com.
In fact, she said, Alabama could stand to become a little more like Florida.
Despite her loss, McClure said she will be front and center during the legislative session, fighting against what she called “Common Core.”
“Who knows what direction we will take,” she said. “We just need to keep true to our conservative values and what we stand for and it will resonate with the voters or it won’t.”
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