Conservatives to gain seats on KS state school board. But how many? Here are the races

When unveiling the new, controversial map for the Kansas state Board of Education, Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson said he hoped redistricting would encourage more conservative candidates to seek office.

“I’d love to have more conservatives run because you’re starting to see, particularly after COVID, how important education is and how important that board is in the process,” Masterson, an Andover Republican, said before the Legislature approved the new map this spring, splitting Wyandotte County into three pieces.

He seems to have gotten his wish. The board is expected to gain at least two new conservative members, who defeated more moderate incumbents in the August primary with campaigns against “indoctrinating” students with lessons on racism and transgender students’ participation in sports. They argue that parents should have more say over what goes on in the classroom, and that teachers should be armed.

The board represents 10 districts across the state, and five of those seats are on ballots for the Nov. 8 election.

The newcomers, Dennis Hershberger of Hutchinson and Cathy Hopkins of Hays are now running unopposed for the board’s four-year terms. But some voters are supporting a write-in campaign for Garden City Republican Jean Clifford, who lost her reelection bid to Hopkins.

Incumbent Jim Porter, a moderate Republican from Fredonia, also is running unopposed after winning his primary against Luke Aichele, a McPherson barber who opened his business in violation of COVID-19 protocols at the height of the pandemic.

Two other seats on the board will be decided by Kansas City area voters.

In Johnson County, conservative incumbent Michelle Dombrosky, an Olathe Republican, is running for a second term. She faces a challenge from Overland Park Democrat Sheila Albers.

In the other race, Kansas City Democrat Janet Waugh, who served on the state school board for more than two decades, couldn’t run for another term after redistricting. Leavenworth newcomers Jeffrey Howards, a Democrat, and Danny Zeck, a conservative Republican, are running for the seat.

“Janet Waugh was gerrymandered out of her district. I believe that was deliberate,” said Porter, the board chair who has represented southeastern Kansas since 2015. “I am concerned with what appeared to me to be an effort to weaken minority voting in the Kansas City area. Topeka is split up pretty well, too. And I don’t see how that best represents the people of our state when you break up communities.”

Porter said that while he won some new areas and lost others, his race was less affected by the new redistricting map. But Deena Horst, a Salina Republican in her third term, “in two years will be gerrymandered out of her district,” he said.

Kansas residents can cast ballots by mail or in advance ahead of Nov. 8, or from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Election Day.

A shift to the right?

Over the past several years the Legislature has often been at odds with the state school board.

As lawmakers pursued bills on classroom curriculum, the board insisted they had interfered with the responsibility of the state and local school boards. Porter, at one point, floated suing the Legislature.

But the election has attracted a slate of candidates for the relatively moderate state school board who may be more in step with the GOP-dominated Legislature.

The four conservatives in the race are all campaigning for the same issues, frequently using the exact same wording on their websites and materials: pushing for “parent-oriented” approaches and “local control” and arguing that “data collection” in schools infringes on parents’ rights.

“Conservatives across the country see the problems in education en masse. We as Republican candidates, simply networked and knew what our constituents wanted,” said Hershberger, a former nurse who serves as the Reno County Republican Committee chair. He argues he can offer a unique perspective to the board because his own children started out in public school, but were primarily homeschooled, and one graduated from a private Christian school.

Local school boards over the past few years have played host to tense debates over hot national issues, as far-right groups and parents fight what they view as a liberal tide in public schools — or as Hershberger put it, “societal indoctrination by cultural elites.” Conservative parent groups and political action committees have poured money into campaigns for candidates who have vowed to ban offensive books from school libraries, limit teachings on race and sexuality and fight policies that would make schools more inclusive to transgender students.

Conservative state school board candidates point to Kansas’ falling test scores in recent years as an indictment of the current education strategy — arguing that schools should get back to the academic basics, and parents should have more control over everything else.

“I think parental rights are extremely important, and I think COVID has really brought that to the forefront,” said Charlotte O’Hara, a conservative commissioner running for Johnson County chair, who donated to Dombrosky’s campaign.

While test scores have remained flat or fallen, education officials say that other achievement measures, such as the state’s graduation rate and students’ postsecondary success, have hit new highs in recent years.

And others contend that the conservative messaging is aimed at undermining long-underfunded public schools, at a time when educators feel under attack and schools are struggling with critical staff shortages.

“As a parent-led education advocacy group, we support transparency and parents’ rights, but the reality is, our schools are transparent and already support parents’ rights,” said Judith Deedy, founder of Game On for Kansas Schools. “The rhetoric being used in these campaigns is part of a nationwide effort to erode support for public education, and we are particularly concerned that it’s being used by people running for our State Board of Education.”

The state board has become more solidly moderate in recent years, and is poised to keep a moderate majority after this election. But some worry that if far-right candidates gain more ground this election and in the coming years, Kansas education could hearken back to when conservatives were in the majority in 2005 and approved science standards that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory.

State Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican who is chair of the House K-12 Budget Committee, said she would like to see the new board put greater emphasis on student achievement, which she, like the conservative board candidates, argued has been clouded by a push for more social-emotional learning in schools.

Those lessons teach students how to manage their emotions, work in teams and develop the soft skills needed to be successful in the workplace. The Kansas State Department of Education has placed importance on it, aiming for graduates to be more well-rounded and employable, in addition to academically successful.

While the concept has been around for much longer, in the past year, parents and far-right groups have been attacking it, finding ways to tie it to critical race theory — and feeding off of the anger over the academic concept that examines the role of American institutions in perpetuating racial inequality, and is not taught in Kansas K-12 schools.

The four conservative candidates have argued that parents should be allowed to opt in to school surveys or data collection. Parents have cited concerns over schools asking their students questions about their identity, religious or political beliefs and mental health.

New legislation that took effect this summer, and was part of the school funding law passed by the Kansas Legislature last spring, requires all schools to tell parents in writing if they plan to administer non-academic surveys or questionnaires.

Some educators have said that the law and other “curriculum transparency” proposals have had a chilling effect on open classroom discussion, causing them to pause before asking routine get-to-know-you questions at the start of the school year.

Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the proposed parents’ bill of rights this year, deeming it the “teacher demoralization act.” The legislation — outlining a set of rights parents may employ over their child’s education, including reviewing and objecting to books and curriculum — earned steep criticism from teachers across the state, who say parents already have such rights. GOP lawmakers are pushing for the proposal to return this upcoming session.

“We are concerned that an extremist takeover of our State Board of Education is being attempted. In the primary, three extremists campaigned on the false issues of social-emotional learning, student data and parents’ rights,” Deedy said. “At the very least these candidates don’t seem to understand the issues schools are facing or how to address them. The other possibility is that they are part of the effort to undermine public education. Either way, we are concerned.”

District 3: Two Johnson County candidates

In Johnson County, Albers, a former public educator and Blue Valley middle school principal, is challenging Dombrosky for the District 3 seat. The district also includes part of Miami County and the Wellsville school district in Franklin county.

Dombrosky did not respond to The Star’s messages for comment.

Albers, a Democrat, has been in the public eye since, in 2018, her 17-year-old son John Albers was fatally shot by a police officer in Overland Park. Since her son’s death, Albers has advocated for increased transparency and policy reform, including successfully pushing for crisis intervention training for all Overland Park officers.

She said she is running for state school board because she is focused on “serving people and making our community a better place for everyone. I am an educator with 25 years of experience in public schools — in both the classroom and as an administrator. I have championed positive changes in public schools, mental health and public policy.”

Albers’ priorities include finding innovative ways to hire and retain quality teachers amid critical staff shortages, improving school safety, expanding early childhood programs and offering more postsecondary opportunities. She also said the state must fully fund special education. Kansas law says the state should provide 92% of the excess costs of special education, but it only funds 71%, requiring districts to transfer funds from other programs to pay for the services.

Albers has received the endorsement of Game On for Kansas Schools, the Kansas National Education Association and other pro-public education groups.

Albers this week wrote on Facebook that her opponent has a pattern of not answering surveys or questions from news outlets, saying, “Voters deserve transparency.”

The incumbent, along with the three other conservatives in the race, received the endorsement of the Kansans for Life PAC, focused on electing candidates who oppose abortion rights. Dombrosky spoke at a rally in September alongside a member of Johnson County’s chapter of Moms for Liberty, a far-right group based in Florida that has pushed for book banning, and has shown up to support a policy in Gardner Edgerton that would ban transgender students from using their preferred bathrooms.

According to her campaign website, Dombrosky is prioritizing the same issues as other conservatives in the race, including parental rights and allowing families to opt in to data collection.

On a candidate survey, on ivoterguide.com, Dombrosky said she strongly agrees with parents having authority over their child’s education, adding that, “they already have the right to direct their child’s education in the state of KS.

“We have unalienable rights. We don’t need the Govt’ directing our child’s education. We choose the direction and how we want them to be educated, even in the public schools. If we choose to not attend public schools where we pay our local tax dollars, we need to do so without public money, or tax dollars following the child.”

She also said on the survey that she believes teachers who are licensed to carry guns should be allowed to do so in schools. And she strongly opposes curriculum that emphasizes slavery and racism as foundational to America’s history.

Albers told The Star that, “Kansas students come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. It is incumbent upon the State Board of Education Members to ensure that standards encompass the diversity of experiences and backgrounds in our communities. Academic progress and character development begins when a student feels a sense of belonging.”

She said that curriculum standards must “address our nation’s strengths and its struggles in a historically accurate manner. Having difficult discussions about discrimination should not make individuals feel guilty about past injustices. Instead, it should inspire us to do better, remind us not to repeat mistakes of the past, and work toward a more perfect union.”

District 1: Two Leavenworth candidates

In the 1st District, two newcomers are vying for the seat left open by Waugh in northeast Kansas.

The district spans parts of Wyandotte, Atchison and Leavenworth counties, as well as several other counties, as far west as Marshall and Riley counties.

Howards, chair of the Leavenworth County Democratic Party, is retired from the military, where he spent part of his career training soldiers. When he heard Waugh was no longer able to run for the state board because of redistricting, he said, “As an old Marine I had no choice but to march to the sound of the guns and come to the assistance of students and educators alike.”

He said his priorities include protecting “educators and education in Kansas from ultra-conservatives attempting to take over the BOE and destroy public education,” fully funding special education, and supporting diversity within the education system, including inclusive policies for the LGBTQ community.

Zeck, a Leavenworth Republican, answered The Star’s call for comment, but said he was unavailable for an interview because he was traveling. According to his campaign website, he operated a Ford dealership for over 30 years. He said when he learned about “problems with the curriculum being taught in the classrooms of Leavenworth School District” he knew “it was a time to step out of retirement into the political arena.”

His website says, “It is time to stop the Washington Liberal Standards from dictating values that do not fit Kansas Education. We must put Parents In Charge of their child’s Education.” And it argues that the state board is not putting enough focus on student academic achievement.

Howards emphasized that while state test scores are down, the state has recently seen a record high graduation rate, as well as higher levels of postsecondary success, according to the state education department.

“Progress is slow and has been hindered across the State by COVID but the success stories are continuing, graduation rates rising and drop out rates declining in spite of the numbers that the ultra-conservatives are throwing around,” he said in an email.

He said students need a well-rounded education to prepare them for their futures, including social-emotional learning and being “taught to embrace diversity.” He argued that only teaching the basics of reading, writing and math is no longer adequate to prepare students for the modern workforce.

Zeck has advocated for allowing parents to opt out of lessons on social-emotional learning. And he said in the ivoterguide.com survey that students should not be taught about curriculum that focuses on slavery and racism being foundational to America’s history, writing that, “A curricula that teaches a child not to trust the generation before them, which is their parents, can only break down the family unit further.”

On the issue of parental rights, Howards argued, “Parents need to be involved in their children’s education and have the right to review material and make suggestions, but not demands, and no one parent has the right to demand that all children’s education meet the standards that they personally want in place for their child.

“Teachers are feeling overwhelmed by parents’ demands and younger teachers are leaving the profession in the face of parental assaults as a result.”