Beth Murdoch remembers what it felt like the first time she spoke during a Hilliard City School Board meeting.
She'd done her research, prepared her notes and stood at the podium to share her concerns about how the district was handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I felt like I was talking to an empty room," Murdoch said.
No questions. No comments. And little to no response about her subsequent emails and submitted statements.
Murdoch felt frustrated. And she wasn't alone.
"Back in February, I started seeing a lot of posts on Facebook from parents who were frustrated that the school wasn’t listening to them," Lisa Chaffee said.
So, Chaffee, a middle school mother, created a Facebook group that eventually led her, Murdoch and a nurse anesthetist named Zach Vorst to run for three open seats on the Hilliard school board this November.
It's the first time any of them have run for elected office. And they're not alone either. The trio represents a growing number of people across Ohio and the country who are wading into local politics in the wake of the coronavirus.
Races that were once sleepy, uncontested events are now hard-fought elections where people steal campaign signs, sling accusations and drop some serious cash.
That's unusual, said Ohio Education President Scott DiMauro.
"Those kinds of partisan fights are breaking out in non-partisan school board races in a lot of places around the state," DiMauro said.
The number of candidates for school board seats has doubled since 2017, according to the Ohio School Boards Association. And this year, the majority of folks on the ballot are new – 1,277 incumbents and 1,351 newcomers.
"Something is happening that is increasing the interest," association President Rick Lewis said.
And the response to the question, "what made you decide to run for office?" has overwhelmingly been COVID-19.
Escalating tensions
Ohio's school board members typically approve budgets, select superintendents, set academic calendars and approve textbooks.
The elections are nonpartisan. The positions pay less than $5,000. And the meetings were traditionally uneventful.
Then, the pandemic hit and school boards began broadcasting their meetings online. Nervous parents tuned in by the thousands, and they were filled with strong opinions about the effectiveness of remote learning, mask mandates and vaccine requirements.
"Emotions are running very, very high," Lewis said. "It's almost to the point where the lack of civility can become concerning."
The Columbus suburb of Worthington curtailed a September school board meeting after a group of attendees refused to wear masks and two people gave a Nazi salute. Board members in a Colorado mountain town needed a police escort to their cars after a particularly contentious meeting in August. And a fistfight between multiple people broke out in the parking lot of a recent Missouri school board meeting.
"This is the first time I’ve seen it at the local level like this," said Aryeh Alex, a Franklin Township Trustee who ran the Democratic state House campaigns in Ohio last year. "The level of national toxicity seeping into our local meetings. I’ve never seen anything like it."
Local government meetings used to be about potholes and making sure the school bus showed up on time. Now they're about COVID conspiracies and the president's agenda.
Alex chose not to run for reelection.
"It used to be something very rewarding, but it’s become something where you have to defend the basic purpose of local institutions," Alex said. "It’s not worth the 30-40 extra hours a week I put into this to get a line of people yelling at me."
Feeling pissed and dismissed
Chaffee's Facebook group formed in response to the pandemic, but many of her supporters also oppose the teaching of critical race theory, the idea that racism has woven itself into American laws and institutions. And they have reservations about letting transgender girls play on female sports teams.
Hilliard has three of its five seats up for grabs this election, which means the candidates who win in November could represent a new majority.
The school district has a mask mandate in place, but Vorst, Chaffee and Murdoch say they would vote to rescind it.
Hilliard's online option for students should be expanded to include AP courses, and she'd be open to creating masked classrooms instead of mask mandates.
Murdoch and her sophomore son have both been vaccinated, but she's adamant that parents be allowed to make those decisions without fear of reprisal from the state.
"No parent is going to make a choice they believe is going to be detrimental to their kids," she said.
But that's what people say about her and her co-candidates. They've been called racists, had their campaign signs stolen and been maligned as foolish conspiracy theorists. And it doesn't feel so different from the way people dismissed supporters of former President Donald Trump.
"The first couple of school board meetings I went to, the maximum number of people they allowed to speak was 10," Vorst said. "The board did not acknowledge them or engage in true, genuine dialogue."
Not everyone's angry at the school board
Candidates who oppose mask mandates aren't the only political newcomers in this election cycle.
Kelley Arnold is running for one of those open seats in Hilliard, and she's been supportive of the way her district navigated the pandemic.
"I’m not an epidemiologist. I have to rely on the science," Arnold said. "It’s so crucial we listen to our children’s hospitals when they ask schools to mandate masks."
But there's no guarantee that's going to happen.
School boards across Ohio could flip control in November. Off-year elections have much lower turnouts and small, highly motivated groups can sway their outcomes.
"I think it will be really interesting to see who shows up and votes," Alex said.
Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
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