Newly elected Forest Hills school board member Katie Stewart said her first-grade daughter was "shocked" after learning about racism in school.
Stewart told the story on Kevin Menne's "Ask The Politician" YouTube channel in late September. She explained that her family is Middle Eastern, with dark hair and tan skin, and her husband's family members are Irish and "rather pale."
"(My daughter) had absolutely no idea that kids had different skin tones, she didn't think anything of it," Stewart said in the video.
She said her child was too young to grasp the concept of race when it was brought up in her elementary classroom.
"To bring things up to children when it's not age-appropriate, I think, can do a lot of damage," Stewart said, "and kind of set a different tone in the classroom where people feel like they're a victim and that maybe their friend is oppressing them. And that's not the kind of mentality I would like for our students."
Stewart garnered the most votes in Forest Hills' school board race, followed closely by her running mates Sara Jonas and Bob Bibb.
The three GOP-endorsed school board candidates easily beat out current board President Forest Heis, who received nearly 2,000 votes less than Stewart. A fourth Republican slate member for the board, Linda Marie Hausfeld, was also elected to serve Forest Hills on Tuesday for an unexpired term ending in 2023.
Stewart, Jonas, Bibb and Hausfeld ran together as "Four For Forest Hills" on a platform rooted in opposition to critical race theory rhetoric.
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"Ultimately, I think that parents want their children to be taught basic education: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science," Stewart told The Enquirer. "I don't think that parents in the community really want any type of political agenda in the classroom."
Stewart told The Enquirer that critical race theory is visible in the district's CARE program, which focuses on inclusion and equity practices.
But the theory is not taught in Forest Hills' schools, Superintendent Scot Prebles has said repeatedly.
Experts say it would not make sense for the theory to be taught in any K-12 classroom anywhere. Critical race theory is a college-level concept that studies racial bias present in systems, not the behaviors of individual people. It is often taught in law school and other higher education programs.
Critical race theory: What is it, really?
Even so, Stewart and a slew of other school board candidates ran successful campaigns against the theory this election season, landing them seats in public school boards across the Cincinnati region, according to unofficial election results .
Many of these conservative candidates' campaigns also centered around condemning Black Lives Matter, diversity, equity, inclusion, masks, COVID-19 vaccines, social and emotional learning and comprehensive sex education.
Darbi Boddy and Isaac Adi were both anti-critical race theory candidates elected to the Lakota Local Schools board of education on Tuesday.
Roy MacCutcheon and Jennifer Daulton ran on similar platforms and won in the Lebanon City Schools district.
The same trend could be seen in Clermont County with the election of Melissa Hendricks-Nolan and Jerry Combs to Milford school board.
“The reason the Forest Hills group won four seats was because they are the most organized group in the whole state of Ohio. They’ve got a group of 80 or 100 parents that have met every week for 15 weeks and they’ve approached this like a business plan," Dan Regenold told The Enquirer.
Regenold runs Stop Critical Race Theory in Ohio , a coalition of about 50 groups in the state that do not support having "divisive" conversations regarding race in schools.
Kings Local Schools candidates Karen Burton, Scott Schitter and Ray Gaier were endorsed by Stop Critical Race Theory in Ohio, but not elected by voters Tuesday.
Regenold said it will likely take a few years for districts such as Kings to get to Forest Hills' level of organization.
"First of all, this whole conversation (about the theory) has been politicized," Miami University professor of global and intercultural studies Rodney Coates said.
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Coates has taught courses on sociology, social justice and critical race for more than three decades.
People don't typically get out to the polls unless there are hot-button issues, he said, and even then voters are most instigated to vote when prompted by fear or negativity.
Critical race theory became the perfect catalyst to lure voters this season. Coates said those who used the theory in their campaigns were mostly against it, with very few candidates touting "pro-critical race theory" platforms.
That's because it's a "non-issue," Coates said, and most people don't know what the theory really is, anyway – especially the people speaking against it.
"You've got people beating the drum, but nobody knows what the song is," he said.
Critical race theory explainer
Critical race theory is a decades-old legal theory that considers how slavery and Jim Crow-era politics affect present-day race relations. It is the examination of how legislation and systems of racism intersect, according to Christopher Miller, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center senior director of education and community engagement.
Miami professor Coates aligns with this assessment of the theory, and so does Cincinnati NAACP Third Vice President Susan Johnson.
“There’s really no threat or no interest, no push for critical race theory in its true meaning to be taught in our schools," Johnson said. "It's a flat-out misconception, a mistruth.”
In reality, Johnson said, the theory is graduate-level coursework. But when it's discussed in local school board settings, Johnson and Miller said the term is twisted into fearmongering "propaganda" used to limit or silence any and all classroom conversations that deal with race. It also limits the factual truth of American history and silences any exploration of cultural differences or complex conversations about diversity.
Board members with that ideology come to the table with "a spirit of enslavement," Miller said.
“That goes against what education is supposed to be about," Miller said. "Education is to build strong citizenship so that they can have an understanding of how the government works, having the understanding of how society works, having the understanding of looking through the lens of multiple perspectives. And so this type of spirit stifles any meaningful discussion in education in regards to having an inclusive and equitable society.”
Step backward or forward? Depends on whom you ask
Those words – inclusion and equity – have been reclaimed by people against the theory and deemed evil. Protect Ohio Children, a coalition to help like-minded school board candidates “shine light on the darkness of dangerous and radical materials being presented to children," listed buzzwords on its website that have served as a sort of script for Ohio school board candidates this election season.
Words to fear, according to the site, include social and emotional learning, comprehensive sex education, equity, intersectionality and, of course, critical race theory.
Many of those same candidates also opposed mask mandates, Regenold said, and in his perspective, the anti-mask agenda far surpassed the theory's reach to voters.
But it's true, he said, that parents are seeing divisive topics creeping into their children's classrooms.
“What we’re worried about is that these schools are taking their eye off the ball of reading, writing, arithmetic, math and science and instead putting the ball on race and what’s happening is our outcomes are just getting worse," Regenold said.
"The grades are worse, the test scores are worse, everything’s worse. And we just see it as just kind of a big waste of time.”
But whatever it was that got voters to the polls, critical race theory or otherwise, Regenold was happy with Tuesday's results.
“I think the greatest thing about this isn’t CRT or whatever, it’s that parents have woke up to know that they’ve got to be involved in their kids’ education," he said.
Boddy, a newcomer who won a seat on the Lakota school board, believes this year's race was about more than critical race theory.
"Winning the election was a matter of listening to what the parents and community were saying, making that a campaign platform and letting those parents and the community know we were behind them, that this was our commitment," she wrote to The Enquirer.
"What winning means is that it is now incumbent upon us to come through and honor those commitments. I take the position with a great deal of pride and a very humbling sense of responsibility."
Miller, Coates and Johnson, on the other hand, are worried the election results might have been a step backward in those communities.
Miller said the anti-critical race theory movement is a direct reaction to the 2020 activism and protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That racial reckoning was one of the largest in U.S. history. But with progress always comes backlash, he said.
Johnson agreed. “There are those who want to distract us and they’re using fearmongering and advancing this false narrative of CRT in order to keep decent people from being on the right side of history,” Johnson said. “Because who wants to spread dishonesty? Who wants to keep their children from learning factual information about history? Who benefits from that?”
And this response to last year's activism could have long-lasting impacts. Miller said we are now seeing adults uncomfortable talking about race, which will be handed down to their children. Those children may lack empathy for others who don't look like them, furthering the social divide we've seen in our country through the decades. In some regards, it is a step back for justice, he said.
“I believe we will continue to see a confrontation between those who want to foster truth and those who want to continue to foster falsehoods," Miller said.
In the end, all alluded that the discussion surrounding critical race theory is far from over.
“This election was not the end of this conversation, it’s the beginning of this conversation. A conversation, by the way, that started in 1776,” Coates said. “And it’s about what kind of America we want.”
