Serving on a School Board,2019-2023: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of a Democratic Institution

Consolidation—Concerns of Efficiency and Progress

By the early twentieth century, problems arising from local governance began to be visible, among them inefficiencies, limited resources, and a lack of professional leadership. In urban districts, local school committees and ward-based politics had produced very large boards. By 1904, Philadelphia boasted 504 members of ward boards and 42 people on the central board (Tyack, 2003, p. 139). In midwestern states, where one-room school houses and small districts dominated, tens of thousands of school boards each oversaw a single school. These conditions soon became the targets of reform. Professional leaders in education addressed problems of “too many school districts and too much grass roots democracy” through school and district consolidation (Tyack, 2003, p. 139). Through a combination of incentives and mandates, state governments induced over ninety percent of rural districts to close by the 1950s and ’60s (Scribner, 2016). Ohio had 2,674 districts in 1914, and today has 611.

Education professionals and government authorities “touted consolidation as the cure for the problems that plagued the one-room schools: lack of money, poor quality of teaching, poor facilities, lack of textbooks, and insufficient time. Consolidation represented progress to these educators” (Fleming, 1995, p. 25). However, to local citizens, consolidation often meant the closure of small schools and districts that held communal value to citizens, in the name of efficiency, expertise, educational quality, and centralization of powers. Organized and residual opposition to these efforts were motivated by the ways that local schools often served as centers of community life, even as the ability of localities to singularly fund them was diminishing over time (Scribner, 2016). Wounds felt over closed community school districts remain in rural localities today, shaping how some citizens vote for school tax issues (Lieszkovszky, 2013). Consolidation continued well through the latter half of the twentieth century: In 1968, there were 22,010 U.S. school districts; by 2011, that number was 13,588 (Ford & Ihrke, 2020a).

Consolidation increased the number and diversity of citizens that board members represent and produced two additional effects: shifting more power to professional educators and replacing an older type of board member—farmers, clergy, and merchants—with more white-collar professional members from dominant classes (Kirst, 2004). Consolidation would have tremendous impacts on the nature and politics of school governance.

Growing State and Federal Power—Concerns over Equity and Academic Achievement

By the latter half of the twentieth century, new concerns motivated critics of school board governance. Reformers in this era would expand the power of federal and state governments to remedy two different problems: inequality, and lagging academic achievement (Kirst, 2004). The expansion of federal and state powers of education in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955) decisions was prompted by persistent evidence that educational equity goals could not simply be left in the hands of local school governance and leadership. The Constitutional rights of students of various demographic groups (Black and Brown students, those living in poverty, females, English Language Learners, and students with disabilities) won through citizen organizing, court cases, and legislative reform, required the force of state and federal powers in many forms, including the incentive of additional resources, along with stricter oversights and penalties for noncompliance.

While clear victories were achieved during this era, desegregation battles following Brown yielded ambiguous outcomes. Local boards had long been a tool to support an array of biased policies and structures, perpetuating unequal opportunities and outcomes for students (Hill Collins, 2010; Lukes & Cleveland, 2021). From 1954 to 1970, the Supreme Court enforced school desegregation efforts, and “struck down different strategies that state and local governments used to frustrate desegregation” (Brace, 2023, p. 98), but the tide changed in 1973. ¹ San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) limited the powers of federal courts to require states to equalize school funding across districts, and in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), to integrate Black and Brown cities with ever-whitening suburbs (Orfield & Pfleger, 2024). Many scholars assert that “the tradition of local control concept has stymied attempts to achieve more equitable and integrated public schools” through the courts (Brace, 2023, p. 125; see also Howell, 2005; Macedo, 2003; McDermott, 1999).

The San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez decision upheld the heavy reliance on local property taxes to fund public education in many states (Kelly, 2023), including Ohio. This reliance keeps in place the (growing) gap between public schools in rich and poor communities. Plaintiffs in DeRolph v. State of Ohio (1997) claimed that “the state’s system violated several provisions of the Ohio Constitution” and ordered the state board of education to “prepare legislative proposals that would eliminate wealth-based disparities among school district” (Napp, 2020, pp. 1–2). Four different DeRolph decisions issued by the Ohio Supreme Court from 1997 to 2002 bore little fruit for fairer public education funding. Ice (2020) summarizes: “Reflecting on the legislative and executive efforts to revamp Ohio’s education-financing system since DeRolph, it is clear that although each administration has tweaked the school-funding formula, its basic elements have remained the same for nearly fifty years” (p. 1283). Inequitable funding across school districts is extraordinarily difficult to resolve under the traditions of local control—whose principles offer justification for state legislators from wealthier districts, despite court requirements, to fight more generously redistributive funding formulas.

Education reformers further impacted local governance in efforts to raise academic standards and achievement. Beginning with the A Nation at Risk report (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) in attacking the mediocrity of American education, using fears of global economic competition, these reforms pushed variations of test-based accountability. No Child Left Behind (2002) and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), would create much of today’s accountability infrastructure of public schools: mandated, standardized testing in reading and math, school report cards which make achievement among racial, ethnic, and disability groups visible, mechanisms to take over chronically poorly performing school districts, and the availability of school choice options, ostensibly to encourage competition. These shifts have introduced reform, in some ways, but weakened local educational authority, including the power of school boards, administrators, and teachers. Cuban (2004) argues that this is a poor trade-off, observing that while some targeted federal and state programs for school improvement have stimulated reform in individual districts and schools, “the overall evidence provides meager support for reducing the power of local decisionmakers and increasing authority at the state and federal levels” (p. 116; see also Yang, 2011).

School Choice and Parental Rights

The push for equity remedies, and the policy changes spurred by NCLB helped legitimize the most recent challenge to local control of public education: school choice. In 1996, a pilot voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, was created for students from poorly-performing schools, all in high poverty neighborhoods, to receive tuition dollars for private school enrollment. In 2002, voucher programs were deemed constitutional in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).

The decision opened the door to an aggressive expansion of voucher (and charter school) funding in Ohio (Pope, 2024). The 2023–2025 Ohio state budget turned the EdChoice voucher program into a nearly universal offering; as of 2024, students receive $6,166 for K–8 and $8,408 for high school tuition, and family eligibility is met if household income is below $135,000 or 450% of the federal poverty level. Voucher use in Ohio is up more than 400% in the last decade (O’Donnell, 2024), yet private schools have no form of state academic accountability, unlike the extensive testing and reporting mandates under which public schools operate (Behrens, 2023). Schools accepting vouchers can also legally deny admission to (for example) LGBTQ students and families, or students with special needs requiring additional supports.

School choice, a national and global trend, includes market-based policies embraced by those opposing bureaucratic inefficiencies in “government schools,” which assert the rights of parents to choose the child’s school at taxpayer expense (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Schneider & Berkshire, 2020). The rhetoric of parental rights (presumably to tax funding for private school tuition) was useful for choice supporters, as it had been in previous generations. The asserted rights of parents became a touchstone of conservative educational organizing across the U.S. in the post-WW2 era, as consolidation efforts made local governance less responsive to parental demands, whether the issue was the teaching of evolution, patriotic values, or sex education (Scribner, 2016; Zimmerman, 2022). The most recent push for parental rights arose during COVID, when anger over school closures, mask mandates, and vaccinations became politicized. Conservative groups used the energy generated by these campaigns to fight diversity and inclusion efforts which gained strength after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Parental rights groups today often target local school governance as an accessible venue for advancing their goals, often opposing equity policies, curriculum, and teaching deemed “divisive” (Roegman et al., 2022). Since 2020, Ohio parents’ rights groups have renewed activism in local and state arenas (Natanson, 2023).

The Present Political Context for Local Control in Ohio

The shift away from school boards’ exclusive control over education across the twentieth century is unsurprising, as the country’s population increased, the economy became more urbanized and interconnected, the cost and complexities of serving a diverse array of students and families grew, and groups fought to have all children equitably educated. The result today is a complex bureaucracy of overlapping control mechanisms and authorities. As Collins and Reckhow (2023) state, “there is a paradox of education politics. While schooling happens locally, the power over schools is diffuse” (p. 27). Yet, as COVID demonstrated, local boards retain salient powers: beyond budgetary responsibilities and the hiring/supervision of superintendent and treasurer, boards are accountable for student academic performance, student safety and well-being, curriculum oversight, and facilities.

The weakening of local authority makes executing these responsibilities more challenging. The primary example is funding. School boards in Ohio are responsible for raising the local share of student funding via tax levies, which require local voters to fund between 30% and 70% of the district’s total budget. Levies frequently fail to pass, due in part to the frequency with which Ohio districts must ask voters to support them at the ballot box, thanks to a law passed in the 1970s which freezes the amount of collectable property tax revenues to that percentage approved when the original levy passed (Crawford, 2023). Moreover, Ohio has the 15^th most regressive tax system in the country, making it harder for poorer areas to raise their own taxes (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2024). The growth of Ohio’s voucher programs will not only shrink the pot of money available for public schools, but will make passing school levies even harder (Tebben, 2025; Wething, 2024).

The expansion of vouchers, made possible by the super-majority of Republicans in the state legislature for much of the last three decades, is a by-product of gerrymandering, or the practice of lawmakers drawing electoral maps in order to maintain their party’s power (Ballotpedia, 2024). Ohio is one of the ten most gerrymandered states. Since 2011, Republican lawmakers have broken up majority nonwhite regions to dilute the electoral power of Black and Brown citizens, and majority Democratic districts (DeWitt, 2024; McGlone & Needham, 2017). Gerrymandered districts create non-competitive elections, and thus enable GOP lawmakers to pursue more extremist policies: expanding voucher budgets as well as the culture wars-inspired lawmaking efforts seen since 2021 (Johanek, 2023; Mayer, 2022; MacGillis, 2025).

Funding and state electoral politics are among the tensions complicating local school governance and in Ohio, are presently eroding the enabling conditions for local governance. As democratic institutions serving all students, responding to the unique needs of their communities, public schools require support and legitimacy—forms of trust and respect—to operate (Stitzlein, 2017). These conditions are under strain, according to political scientists. In Degenerations of Democracy, Calhoun et al. (2022) argue that the U.S. is experiencing a decline in democratic institutions and practices, evidenced in three ways. The first is the decline of citizen efficacy, wherein citizens have a more difficult time now making their voices heard and felt by policy-makers. In Ohio, gerrymandered districts and consolidated school districts make elected representatives less accessible, and less representative of diverse populations (Johanek, 2023), and have made possible the acceleration of school privatization policies while efforts to significantly reform public school funding formulas have been stalled for decades (Patton, 2021). The second is waves of exclusion against various races, ethnicities, and classes of people from public life, including high quality public education. These exclusions are not new, but COVID‘s impacts on school achievement has most recently reinforced the racial- and class-based gaps in education (Lavertu, 2021). The third is polarization as a pathologizing force in politics and daily life, which has profoundly impacted educational policy-making nationally and in Ohio (Houston, 2024; Natanson, 2023). These challenges were felt in different ways by the school board members interviewed for this research study, whose design and participants I discuss next.

Participant Recruitment, Data Collection, and Analysis

After obtaining Institutional Research Board approval, I used snowball sampling to recruit participants through state networks created during my school board service, and through my work as professor of educational leadership at an Ohio university. A contact established through the Ohio School Boards Association forwarded my query to a large list of board members around the state. I also used social media networks to invite participation. Additionally, I reached out to a few other board members whom I had briefly met through board work, and asked if they would participate.

Eighteen participants generously agreed to participate and be recorded in our interviews, which took place from February through May 2024. In interviews, I asked about their board experiences since 2019, thoughts on board governance as a way to run public schools, how their board works with other governmental and community organizations, and how they engage with their communities. Participants knew from my initial solicitation email that I was a former board member and educator, and that shared experience helped establish some trust in the conversations. I conducted hour-long interviews via Zoom, recording and transcribing each. In the transcripts, interviewees were assigned a pseudonym and identifying demographic descriptors were changed to protect confidentiality. Afterward, each interview transcript was sent to the corresponding interviewee via email to check accuracy of the transcription.

I use a multidisciplinary hermeneutical approach to the research and analysis (Elliott & Timulak, 2021; Santoro, 2015). From designing the study to analyzing the data, I built a wide literature review of contemporary U.S. school board and local control research across social science sub-disciplines of educational history, policy, politics, and leadership. This literature helped me contextualize and gain focus on the school board as a governing institution, as I listened to my participants’ experiences with their own board, their own localities. As a philosopher of democracy and education, however, I was highly attuned to participants’ words as they spoke about the challenges and possibilities inherent in local shared governance for public schools as a civic, ethical, and democratic project. I listened closely to how they experienced civic leadership, and what it meant to govern schools locally—with integrity, amid uncertainty and fear, without expertise. I also sought to understand each interviewee within their regional and district context, constructing a data profile of each participant’s district, using state report cards, profiles, demographic data, and journalist reports describing issues the district had more recently faced, particularly around the 2019–2023 period (Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 2024c). This profile helped provide a kind of phenomenological epoché—a method to discern the unique lived experiences of each board member in their own region and contextual circumstance—in order to help suspend judgment or final interpretations of another person’s lived experiences of school board service until a broader understanding of larger themes and meanings was acquired (van Manen, 2017).

Working with the interview recordings and transcription texts, I prepared transcriptions of each interview, and used Dedoose software to assign 21 thematic codes to interview passages, and track coding patterns across transcripts. In my analysis, I constantly moved from interview texts to the particular descriptive contextual data about that board members’ district and its communities, moving in circles around the interview texts, and then identifying patterns across interviews of shared experiences and ways of describing school board membership and service. I wrote research memos on these commonalities, shaping them into the salient themes emerging from the analysis. These memos outlined composite descriptions of the main themes of the school board service experience as seen across the data. While the idea of a singular “essence” of school board service defies the great variety of communities, schools, and board dynamics, my goal was to actively re-construct the nature of the lived experience of Ohio school board service during the 2019–2023 period, inclusive of the variety of experiences and interpretations of the board member experience, but condensed into a handful of prominent, characteristic commonalities. Four themes reveal patterns in how school board members experience the work of local educational governance in Ohio, and broader patterns relative to the strengths and weaknesses of the institution of the school board itself.

Participants: Identities, Places, Histories, and Motivations for Service

The 18 participants in this study are representative of Ohio school board membership (Bobo, 2022). The ratio of men (11) to women (9) nearly matched the 58% male, 42% female ratio of state board membership. Fourteen people identified as white or Caucasian, and four self-identified as racial or ethnic minorities (African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian American, and Jewish). One participant, from a rural district, self-identified as an “out” member of the LGTBQ community. This pool was thus slightly more diverse than typical Ohio school boards in 2022, when 92% of school board members identified as white (Bobo, 2022). In general, school board members in Ohio and nationally are older, whiter, and wealthier than the constituencies they serve (White et al., 2023). The longest-serving participant had 34 years in their seat, and the average length of board service among the group was 12 years. For comparison, about 16% of Ohio board members serve for a span of 9–12 years; compared to 50% who serve one full term or less (Bobo, 2022). Participants therefore had more years in office than average, giving them more experience, as well as potentially more bias toward local educational governance as an institution.

The pool was fairly representative of district types and student enrollments across Ohio’s 611 school districts. Participants represented rural (3), small town (5), suburban (7), and urban (3) districts, a sample which under-represents rural districts by type, but not by student enrollment. While Ohio has more rural districts than any other type, more students are enrolled in small town, suburban and urban districts. Nearly 300,000 students are enrolled in 231 rural Ohio districts, and 385,000 enrolled in 199 small town districts, compared with 560,000 students enrolled in 123 suburban districts, and 410,000 students enrolled in 55 urban districts (Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 2024b).

Despite the fact that interview questions were about education politics, I refrained from directly asking participants to identify their own partisan loyalties or views. Ohio is among the majority of states which have non-partisan school board elections (Knight-Abowitz, 2024). While Ohio as a swing state has leaned Republican in recent national elections, and a majority of counties supported Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2020 and 2024, in both 2020 and 2024, Biden received 45% of the Ohio popular vote. The participant pool consisted of ten board members from districts located in counties which supported Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024, and eight members from districts in counties whose majorities supported Trump for president in 2020 and 2024. Ford and Ihlke (2020a) found in their national study that suburban members were more likely to identify as liberal or non-partisan rather than conservative, compared to rural colleagues (p. 146; see also Kitchens & Goldberg, 2024). In the final analysis, the participant pool represents the full range of Ohio districts, but it skews slightly more diverse in terms of racial-ethnic identities of board members and skews slightly center-left in terms of representation of board members from Democratic-leaning districts—likely tied to the small number of rural districts as well as the influence of my own identity as a university professor on participant recruitment (assumed liberal by potential participants and thus impacting who might agree to participate).

The places in which schools are located, and the types of districts in which board members are serving, are critical contexts shaping their work. Among the most important contextual factors is relative wealth and poverty in the district. Across the 18 board members, 2023 mean household income in their districts ranged from $28,509 to $80,824; the average across the districts in the study is $45,438 (Ohio median income for 2023 is $41,132) (Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 2024a). Mirroring Ohio demographics, white, non-Hispanic students represented the majority of racial-ethnic groups in all districts except one in the sample, with more substantial racial-ethnic diversity in urban and suburban districts.

The participants in the study had an array of motivations behind their school board involvement (Mountford, 2004). Six participants ran for school board following leadership in Parent-Teacher Groups or levy campaigns. Four discussed an agenda for change that they sought in running—correcting a specific problem in leadership or shifting policy direction. Six participants spoke about serving their community. Four participants were alumni of the districts they served, and two spoke of their parents (who had served on school boards or in public education) as inspiration.

To protect the confidentiality of participants, who are publicly visible in their work, I have anonymized them in discussing their views, often changing gender, ethnicity, and racial identities of individuals.

Service through COVID and Culture Wars: Uncertainty, Hostility, Misinformation

Being an elected official comes with conflict. While scholars note that school board conflicts have increased since the 1950s (Tracey, 2010), COVID was, as one board member told me, an “accelerant” to conflict and rancor in all districts. Board members in larger suburban and urban districts experienced more acute and difficult COVID conflicts (Holman et al., 2024). Jim, an urban district board member and a long-time teacher in a different district, described the difference between pre- and post-COVID era in local governance:

And then, you know, then, 2020 hit. And it was the whole COVID masks. Closing of school. George Floyd with all the civil unrest. And that totally turned everything around. I mean, we had to have security at meetings. We had multiple, we had people protesting outside of meetings. We had 10, 15 speakers at every meeting for a period of time. All negative complaining about one thing or another. And I mean, that started to die down, but then we had our group of regulars, about 5 or 6, that hung in there for at least 2 years. Actually, we haven’t had anybody speak since November (2023), which we’re all shocked about because we had this very loyal group. But . . . all of that turned into the book banning and the CRT and being called lib tards and pedophiles and you know, attacking teachers’ unions and all that kind of stuff. Same thing that’s been going on everywhere.

Jim described the conditions of unrest, dissent, and incivility that have become more frequent on some school boards, particularly occurring in larger school districts in cities and suburbs, in places with more white students, and in places with more political competition (Holman et al., 2024).

Anna, a board member in a rural district where she has lived most of her life, described her experience, echoing the experience of conflict, but revealing the struggles over finding good information and expertise to use in making decisions about health and safety during the pandemic. She stated,

You know, I feel like with COVID we . . . we’re just kind of putting out fires. I don’t feel like we could focus on education at all. I felt like we were focusing on masks, a lot then. . . . You know, it was just, it was a lot of . . . “Okay, we got this information from here. We got that information here.” We don’t really know what to believe. You know, you don’t know. Like is this accurate? Is that active? What do we do?

Anna characterized her first year of COVID as a school board member in Ohio, where Governor Mike DeWine, a moderate Republican, closed all schools in March 2020, through the spring term. Districts struggled to pivot to remote learning plans, made harder in districts where internet access was poor. Some districts, in addition to putting together plans for remote or at-home learning, also established meal delivery systems for students who are food insecure. As masking and testing became politicized, hospitalization and death rates climbed. By summer 2020, DeWine mandated districts to work with local health departments to devise infection reporting systems, but allowed schools to formulate their own masking and in-person attendance policies. Anna was one of the board members who told me she spent many hours outside of board meetings looking for reliable and accurate information about COVID and how to prevent its spread, in an environmental rife with mis- and disinformation (Malin & Lubienski, 2022).

Rural and small-town board members faced many community divisions over how to respond to COVID but, judging from interviews, felt more support for a full return to in-person school attendance in August of 2020 than did urban and suburban members. Rural and small-town boards worked in communities where there was much more “staunch opposition . . . to any of the mitigating measures that were being . . . proposed,” said one small town board member of that politicized time. Many board members told me that the summer 2020 board meetings, where decisions were made over whether and how to return to school in August, were the most contentious and well attended in their memories. Board members knew that whatever they decided, they would disappoint or anger a significant portion of the community. But in rural and small-town districts, the urgency to get students back in classrooms was felt more strongly than the fear of COVID; several of these board members expressed persistent concerns about the well-being of students being more secure in school than at home, especially in rural districts with extensive (or pockets of) deep poverty. One board member from such a district in southeast Ohio stated, “You will be disturbed to know that 75% of our second-grade class during lockdown experienced abuse or . . . sexual abuse while they were at their homes. 75% of an entire cohort of children.” ² For many reasons including the welfare of students and the views of constituents in conservative areas, school leaders felt pressure to fully re-open in fall semester 2020.

Hillary, a Hispanic-American board member whose father died of COVID complications early in the 2020 outbreak, described serving in her central Ohio suburban district at that time:

So being one of the more progressive districts and one of the bigger districts, there was a, there was a bit of a spotlight in our district. We even had gubernatorial candidates come to . . . watch our meetings. So . . . we had the same level of people who are against masks or who didn’t believe COVID existed or wanted our kids back full time. You know, I think every district grappled with that. . . . You know, it was one of those decisions where . . . no one’s going to be happy. The people that want . . . the kids to always be remote, you know, that’s it. And there was no compromise. The kids who thought COVID was no big deal. There’s no compromise.

Serving in a district with over 10,000 students, Hillary described the political pressures of policy-making without expertise or reliable knowledge, hearing debates about the veracity of an illness who had contributed to the death of her own parent.

Lydia, who served on a low-poverty suburban board in southwest Ohio, shared a conversation with a close neighbor during this same time period, who asked,

“You’re not going to make those kids wear masks, are you?” And I’m like, “Listen, friend, neighbor whose door is five doors away from me, who—I have a flexible schedule and I watch your kids and make sure they can get on the bus when you have to get to work early—you know who I’m going to listen to? The doctors at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. You’re in construction, I’m a ______, that’s who we listen to, they’re the experts.”

In this conversation, Lydia notes the relational network she navigates as a board member—as a neighbor, and a policy-maker. In interviews, board members from a wide range of district sizes would report such conversations about school matters conducted in grocery stores, hair salons, and other locations.

Board members, particularly from larger districts, conveyed different examples of protests, hostility, or attacks they endured in this period. Lydia reported that this same neighbor “went online and posted some pretty nasty things about me on social media, because I voted to have kids come back in person, with a virtual academy option, but also wearing masks and distance as much that could be allowed at that point.” One board member stated that a protest had been planned outside his home, but never materialized. Social media commentary was reported by most to be a particular challenge. Community forums on apps such as Facebook helped spread mis-information and disparaging comments which created more hostile environments for local decision-making.

While online environments and meetings were getting more heated, board members reported efforts to stay focused on student and teacher safety. Even as some board meeting attendees engaged in what many would label extreme behavior (denying the existence of COVID, throwing Nazi salutes, or accusing government representatives of engaging in conspiracies were three examples provided across interviews), board members described their efforts to make sensible policies for their unique contexts amidst changing conditions. Mike, a board president of a district in a Rust-Belt community with high poverty, described his goals for meetings during this time: “to encourage community members, who could come in and kind of negotiate different conversations . . . to keep a sense of positive dialogue, constructive dialogue, thoughtful dialogue, and reasoned dialogue within . . .that environment.” Mike was especially cognizant, in his divided community, “not silence people, because I think . . . when you have that, it infuriates people, it makes them louder and angrier.”

Pressures would continue beyond COVID, as politically-motivated culture wars issues heated up on the national stage. In September of 2020, President Trump issued an executive order discontinuing anti-bias and racial sensitivity training in government agencies (Trump, 2020). Particularly in larger and more diverse districts across Ohio, these moves would complicate racial equity efforts initiated before or revitalized after the George Floyd murder and ensuing community activism. In Lydia’s suburban district, the national push for racial justice fueled the district’s decision to retire a Native American mascot during 2020–2021. Lydia told me that she and some board colleagues felt it was time to act on this issue, an historic source of controversy in the district. Ultimately, the board removed the mascot in 2021. For Lydia, who identifies as Asian-American, the issue was deeply felt: “I firmly believe that [the mascot] is a racial slur. My child would have been at that school, [and] my husband . . . said, ‘no way are we sending her there, there’s no way she’s going to wear a shirt that says that.’” Her personal conviction persisted despite experiences of anonymous phone harassment received at her workplace, and caustic online comments during this period.

In a high poverty urban district in southwest Ohio, where for the first time a non-white superintendent was in leadership, a board member recalls the meeting when this issue came to his district’s doorstep:

Yeah, I mean it was right around the time that the national media, specifically Fox News, charged community members to go to school boards. [I remember this] elderly lady, seemed sweet as could be, came in and said “I really don’t know what CRT is but I was told to come here tonight and tell you not to do it.” And that was her message. And . . . so it was kind of like a marching order, and . . . she got her 3 minutes on the mic and . . . and then there are other people who, again, those names in your community that are . . . really active within kind of stirring that up. They were extremely vocal and accusatory.

Hostility, fed by fear and misinformation spreading over COVID, became more weaponized as national culture wars issues over diversity, equity, and inclusion were unfolding in local contexts and influencing electoral school politics as well (Henig et al., 2019; Jacob, 2024). These conditions further complicated board efforts to facilitate effective deliberation about school policy and priorities for their students.

Intergovernmental Collaborations: A State Legislature that “Wants to Dismantle Public Education”

Board service during COVID was a time of much more overt intergovernmental collaboration between local health departments, governor’s offices, and legislatures. In interviews, I asked participants to discuss the different elected bodies with which they share power and whose cooperation makes their work possible: “In your experience, how/do other governmental entities generally enhance or impede the work of local boards?” Today, public school districts—sharing authority with state, federal, and municipal governments—depend upon cooperation of many entities, including civic and private organizations in their localities. Federal and state authorities help fund operations and special services for students with special needs; municipalities assist with all sorts of projects and efforts. Board members gave various examples, citing the mostly cooperative relationships they forge with surrounding municipalities due to the shared interests in their community’s young people. A district building a new school gets funding assistance from the state, as well as construction assistance from a town government in extending the sidewalks around the new school location. A new soccer field might require a new water delivery system, facilitated by municipal government. A community/youth health initiative requires collaboration across local governmental, civic, non-profit, religious, and commercial entities. Concern over the stewardship of resources, of a community’s strengths and traditions, and the shared interests in raising and educating the next generation all facilitate these collaborations.

COVID forced a whole new level of intergovernmental collaboration. Superintendents worked in lock-step with county health departments to design elaborate safety protocols, record-keeping and reporting mechanisms as conditions changed over the course of the 2020–2021 school year. Some board members, in our interviews, praised the assistance that their local health departments provided them during the pandemic. Governor DeWine received appreciation from some board members for his decisive leadership in Ohio during the first months of the pandemic.

Board members had little praise, however, for the Ohio legislature, specifically around laws passed relative to culture war issues, and voucher expansion (Johanek, 2023; Pope, 2024). A board member in a small suburban, low poverty district in a Democratic-leaning county, expressed this clearly:

At the state level, I think it’s very frustrating that we have such a super majority [in power]. And that education is being torn apart. And I mean, it’s just like bill after bill after bill. That comes across that’s hurting public education and all these vouchers and . . . there’s people . . . that have nothing to do with education that are making education law. And you watch, you know, on the Ohio channel, you watch the testimony and there’s always more people against these things, but they still . . . It’s a big frustration that they don’t . . . really listen to teachers and educators and superintendents.

Another board member, from a rural district in a Republican-leaning county, reported frustration with the lack of transparency, the “slipping school legislation” into larger bills without discussion, and the failure to consult or listen to local educators and officials. A board member from a small town district in a Republican-leaning northwestern county stated, “I don’t trust the members of the state legislature quite frankly to provide for public education. I feel as though public education is constantly under attack.” Keith, serving on a suburban school board in a Democratic-leaning area, stated that “public education has become a political football. It’s become weaponized and a tool to maintain power and electability.”

Board members also shared perceptions that state legislators lack adequate knowledge about what schools do, how they work, and how laws impact students. Denise, an African-American board member in an urban district, who had served for multiple terms, told me that “at the state level, a lot of those folks have no clue what goes on in schools.” She continued,

I look at some of these legislative actions, and recommendations that are coming through house bills and senate bills, at the state level, and I think, “does this person live on Mars?” It’s not so much whether its liberal or conservative, it’s, “What does this have to do with kids?”

In a similar vein, Keith shared his worry over how LGTBQ students or African-American students in his district, for example, feel the impact of some of the legislation curtailing teaching of “controversial issues” that related directly to their identities and lives.

Overall, opposition to the legislature’s culture wars agenda since 2021 was more strongly expressed by board members in suburban and urban districts, which lean more Democratic than Republican. However, disapproval of state voucher policy and voucher expansion was universal, expressed in all board member interviews.

Local Control: Trust, Stewardship, and the Well-being of Students

I asked two interview questions related to local control and good governance of public schools. “Given the unique, decentralized nature of local control of U.S. schools, which has been in existence for centuries, what is the unique role of the local school board in governing public schools today?” This question elicited reflection regarding how and whether local control mechanisms continue to serve students and educational goals, as they have experienced the institution. Further, I asked, “what, in your view, does ‘good’ governance of public education mean?” I invited participants to share their stories and views related to these broader questions concerning the past, present, and future of the school board as a governance institution.

I wanted to explore how board members made sense of the meanings and mythologies of “local control.” As Scribner (2016) argues, the pattern of national debates over local control are characterized by the tendency of liberal elites and professional educational pundits to criticize local school control and “pathologize its adherents” (p. 33). Local educational authorities of all types, and perhaps especially those from rural and small-town districts, are assumed to be power-hungry, “irrational, morally rigid, unable to accept change,” and driven by economic interest and maintenance of the status quo (p. 33). Yet to many Americans, “local government ensures self-determination, egalitarianism, diversity, and efficiency, all counterpoints to the failures of centralized government” (Scribner, 2016, p. 33). Unsurprisingly, participants expressed support of the institution, yet the perspectives of local control—from those who wield it—reflected sophisticated insights about the challenges inherent in the model today.

All participants described the unique nature of the local governance but often simultaneously noted how poorly it was understood by citizens—a well-documented trend (Danzberger & Uzdan, 1992). Morgan, serving in a wealthy, diverse suburban district in northeast Ohio, stated:

It’s wild to me that the community believes that we actually make decisions, like that we’re doing the day-to-day work of running a school district. None of my fellow board members or I are educators, this is not where we have expertise. I can’t make a curriculum. I do not have the expertise to do that, let alone that you’d think that that’s what my role is.

Morgan further described a very common on-boarding process for new board members, during which she attended several robust trainings (available, but not mandatory) from the Ohio School Board Association, and then attended her first school board meeting as a voting member. Because of Ohio’s strict Sunshine laws, board members cannot ever meet as a body in private, so while new board members likely have met with the board president, or with their superintendent and treasurer to receive training before they take office, board members do not ever meet as a whole board except in public. “I hadn’t even talked to any of the board members, I knew nothing. . . . What are we doing ? And then we had a four-hour Executive Session. And we fired our football coach. And [afterwards] there’s people holding up protest signs” demanding her resignation. Many board members interviewed shared Morgan’s view that board work is both poorly understood, and that new board members arrive on the scene without much knowledge of how to execute their role. While the Ohio School Board Association and individual districts provide training sessions, these vary widely in depth and degree of participation by newly elected members.

Still, most board members expressed the belief that local control remains a very important value for their communities. Reasons for valuing local control were somewhat distinct between rural and small town board members on the one hand, and their suburban and urban counterparts on the other. Board members in smaller communities were more likely express value for local control as a way of being able to shape their ways of living as opposed to being subject to the views of “politicians in Columbus or Washington, D.C.” Similarly, these board members from smaller districts referenced the principle of subsidiarity, that idea that a centralized authority (e.g., state or national government) should only be making policies which cannot be made at a more local or immediate level (Hill, 2004). A board member from a small town district in northeast Ohio stated that local control was valuable because “those decisions about curriculum and that kind of stuff can be made at the level . . . the level closest to the area that you are educating.”

Urban and suburban board members were more likely to express the value of local control as a way to ensure safety and well-being of their students, particularly those seen as marginalized by mental health challenges, or by the climate created schools for students with diverse ethnic, racial, sexual or gender identities. Hilary, from a large suburban district in central Ohio, stated:

Good governance of public education at the local level . . . I think the most important thing is we need to be inclusive to all students. I mean, it should be student focused. . . . We need to make sure every kid feels safe because if a kid doesn’t feel safe, they’re not going to learn. And the marginalization of students by religion or by race . . . or by gender identity isn’t good. I mean, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. Schools need to be safe places for every single student and especially the students on the lower end of the social economic, you know, latter or especially students.

Another suburban board member relayed similar sentiments but in starker terms. “I was on a board four years, I answered the phone seven times for student deaths. To be told a student died. Seven times. . . . We are facing a real crisis in my community . . . we have been facing a real crisis.” The experience of student death in one’s district, no matter the size, impacts board members, but suicide hits very hard. These board members expressed a value of local control that was synonymous with care-taking responsibilities for the well-being of their district’s students. In addition to concerns over mental health, board members repeatedly mentioned their responsibilities for student safety as a key concern. A rural board member in his 34^th year of service in northwestern Ohio, when asked about what good governance of schools means to him, gave this succinct list of priorities: “Keeping the kids safe. Provide, make it a place that they want to come to. Financially, keeping it sound.”

Board members also appreciated that local control enables innovation and flexibility. Several members described programs that their districts had initiated to uniquely serve their communities. One described their rural district’s decision to share a superintendent with two other neighboring small districts as a cost-cutting measure. A small-town board member discussed creative ways their district worked with local businesses to address COVID infection prevention measures in their town. A suburban member described a district initiative developed to address the behavioral issues on the rise in post-pandemic classrooms. Many discussed the importance of local control in enabling districts to hire superintendents in whom they had confidence, and who seemed to be a good fit for their schools and communities.

The Role of the Board, and Public Perceptions of Their Work

Local control was valued by board members but not simplistically rendered in our conversations. The strains between local boards and educational expertise, particular as seen in relationships with the superintendent, were a final theme. Bonnie, serving on the board of a small-town district but employed as an educator in another, stated: “I do think at times boards can be . . . I don’t know if I want to call it prohibitive. They can kind of stymie the growth that a district needs to make. And they can get in the way of the change that a district needs to make or that a superintendent needs to make.” However, at times board members feel “managed” by superintendents who seek to use boards as merely consultive, or minimize their involvement in decision-making (Björk, 2008; Sutherland, 2023). One member referred to the common perception, that he felt was often true, that board members are “rubber stampers” for superintendents’ agendas. Jim, also a career educator by profession, said it this way:

I think really we should be ambassadors to . . . being a link between the community and the school district. Visible, open to speaking to everyone, obviously respectfully, supporting the administration. But also giving our opinion and having our own, you know, goals of where we see the school district going and working together with the superintendent to make that happen. I’m not sure that that happens everywhere. I think in a lot of places school boards are run by their superintendents. And that’s, I mean, I see that locally.

These tensions—between the authority of educational professionals and school board members—are the same ones that promoted consolidation efforts a century ago, when reformers wanted schools to be run by educational experts (Sutherland, 2023). While some board members discussed such tensions and expressed interest in being more than consultive players in major planning, just as many expressed contentment in their interviews with policy-making, budgeting, and supervision of the superintendent as their primary, delimited roles.

Board members also expressed an awareness of the connections between the quality and civility of their deliberations and actions in board meetings, and the legitimacy of the school district’s policies and efforts (Miron & Wimpelberg, 1992). Donna, a small town board member in her 12^th year of service, reflected this idea:

I think that we have a very good board. . . . We talk about things, we work through them, we do present a united front to the public. And I, think part of that . . . is because it’s much easier to present a united front to the public, because that way there may be people in that public that do not agree with every decision that the board makes. However, if the board is united then it’s much harder for that person from the public . . . to have an in . . . It’s like a mosquito bite that needs scratched, you know . . . if they recognize or they sense that there’s not a united front then they’re going to keep bugging you and you’re going to keep scratching that and it’s just going to kind of wear away, wear away at you.

Board members have awareness that the public’s perceptions of their work impact the trust of citizens in the district, but this awareness can also produce a defensiveness against authentic public engagement (which should include disagreement and dissent) within board decision-making processes. While most board members praised their communities’ positive and supportive engagement with their schools, they also sometimes chafed at those who express distrust of board members as elected officials. Donna stated, “what I find the most disheartening, [is] the lack of trust of government in my community. . . . The distrust of government. And . . . I would say . . . you know, I look back at them and say, you know, I am government. . . . You elected me.”

Donna pointed to the unique liminal quality of school board members as local elected officials, or “citizen-policy makers” (Asen, 2015, p. 36). Board members are “politicians with a small ‘p,’ or, perhaps better, citizens with a capital ‘C’” (Tracey, 2010, p. 196). As very accessible elected officials—one rarely runs into their U.S. Senator at the store or salon—board members can be a “scapegoat,” as one rural board member described, for the frustrations with more distant governmental bodies. Yet in their relationships across the community, they are aware of their role in earning and retaining local trust in their district.

The goal of this phenomenological, multidisciplinary, descriptive-interpretive research study is to discover how school board members experience and navigate board service during a time of political and cultural conflict. Using the case of Ohio, the study contextualizes school boards in the larger historic and political dynamics of school governance. The common elements of the school board experience, as interpreted through the data, show school board service to be a complex leadership role demanding collaboration and relational navigation across inter-connected institutions (families, municipalities, state and federal governments, private sector entities, non-profit organizations), and the interactions of all these institutions on students, educators, and schools. These collaborations and relationships rely on the availability of trustworthy information, educational and related experts who advise and share power. The state legislature, in particular, is experienced as a difficult, interventionist collaborator in school board work.

Trust was a recurrent theme discussed related to the school board experience. School boards members experience the importance of public trust, and at times, the erosion of that trust. The decline of public trust in schools impacts board policy deliberation, which should be characterized by productive disagreement alongside consensus-building. Board members described not knowing whether to trust information about COVID, and some expressed open mistrust of the state legislature’s educational agenda. The tensions over trust make the school board experience feel, at times, like a battle; this was of course highlighted through the events of the 2019–2023 time period, but particularly given the fund-raising pressures in many districts, this comes with the general territory of board service, too.

School board service is also experienced as a moral responsibility. Board members are conscious of the burden in their roles for providing a safe, positive school experience and good educational outcomes for children in their district. In an environment with pandemics, extreme poverty, and school shooters, this burden can feel acute. In addition, board members experience the weight of challenges like school safety, student well-being, and inequitable district outcomes as part of their charge and mission. Board members experience responsibility for fiscal efficiency and stewardship of resources, which adds more pressure and tension in a state where funding challenges plague many public school districts.

While carrying the limitation of a research participant pool of only 18 board members who self-reported their experiences, this study gleans the key themes of service in one of the more unique, accessible, and long-standing institutions of democratic governance. The final section considers what these experiences tell us about the health of that institution.