Thoughts on Cherokee County School Board Elections

I have sat quietly for this entire local election cycle and have not expressed an opinion on my own local races. But we are in the silly season, when every two years some radical lefties in Cherokee County try to destroy the reputation of anyone seeking to make change with things they don’t agree with.

I don’t really know any of the people running for school board. I don’t have a contested race to vote in this time around for that position. But there are four seats up for grabs and two of them are open. Two incumbents are facing challenges from people who have teamed up with candidates in the open seats to present themselves as a slate. They have labeled themselves “Four Can Do More.”

As a student of political campaigns, I find the strategy of presenting a slate to be a double edged source at best. It is a political suicide pact at worst. And it ignores the electoral reality that everyone in Cherokee County gets just one vote for their own school board member. Further, not all of the four are created equal. While at least one comes across as articulate and knowledgeable, they are tied to any flaws the others may have. And another of them comes across as fueled by anger, which, may very well reflect the mood of many who will vote for him. If I were a candidate, I would want to stand on my own qualifications and merits and not be tied to anyone else.

I want to stress at this point that if you have a vote for school board in Cherokee County this is not a post telling you who to vote for and why.

But I can tell you that there is a reason that my children are not in Cherokee County Schools and it starts and ends with the way some… key word, some, of the employees of the school district behave on social media. Before I go any further, this is not meant to cast aspersions on teachers as a whole. A favorite tactic of the lefties here is to try to say that any criticism of a specific event or person is an attack on the entire, honorable profession. That is not the case. The vast majority of the teachers and staff in CCSD are amazing people. Nonetheless, the establishment has long relied on these folks to be their defenders and there has not, to my knowledge, ever been any type of public discouragement of their behavior.

If the majority is so great, then why did we pull our kids out? For one, I have an autistic son who is not always able to communicate how he is feeling or frankly deal with his emotions. He is sensitive and gets embarrassed easily and his flight instinct is his number one defense mechanism. His second is to exercise his right to remain silent. And he is extraordinarily disciplined at the latter. Gitmo interrogators would not be able to get him to talk if he didn’t want to.

And while I was in the State House I fought for parents to choose the environment that best suited their children’s educational needs. I have always said that you can be supportive of public schools and advocate for school choice. This was not sufficient for these folks and they made me their target. They were vitriolic in their rhetoric and used violent imagery to get their point across. And after seeing employees who worked at a school where my son would be attending use phrases like, “I want to see his head on a silver platter,” I could not allow people like that to have access to my son. He would likely have remained silent about any trauma he would have experienced and I would not have known about it. We assessed the risk and asked ourselves if people hate us so much that they would say things like this in public, what would they do to my son if given access to him?

So just like that, the only member of the Georgia General Assembly to have children in the public school district in Cherokee County in decades removed his kids from the district.

Vote for whomever you want. As for me and my family, we will homeschool. And also continue to fight for parents to have choices when educating their children.