A concerted and co-ordinated push by social conservative groups to train candidates and campaigners for upcoming school board elections is raising the stakes in this fall’s municipal elections, with voting day less than two months away.
Groups like Take Back Alberta have actively been courting and training grassroots members since the last municipal election in order to wrest control from trustees they see as too politically progressive around social issues such as 2SLGBTQ+ rights and parental control.
David Parker, executive director of Take Back Alberta (TBA), pointed to low voter turnout and a high proportion of acclaimed school trustee candidates as keys to their success in the Oct. 20 Alberta municipal election.
“People who don’t believe in parental rights need to be driven out of any elected office in Alberta,” Parker said in a July interview with CBC News.
With sometimes small populations, and electors divided into public, Catholic or francophone school board voters, some school boards struggle to attract candidates.
School board election turnouts are hard to calculate, because municipalities may not know how many electors vote for each school board in areas where divisions overlap.
Provincial data shows that in the 2021 municipal elections, of 421 school board trustees elected, 207 were acclaimed to the position. Another six seats were vacant.
The push to influence school boards comes as the province removes the ability of Alberta boards to ditch trustees for code of conduct breaches thanks to legislation passed in spring.
Another group, Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), has also ramped up its workshops for trustee candidates.
Although executive director John Hilton-O’Brien said the organization wants to see better board governance and a wider variety of perspectives represented on boards, an explicit goal of the organization is to get rid of school board policies that prevent teachers from telling parents if a student is attending gay-straight alliance meetings.
“We’ve still got a secrecy policy,” he said. “It’s got to go.”
The escalation of social conservative groups organizing in advance of the elections worries some education organizations with more progressive stances.
Dennis MacNeil is president of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta and a trustee with Aspen View Public Schools — a rural division in the northeast that TBA said it is targeting in the election.
MacNeil said the change to code of conduct legislation is particularly problematic in light of special interest groups recruiting potential trustees with a singular focus.
“If you’re that one-agenda person who is on a board, and your only focus is to be anti-woke, or whatever … that creates a lot of problems for boards,” MacNeil said in a June interview.
