Right-wing ‘slate’ seeks control of Albany County School Board

United by their beliefs about COVID and about nefarious “ideologies” allegedly infiltrating the district, the slate hopes to wrest control of the schools from those they view as political rivals.

With seven of nine school board seats on the table this election, a slate of conservative and right-wing candidates hopes to gain power.

They are united by the false belief that pandemic threats were overstated or nonexistent, and also in their opposition to the alleged presence of “critical race theory” in school classrooms and “inappropriate” books in school libraries.

The Albany County School Board races are technically non-partisan — meaning that candidates do not file to run as Republicans or Democrats and those distinctions do not appear above their names on the ballot.

But that doesn’t mean the race is apolitical.

Laramie City Council seats are also non-partisan, but there are still discernible, if fluid, factions.

And school board candidates have not been shy about grouping themselves into rough factions either, as local mailers make clear.

A pair of mailers outlining two distinct factions running for school board. // Source: elliottarthur.org and Carrie Murthy for School Board.

The conservative slate has gone further in solidifying their alliance — sponsoring a campaign float, hosting group events, even collecting their members under a single campaign website.

The members of this slate (and their specific races) are:

• Elliott Arthur (Area A, unexpired term)

• Teri Jo Gillum (Area A, four-year term)

• Tom Mullan (At-Large, four-year term)

• Phoebe Newman (Area A, unexpired term)

• Sandi Rees (Area A, four-year term)

• Mike Schilt (Area A (four-year term)

• Leo Swope (Area B, four-year term)

Every voter in Albany County votes in every school board race. In a typical election cycle, there are usually three races — Area A, Area B and At-Large — for a total of four or five candidates. But there have been two resignations (and appointments) since the last election, so an additional two seats (for two-year unexpired terms in Area A) are on the ballot in 2022.

There are otherwise three available seats in Area A, one seat in Area B and one at-large seat.

The seven candidates fit neatly into the seven available school board seats so that an interested elector could vote a straight “conservative slate” ticket if they wanted to.

The candidates who make up that slate are individuals with differing ideas about a number of topics that might come before the school board. But they are ideologically unified in their concern about the contents of school libraries and course curricula and in their opposition to the district’s 2021 COVID-19 prevention measures.

Pandemic responses have been heavily politicized, and Republicans are far more likely to believe COVID-19 misinformation. That belief in misinformation leads to more dangerous behavior, such as going unvaccinated amidst a global pandemic. The polarization is so strong that Republicans are now significantly more likely to die from the disease.

COVID-19: Anger and misinformation

Several of the conservative slate candidates have downplayed the severity or dismissed the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elliott Arthur, for example, referred to COVID-19 as the “Kung Flu” while filling out a questionnaire for the Laramie Reporter.

While reasonable minds can differ about the appropriate district response to a global pandemic, it is unreasonable to suggest that the threat of COVID-19 was overblown.

The pandemic has killed more than 1.07 million people in the United States and more than 6.59 million worldwide — but most experts agree those official estimates are undercounts. Yet more went undiagnosed or died as an indirect result of the pandemic. In the United States, the pandemic had orphaned more than 140,000 children by this time last year — an indirect result of the pandemic the CDC calls a “hidden and ongoing secondary tragedy.”

In Albany County schools, the public debate has centered on masks. For most of the fall 2021 semester, masks were required in Albany County classrooms. But passing, and then extending, that mask mandate inspired vicious fights between the parents or community members who supported the mandate and the parents or community members opposed.

None of the conservative slate candidates supported the mask mandate. Most were actively opposed. Several have spread outright misinformation about the pandemic, vaccines and masks.

For example, Arthur told the Laramie Reporter in October: “Based upon the latest information from educated people, health professionals and personal observations, mask mandates were little more than ‘feel good’ measures which were ineffective for the vast majority of the population.”

This is false.

Masks are effective at reducing transmission of COVID-19. They were even more effective at reducing the transmission of the delta variant prevalent during the Albany County mask mandate debates. This is the consensus of the relevant experts.

Despite that clear expert consensus, misinformation, conspiracy theories and outright disinformation campaigns have hindered official pandemic responses. This has been the case since the early days of the pandemic, when motivated political actors exploited the public’s distrust of experts to push misinformation and lies about the effectiveness of masks.

Laramie High School student Grace Smith is arrested for trespassing in a viral video uploaded to her father’s YouTube page.

The same mask misinformation being pushed by these political actors was parroted by those who shut down a school board meeting in September 2021 — including conservative slate candidate Sandi Rees, who spent that meeting’s brief intermission shouting at the school board.

In her 2022 campaign, Rees has stressed civility.

“It is true that I found myself at odds with the school board on more than one occasion,” Rees said during a League of Women Voters forum last month. “I found myself being called misinformed and stupid, have had the police called on me, have witnessed a 16-year-old child hauled out in handcuffs because she chose to not wear a mask. I hope that we can move forward respectfully and not ever have to deal with this again.”

That 16-year-old was Grace Smith. She was arrested for trespassing after being asked to don a mask repeatedly, refusing repeatedly, being asked to leave campus and again refusing to comply. Her family raised more than $140,000 through a subsequent national crowdsourcing effort as school board trustees and other members of the local community faced a wave of “insults, vitriol, threats and personal attacks.” She and her father also launched a conspiratorial and misinformation-laden lawsuit against the school district and state officials that was subsequently thrown out of court.

Area A candidate Mike Shilt also spread misinformation about masks during the same October forum.

“As it turns out, masks are totally ineffective at stopping the virus, because the virus particle is so small,” he said. “If we get into this again, before it happens, I would encourage everyone to do some research into this mask subject.”

Again, this information is false.

Schilt is correct in that the virus particle is very tiny — tiny enough to theoretically slip through the fibers of a mask. But he is wrong about how masks work. Yes, masks work as a wall to stop larger particles from passing through. But the better masks also have electrostatic properties that kick around the smaller particles, increasing the chances that those particles come into contact with a fiber and stick.

Is it perfect? No. But no public health intervention ever was. You might have heard of N95 and KN95 masks. The “95” refers to the percentage of those smaller particles stopped by the mask. Stopping 95 percent of tiny particles isn’t perfect, but it’s significantly more effective than stopping 0 percent. And 95 percent effective is certainly not “totally ineffective.”

Schilt’s contention that masks don’t work doesn’t just ignore the science of masks. It also ignored the reality that every major study on the subject has observed: masks work to reduce transmission and communities with widespread mask usage saw less transmission. Schools that masked also saw less transmission. This science underpinned the school board’s October decision to extend the mask mandate — but it has not made a dent in the belief system of the slate.

Many if not all of the conservative slate candidates believe precautions against COVID should be optional. Phoebe Newman said the district should follow CDC guidance but not enforce it with employees or students. Sandi Rees added it was inappropriate to reject the inexpert findings of parents.

“There is a lot of differing information out there,” she said at the League of Women Voters forum last month. “And to (say) that some of the information that your constituents have is wrong is inappropriate. Because I’ll tell you what: it’s the parents’ decision and their medical providers to make those decisions.”

At-large candidate Thomas Mullan said the same.

“It should be a personal choice — much like I did when it came to my employees,” he told the Laramie Reporter last month.

Mullan owns I-80 Towing and the side of his business bears a large banner proclaiming mask mandates are unconstitutional and suggesting Marxists run Laramie. The banner features a guinea pig in a mask being threatened by a syringe — presumably loaded with one of the highly effective, rigorously tested COVID-19 vaccines already delivered to 70 percent of all humans alive today.

Personal choice, for both masks and vaccines, is the current policy of Albany County School District No. 1. A vaccine mandate was never seriously entertained. The mask mandate ended in December 2021.

But as University of Wyoming Public Health Expert Christine Porter has repeatedly reminded the community since the beginning of the pandemic: public health is public, and denying that reality is deadly.

"The reason the U.S. has the highest death rate from COVID in the developed world is our individualistic approach,” Porter has said. “We've individualized health, which of course health is not. Each individual has their own health, but what maintains it or harms it we think of as being in the individual's control, but it is far from that.”

So-called ‘critical race theory’

The current school board has addressed a number of topics since the last election in 2020 — up to and including the construction of a new elementary school. But the district’s pandemic response has been, by far, the most discussed and debated topic before the nine-member governing body.

However, it’s not the only contentious issue coloring this year’s school board elections. And it’s not the only issue where the conservative slate enjoys a consensus.

One mailer bearing all seven candidates’ names promises to “STOP Critical Race Theory” and “Keep sexually explicit content out of school.”

A mailer from the conservative slate promises to “stop Critical Race Theory” and “Keep sexually explicit content out of school.” // Source: elliottarthur.org.

Critical race theory is not taught in elementary, middle or high schools. When it’s taught at the collegiate level, it is taught as one of many possible lenses for research. But the academic theory has become a “boogeyman” for the country’s political right — drummed up by cynical political actors who have been open about their intentions to create a boogeyman.

“‘Cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” writes Chris Rufo, the man chiefly responsible for injecting the term into the nation’s political discourse.

The term, like its predecessors, has colloquially come to mean a wide variety of things — and what the conservative slate means by it on their mailer is unclear.

Few have spoken about the topic publicly, in questionnaires or during forums, but Elliott Arthur decried what he sees as harmful “ideologies” pervading local schools.

“Challenges to the curriculum is exactly what is needed right now,” he told the Laramie Reporter. “The district has allowed ideologies harmful to impressionable young minds to permeate what passes for education. The superintendent must be directed to remove ideological nonsense from the curriculum immediately.”

Some have notably pushed pushed back on the narrative that “harmful” ideologies have “permeated” the schools.

“CRT (critical race theory) is not being taught in our schools,” School Board Trustee Beth Bear writes in a campaign Facebook post. “Children are not indoctrinated in our schools. They are taught by excellent, qualified teachers with curriculum that has been thoroughly vetted and meets state standards, and they are taught to be critical thinkers and to be prepared for life after school.”

School districts across the country have weathered similar allegations and attacks. In Wyoming this year, state lawmakers attempted to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools; while the bill sailed through the senate, it died in the house.

Don’t call it a book ban

Critical race theory is not the only moral panic gripping American schools.

Some of the same organizations and voices pushing the critical race theory scare are also pushing to remove books from school libraries at an unprecedented rate. The campaign has resulted in more than 2,500 book bans across the country, affecting more than 1,600 different books.

None of the conservative slate candidates explicitly say they support banning books. But some have said that certain books “should not be available” or used other euphemisms for school board-directed removal of books from school libraries.

“As for banning books, that’s the wrong tactic,” Arthur told the Laramie Reporter. “However, books containing material of a pornographic nature should not be available to children too immature to understand the consequences of sexual conduct.”

He reiterated this stance during a League of Women Voters forum.

“Books that are not acceptable to the entire community are (not) acceptable in the school library,” he said. “The other books should belong in colleges or public libraries.”

When questioned about book bans, most members of the conservative slate are less explicit than Arthur, saying only that books need to be “age-appropriate.”

“Any person with common sense knows that books simply need to be age-appropriate,” Area B candidate Leo Swope told the Laramie Reporter. “Simply all stakeholders need access to materials their children may have access to. Openness, honesty and discussions help us tremendously in reducing distractions caused by items seen as inappropriate for students.”

Phoebe Newman took a similar stance.

“Firstly, looking to see if the books are age-appropriate,” she told the Laramie Reporter. “Second, do they teach something relevant to the teachings of the school subjects?”

But the seven conservative candidates are not the only ones taking this position.

Most of the 20 candidates running for the various school board seats have said school library books need to be “age-appropriate.” But only a few have taken the chance to forcefully defend libraries and librarians. One such candidate was Area A’s Alex Moon Krassin.

“The banning of books does not encourage critical thinking but rather conformity,” she said. “This is not, nor should it be, the goal of education in Albany County.”

Neither pornography nor CRT are likely to appear in public school districts, but the push to police both has resulted in the removal of books about a range of topics — from comic books about uncomfortable subjects or histories to fictional works featuring LGBT characters.

In Albany County, the school board has not seen significant public comment or debate about CRT — at least not yet. But the national outcry has led some school officials to tread carefully when considering courses such as AP African American History.

“We’re at a place now where if we didn’t put these texts or whatever materials are available for this course out for public observation, like our policies say, it would hit the fan,” one trustee said in December.

The 2022 General Election is Tuesday. The polls close at 7 p.m.