FROM THE EDITOR: It's Time to Ditch Demagoguery and Reclaim Local Politics
With new boards coming in January, there's an opportunity to reverse a trend that has proven detrimental to local politics - the nationalization of local debates.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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In his Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln, Jon Meacham grappled with the seemingly inconsistent views that the 16th president held of human slavery. Equally confounding to Meacham were the ways that later thinkers cherry-picked Lincoln’s writings to support their efforts to paint him as the “Great Liberator” or a racist.
“The devil,” wrote Meacham citing Shakespeare, “can quote scripture to his purpose.” Such scripture quoting, he argues, has grossly distorted our understanding of the man and his humanity. To truly grasp Lincoln, he concluded, one must take him “all in all.”
Nationally today, politics are increasingly driven by demagogic leaders who “quote scripture” — “scripture” these days being swapped for favored data points, political dogma, or facts devoid of context — to their purpose. Donald Trump has taken demagoguery to levels that have parallels in the politics of Andrew Jackson and Huey Long. Zohran Mamdani is a Democratic demagogue trying to match Trump for leadership long on personality and voter anger, but short on reason and logic.
The same approach to governing at the national level has increasingly come to drive local politics, leading local politicians to prioritize ideology over problem-solving, party power over economic growth, and backwards-looking nostalgia over forward-looking policies that build a future for rising generations.
As our region prepares to seat new Board members in January, those taking on the mantle of leadership — and their colleagues who currently sit on the local Boards — would do well to spend some time thinking about the ways that national politics have created turbulence in local politics, and how they might stabilize local Boards by shedding the national focus for the local.
Perhaps in no area has the national influence on the local been clearer than in education.
Spotsylvania
April Gillespie and Lisa Phelps are rolling off the Spotsylvania School Board, bringing an end to a full-throated move launched in 2022 whereby the then-majority worked to push an education agenda that would strip educators of classroom autonomy in favor of parental control, remove books they found offensive, and usher in a Christian- (read, “evangelical”-) first approach to education.
The approach was hardly local, but rather followed a national playbook being constructed by anti-public-school groups like Moms for Liberty and, at the state level, the Middle Resolution Network.
When Gillespie and Phelps were relegated to the minority in 2024, following a 2023 voter revolt against these heavy-handed tactics, they resorted to disruptive antics, tantrums from the dais, and — when that failed — simply quit showing up and doing the work they were elected, and being paid, to do.
Though Phelps and Gillespie were in the majority for just two years — 2022 and 2023 — they wrought considerable damage to the school system. Central office lost much of the institutional memory and educational expertise that was improving student outcomes, a significant number of experienced teachers were unceremoniously dismissed or simply left for greener pastures, and the county expended enormous resources on lawsuits and sideshows, like Kirk Cameron pushing evangelical-friendly books.
The real misfortune of this four-year experiment, however, is that Phelps’ and Gillespie’s antics hurt the very people they purportedly wanted to give voice to. There are parents who have serious concerns that, rightly or wrongly, they felt were being swept under the table. Issues like the age-appropriateness of books — especially at elementary and middle school levels — is a legitimate concern that demands thoughtful policy. Budgetary outlays versus return-on-investment in terms of student outcomes demands a serious and thoughtful analysis. And parents should never feel that they are an object to be avoided in their children’s educational experience.
Rather than address these challenges thoughtfully, however, Phelps and Gillespie simply did what they contended previous Board members, such as Dawn Shelley and outgoing member Nicole Cole, had done — take a heavy-handed, one-sided approach that dismissed the voices of parents who disagreed with them.
Over the past year, the Board has righted itself under the leadership of Chair Megan Jackson, who has re-centered the Board’s role in the school system by focusing on creating policies that allow educational professionals to perform their jobs, and staying out of the day-to-day issues that the superintendent and staff are charged with.
Especially in education, expertise matters. Board members are not elected to interfere in classrooms, make their own observations about how principals run their schools and then try to interfere, or decide what curricula should be deployed in schools. Rather, Board members play an oversight role.
Jackson has played that role well — incoming Board members would do well to learn from her leadership, and check their ideologies at the door.
Fredericksburg
In a school district that has long struggled, without success, to raise itself from the cellar — the city’s schools have for years ranked near the bottom of SOL performance in the state — the incoming Board members will feel pressure to quickly find a path forward that improves student outcomes.
The instinct is to find one lever to pull that will realize the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. However, looking for single levers frequently leads one down ideologically motivated paths that — as seen in Spotsylvania — would likely do more harm than good.
There is little doubt that significant changes are necessary in the city school system.
City leadership knows this and over the years has tried an endless array of quick-fix programs (IB, Comprehensive Instructional Program, James Farmer Scholars Program, Superintendent Community Roundtables, and intensive SOL remediation to name just a few) that have yielded no significant improvement.
Residents also know this. Some are dealing with the issue by walking with their feet, sending their students to private schools or schools in other districts — how many parents have done this, however, is not known. And then there are a very vocal few who have complained relentlessly about poor test scores.
This incoming Board must deal with the schools’ constant underperformance. Though the community has long looked the other way at the obvious, that is no longer possible.
Reporting by the Advance this year has heightened concern about some Board members and their travel habits, a bad look when academic achievement is among the worst in the state. Our reporting has also exposed the extent to which the School Board has for two decades featured an unusually high number of unchallenged races.
The Board’s greatest challenge may be to decide where the start. Answering two questions before taking drastic actions would help.
What does academic success in the city schools look like?
What assets does the system currently have that can help it become better?
There are no easy answers to these questions. And leaning into national ideologies that would limit the creativity and tools at the Board’s disposal would worsen the situation. Throwing in with “school choice” appeals to some, but is unrealistic in this city. Further, there is little evidence that school choice on its own significantly changes things. But leaning in with the same tired educational establishment talking points aren’t likely to help either — the current administration has tried many without results.
So how should the Board attack its problems? Here are some thoughts.
Defining Academic Success
High-stakes exams have many faults — this publication has often written of the need to move away from standardized education and SOLs — but when scores are consistently in the bottom of the state, students clearly are not learning as they should.
Success begins — but does not end — with moving these scores in a significantly positive direction.
The district will rightly point to challenges in doing this. It has a large number of English-language learners. It also has a high percentage of students living in poverty. Finally, there are budgetary and facilities challenges.
Too often, the district has used these challenges to explain why they couldn’t move the academic needle. Rather than use these challenges as a reason the school system isn’t succeeding, the district needs to lean into the problems it has already identified and find targeted solutions.
The district successfully did this with its facility challenges and deserves much credit for this accomplishment.
Leaders, however, must address competing problems simultaneously. That it managed to address its facilities but failed to make any progress on academics doesn’t bode well for its efforts to improve things in the near future.
What Assets Does the District Have?
Second, the district must look to the assets that it currently has.
Finances are a concern, but the school system does not confront a City Council unwilling to work with it to find revenues. Its recent decision to withhold some funds until it knew better what the meals and sales tax revenues would be reflects a Council committed to supporting the school system.
The schools also enjoy strong support from community leaders. From political and nonprofit leaders to business leaders, the school system has individuals willing to rally and help it achieve what it wants to achieve. Strong attendance at the Superintendent Community Roundtables is evidence of this support, as is the recent $1 million gift from Larry Silver to support the district’s plans for career and technical education.
The situation in Fredericksburg is not hopeless. Part of the Board’s challenge is to remind the community of this.
Don’t expect an easy road ahead, but at the very least this new Board owes the community a map — and quickly.
Stafford
Under the leadership most recently of outgoing Board Chair Maureen Siegmund and her predecessors, Stafford has managed to mostly avoid the national political culture wars that ripped apart Spotsylvania County, while embracing innovation the public education system needs to stay viable and relevant — something Fredericksburg City Schools has struggled to do.
Rather, Stafford public schools’ challenges come from a Board of Supervisors that is indirectly harming the school systems’ budget by yielding too many local economic development decisions to anti-development policies apparently fueled by national organizations like the Sierra Club and regional groups like the Piedmont Environmental Council that have adopted data-center positions that make the development of the industry difficult.
This is economic development that could bring the county hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It’s money the county desperately needs.
Stafford County’s budget is hampered on a number of fronts. Most notably, as the county’s Commissioner of the Revenue Scott Mayausky recently told the Advance, by Richmond’s “unfunded mandates [that] are growing at a rate that Stafford can’t afford.”
Chief among these mandates are personal property and real estate tax relief for 100% disabled veterans.
That mandated tax relief, Mayausky recently told the Advance, is “growing on average 30% per year…. That’s 400,000 tax dollars a month that we are forgiving. This is wiping out most of our new growth.”
Meanwhile, the county’s population — and cost of living — continue to rise, meaning the county’s school system is perennially underfunded.
In the face of these economic pressures, the county’s Board of Supervisors have frustrated data center projects at every turn in recent years after initially recruiting the industry to the county.
One factor in that change may have been the Sierra Club.
Emails acquired through a FOIA request show that in October 2023 the Rappahannock Group Sierra Club wrote the members of the Stafford Board of Supervisors and submitted a list of guidelines. Among the recommendations, “Remove data centers as a ‘by right’ use in the county ordinance.”
The day after receiving the note, Bohmke forwarded the email to Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisor member Lori Hayes and asked if her Board had received it prior to their vote. “I got the same email yesterday,” Hayes responded. “I [sic] little late.”
Bohmke and current Board member Crystal Vanuch have frequently led the charge against data centers as by-right developments. They also led the charge for 750 foot setbacks, the most aggressive in Virginia.
Those setbacks, as the Advance reported, appeared motivated by anything by reason. Describing the debate that occurred over setbacks, the Advance explained how they went from 100 feet to 750 feet:
From the original 100-foot setback, a 1,320-foot setback was advertised for the meeting. Why 1,320? That’s not clear. Over the course of the evening, figures ranging from 500 feet to 2 miles were tossed around the dais.
The 750-foot setback was ultimately a political “compromise.” What was lacking was any real substantive defense for that setback, or for that matter any of the other numbers Board members threw out.
These types of reactions appear less thoughtful and more reactionary. Less sound policy and more populist grandstanding.
As the county’s two new Board members join in January, they will face the need to better balance the county’s growing financial crisis, and the economic development opportunities before it.
Walking-Backwards Policies
As newly elected local board members prepare to assume their seats, it’s important they realize the damage that allowing national politics to drive local decision-making has done to this region in recent years.
Local politics should — indeed, must — be practiced in ways that are not national or even state-level.
Local Board members, unlike their elected counterparts at the state and national levels, interact with voters not through composites created from polling data and focus groups, but through real-life interactions in the grocery stores and faith communities and civic groups and neighborhoods where they daily walk. Elected local officials’ emails and phone numbers are readily accessible, making person-to-person interaction with them relatively simple.
Given this intimacy, local politicians should be a hedge against national political dysfunction.
Their jobs are not to implement national policy as they understand them, but to solve the very real problems that their constituents face.
Voters are not asking for perfection. They are asking for progress.
“I may advance slowly,” Lincoln reputedly said, “but I don’t walk backward.”
This regions needs its boards to advance. Slowly is acceptable. But backwards-walking must be rejected. It’s caused enough damage.
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Spot-on analysis about how national ideologies have hijacked local problem-solving. Your Spotsylvania case study is particul arly instructive because it shows the real cost: institutional memory gone, experienced teachers fled, resources wasted on sideshows. What makes this piece so valuable is you're not just diagnosing teh problem, you're naming the tension every local board faces between solving actual problems versusperforming ideology for a national audience. The Lincoln invocation works here because you're calling for the same kind of contextual thinking he used.