As Harold Sims Jr. knocked on doors for his school board campaign, many of the Northern Virginia residents on the other side didn’t know there was an election in May.
Sims wasn’t campaigning for the general election or primary that most voters are familiar with. He was door knocking, along with fundraising and debating other candidates to win the local Democratic Party’s endorsement.
School board races in Virginia, like most of the country, are nonpartisan. There’s no Democrat or Republican label next to candidates’ names. But, for years, local political parties around the state have endorsed school board candidates to signal to voters which candidates match their political ideology.
The vote usually happens among a small group of official party members. Endorsed candidates appear on the slate handed out at the polls. In some cases, those not endorsed are expected to drop out.
What’s emerged in Virginia’s most populous county this year is a new approach to expand the process to more voters: A de facto primary run by the Fairfax County Democratic Committee as an open election for any Democrat to vote on who receives the party’s endorsement.
In blue Fairfax County, winning a school board seat is difficult without the party’s stamp. So for many school board candidates in the suburbs of Washington, the stakes are not in the days leading up to Nov. 7, they are here, in the private endorsement race to get their name on the party’s slate.
On Saturday, the only day of in-person voting in the party’s endorsement election, Sims’s opponent Mateo Dunne stood outside a local government center in a bright blue T-shirt printed with his name. He and a handful of volunteers eagerly handed out fliers to a single voter. By mid afternoon, the polling site had only seen 17 voters.
“You try to get as many people as you can to sign up to vote for you,” Dunne said. “Or people just generally who you think you might be able to persuade, and then it’s a matter of actually getting them to cast their ballot.”
About 90 percent of America’s nearly 14,000 public school board’s are nonpartisan, part of a historical attempt to separate governance from the sway of national politics. But experts anticipate that number is slowly decreasing as culture war issueslike how to teach about race and sexuality, what books are available in school libraries, and how bathrooms and sports teams are designated for students continue to dominate public education.
A new approach
Nonpartisan school boards date back to early 20th-century Progressive Era political reformsto separate governance from politics, said Evan Crawford, a political scientist at the University of San Diego who studies trends in school boards across the country. The idea was that there’s no Republican or Democratic way to perform government functions like shoveling snow — or running schools.
“What’s being challenged now is maybe there is a Republican or Democratic way to run a school district,” Crawford said. “A lot of people think that that’s true. And a lot of people don’t.”
That idea was thrust into the national conversation when the coronavirus pandemic hit, turning attention to school boards as they managed reopening and masking in schools, Crawford said. That tension has continued to build into culture wars issues like transgender student policies, teachings on race and racism, and equity in schools — all debates that have raged in Virginia.
“All 10,000 school districts have to make a decision about how they’re going to respond to covid,” Crawford said. “Once that becomes politicized, once that becomes partisan, then every single school district in the country, their board, whatever decision they make, is going to be viewed through a partisan lens.”
The Fairfax County Democratic Committee has been endorsing candidates since the board became elected in 1995 through a closed caucus vote among the party’s roughly 1,000 active members. Committee chair Bryan Graham said the committee decided to open the election after a hotly contested race in 2019 led to nearly 1,500 applications to become a party member just to vote in the caucus. Graham said the party recognized the rising interest in school board races and wanted to bring more people into the process.
More than 4,000 people registered to vote in this year’s endorsement election and more than 3,300 cast a ballot.
“Fairfax County is a pretty Democratic place, there have been people pushing for this for a very long time,” Graham said. “I kind of call it a baby primary.”
The county school board, which oversees about 198 schools serving more than 180,000 students, is made up of 12 members. All 12 school board seats are on the ballot this year. The party automatically endorsed seven Democratic and uncontestedcandidates. The week-long online endorsement election, which ended Saturday, selected the remaining candidates to support for the board’s three at-large seats, as well as seats in the Mount Vernon and the Hunter Mill Districts.
In the at-large race, candidates raised tens of thousands of dollars. The race in the Mount Vernon District, between Sims and his opponent Dunne drew attention for its competitiveness. The two candidates spent the weeks leading up to the election knocking on of doors, participating in forums and raising thousands of dollars. They sought endorsements from state senators, local leaders and education groups.
Sims, who lost to Dunne, said he was happy to see more people brought into the process, but worried that enough people, especially people of color, were not aware of the election.
“There were only like two individuals who even knew that there was an election, and nobody knew that there was a new process,” Sims said of his door-to-door campaigning. “And I think that’s a problem.”
Opposition to the new system
The Democratic Party in Fairfax’s neighboring Arlington County has been running a similar election to endorse candidates for its smaller five-person school board for years. The endorsement process there has been criticized by local groups like the county branch of the NAACP, which sent a letter to the party in 2022 with concerns that the process was confusing, poorly publicized and exclusionary.
The endorsement vote in Arlington, and under Fairfax’s new process, is open to any registered voter who signs an oath pledging to support the Democratic Party endorsee.
“The reality is, the partisan caucus has become a shadow election overriding the democratic and regulated process, which is evident in the campaign spending patterns, candidate campaigning habits, and simple visibility of signage as the entire community understands the realities of the presumptive power that the endorsement caucus has come to hold,” the letter read.
The party voted to keep the process in place despite the concerns. Chair Steve Baker said the party removed a provision requiring candidates who did not receive the endorsement to drop out of the race as a response to the concerns.
Symone Walker, an attorney for a federal agency, ran for an Arlington school board seat in 2020, and initially planned to run for the Democratic endorsement because she understood the value. But she learned she could only run as an independent because seeking the endorsement would violate the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting federal employees from participating in some forms of partisan political activities.
She continued her campaign as an independent, but struggled to make up the vote in November when Democratic volunteers handed out sample ballots featuring the endorsed candidate.
“It’s almost next to impossible when you have candidates endorsed by the party,” Walker said. “In effect it’s 1,300 members putting people on the school board.”
She lost.
Walker remains critical of the process, arguing that many of the people who vote in the endorsement race tend to skew whiter and wealthier. The letter sent to the county democratic party by the NAACP included data from the 2021 vote that showed nearly one-third of ballots came from a Zip code that makes up about 14 percent of the total Arlington population and is 79 percent White.
Only about 15 percent of ballots came from the county’s most populous and diverse Zip code.
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“It’s mainly the families whose kids aren’t struggling who are deciding who our school board members are,” Walker said. “I don’t believe that school boards should be partisan. I think Virginia got that right.”
Arlington’s endorsement vote for one contested seat concluded on May 13. Around 1,300 people participated in the election. There are more than 150,000 voters registered for the Democratic primary in June.
According to a press release from Arlington Democrats, the party conducted an extensive community outreach program, including the distribution of over 25,000 door hangers to inform voters about the endorsement election.
Baker, the party chair, said that the endorsement process is an important step to ensure that the party can get Democrats into open seats. Multiple strong Democrats on the general election ticket could split the vote and make it easier for a Republican or Independent to win the seat, he said.
“We know with absolute certainty that Republicans are targeting school boards,” Baker said. “I think it’s more important than ever to have this process.”
Reality of partisanship
The shift toward more partisan school boards started even before covid and continued with furthertrickling down of national politics, said Julie Marsh, a professor of public policy and education at theUniversity of Southern California. She pointed to the outside political influence of groups like Moms for Liberty, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s unusual move to endorse dozens of conservative school board candidates in 2022.
Conservative political action committees around the country funneled millions into local school board races in 2022. Candidates campaign on culture war issues like removing “wokeism” from schools and protecting “parents rights.” Democrats campaign on defending equity policies and stoppingthe sway of conservative influence.
Laws in four states — Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana and Pennsylvania — allowpartisan party labels be included on the ballot for school board races. And at least five states — Georgia, Rhode Island, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina — give local authorities control over elections to allow the option.
In Tennessee, a state law passed in 2021 allowed local political parties to decide if they want to put forward candidates with partisan labels. Florida passed legislation to put the question to voters in 2024.
Already in other Virginia jurisdictions, like Loudoun County, there are closed caucus votes limited to dues-paying party members to endorse candidates. And while the Democratic Party in nearby Alexandria does not endorse school board candidates, citing the cost of a broader caucus and the exclusivity of a narrower vote, its leaders recognize that political affiliation matters to many voters.
And political scientists anticipate seeing more parties follow the model in Fairfax and Arlington.
“Even offices that are billed as nonpartisan like school boards are becoming more partisan across the commonwealth,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. “What Fairfax is doing is recognizing the partisan reality of school board races.”
