A Decade of Decline: Why Your School Board Matters

You’ve probably heard someone say, “this is the most important election of our lifetime,” and in many ways this is true. While many are focused on the Presidential election, School Board and City Council elections have the most immediate impact on your daily lives and are just as important as who you select at the top of the ballot. This election is important for our children – whether you have kids in your district or not, your tax dollars pay for the curriculum and teaching of thousands of children and future leaders in your community. Do you know how your money is being used?

We have the responsibility to elect school board members who are dedicated to restoring our schools. AZWOA wants Schools that are for Merit, Academics, Respect and Truth, and our SMART School Boards team has been hard at work recruiting, training and mentoring school board candidates whose values align with ours.

Be sure to use our Voter Guide to find the SMART candidates in your district. This week’s blog was written by Sharon Benson and Ed Steele, candidates for Mesa Public Schools, who further explain the importance of electing strong school board members in your district. Thank you, Sharon and Ed—and every other School Board candidate seeking to serve our students, parents and teachers who want SMART Schools again! ~ Kim

A Decade of Decline: Why Your School Board Matters
By Sharon Benson and Ed Steele, Candidates for Mesa Public School Board

In its heyday, Mesa Public Schools (MPS) was the district to attend; the envy of the East Valley. From academics to athletics, from artistic endeavors to award winning music programs, Mesa provided excellent programming from kindergarten to graduation. So much so, that parents would often bring their own children back to Mesa Schools, often to the same school they attended as children.

In 2011, MPS students were achieving at levels in keeping with the stellar reputation that Mesa had always experienced as this graph shows. Notice however that between 2014 and 2015 achievement in MPS, as well as across the state, plummeted, and MPS hasn’t been able to break the 50% achievement rate since that time. There were a few ‘events’ that occurred during this time period, only one in which your school board would have had direct input; unless they were to be extremely courageous and decide to refuse federal education dollars.

The state assessment test switched from AIMS to AZMerit, there was a full implementation of Common Core across the state, and districts began to go down the road of developing a ‘Portrait of a Graduate’. As these took hold, publicly funded schools began to face steep declines in enrollment. MPS for example lost a total of 8,979 students as of the 2021/22 school year according to data located here. Consider that our 15 day student count for the school year 2024/25, is 54,339, a loss of 20,610 students since the 2011/12 school year. These trends are not exclusive to MPS, and this is where your vote for school board matters.

I have a friend who has said repeatedly that if an organization, which begins with conservative values, does not hold fast to those values, the organization will ultimately become liberal. The core conservative value which directed education in MPS, as well as many other districts across the state, was focused on developing a solid academic foundation upon which students could build. This value was supported by a few other core values such as individual responsibility, discipline, working hard, perseverance, and merit. These values have been eroding over time, often due to a lack of leadership from a district’s governing board.

The trend in education in Arizona, which has been in works since at least 2014, is the Portrait of a Graduate. This has become the framework upon which other elements have been built into our classrooms such as culturally relevant teaching and social emotional learning (SEL); here is just one example of new ‘science’ curriculum adopted by MPS last spring.

When you really take a look at the Portrait of a Graduate in most, if not all districts which have adopted this framework, there is no indication that we want our graduates to be academically sound in the basics needed in order to participate in society. School boards voted to adopt this framework to develop their strategic plan, and can vote to redirect the district using a different framework; one in which academics and solid, critical thinking is the foundation.

Curriculum adoption is another area in which your school board members are of critical importance. Many curriculum options available today are infused with elements incorporating ideas which are contrary to conservative American values. Rather than using quality literature, which incorporate timeless values, stories are selected that allow students to ‘see themselves’ in the literature. Often the material brings in concepts regarding racism, ‘white privilege’, oppressed/oppressor, sex, sexuality, sexual orientation, or gender confusion issues. Many examples straddle the edge of pornography and reading the text or displaying the pictures would be deemed offensive and would not be allowed at a school board meeting. Forcing these themes and concepts upon children results in confusion and anxiety. This is clearly evident as we look at the ‘mental health crisis’ within students across Arizona. A strong conservative school board is able to push back against district leadership, and remove that which is not beneficial for our students’ learning.

Policy development is another critical piece in the quality running of a school district over which your school board members have control. Drafting clear, quality policy, and procedures which are not contrary to federal or state law is critical to improving the education students are receiving as they attend our public schools. This is a statutory mandate for school board members, and should not ever be relegated to hired district leadership.

In MPS, there has been much controversy the last few years regarding this very issue as the community became aware of Transgender Guidelines, and the Checklist associated with the guidelines. Notice, these are guidelines, not policy; no MPS Governing Board has developed or voted on policy regarding gender dysphoria, yet the district has had guidelines in place since 2015. This fact went under the radar for several years, and only became visible because of the social contagion surrounding this topic since 2020. As a result of these guidelines, which in our humble opinion, violate ARS 1-602, and the First Amendment, teachers feel free to introduce concepts of sex and sexuality with minor students, planting seeds of confusion within young minds, which is not acceptable. Voting for a school board which will possess members who uphold parental rights, and the rights of all students will be the only way to reverse this trend, and protect all our students.

Finally, the school board is responsible for hiring the Superintendent, whose responsibility it is on a daily basis, to ensure the will of the elected board members is enacted with fidelity. This is critical, as the elected board members who represent the will of their voters, can do all things right and in alignment with their community, but if the district leadership undermines that, the

degradation of our educational system continues. The Board must hire an ethical person of integrity who aligns with the values of the community, as represented by the elected members of the board.

Your vote for school board members may be the most important vote you cast this election season. Being a non-partisan race, it is important to engage with those people who are running and to investigate and research the candidates, so that you are casting an informed vote that represents your values. The future of public education, which still educates a majority of American children, depends upon it.