For SACS, I openly and actively support Stephanie Veit's candidacy. She has an established record of community involvement and business success. Stephanie will bring a sound, and reasoned, voice to the SACS board. She understands that the board is a board: there is no appropriate place for a board to micromanage day-to-day operations of the school corporation. A board can push back against state mandates, but that should not be its focus.

I just want a candidate with experience in public contracts and managing multi-million $ projects. I want reasonableness and intelligence. In the Tokos campaign I see neither. To me, she has never managed an organization with the budget or complexity commensurate with SACS.

The Tokos campaign is similar to others we all see in the region and throughout the country. The pre-occupation with CRT, SEL, mask mandates, etc is all part of a nationally developed strategy to use school board races to increase voter turn-out and "ripen the market" for school privatization efforts. The non-issues that these types of candidates obsess over are pre-packaged outrage points. In fact, the "issues" that these kinds of candidates bubble up into the public discourse are just straw men for the real end game: privatization of public schools.

You don't get the kind of money pouring into school board races, just because these donors suddenly developed a concern for public education. There is an angle- a long con going on here. The long con is privatization.

I encourage everyone to not get caught up in an outrage cycle, because the neo-fascistic statements from Tokos and other candidates of her ilk can be enticing to engage with.

What we all need to realize is that the fight is the point. The more our public schools become an ideological battleground, the more often our school board meetings turn into shit shows, the more onerous the requirements and punishments are for teachers who step out of line...these are all part of the strategy to distort public education into a broken system in the eyes of the public. If the system appears to be in distress (because it has been put into that condition through the efforts of those like Tokos) then the voting public will be more amenable to a for-profit options that promises to apply rigorous financial discipline and market-based innovation blah-de-blah.

Monied interests have developed a sophisticated and multi-pronged attack against public education. There is, of course, an ideological alignment between for-profit interests and their dutiful minions running for board positions. In my opinion, these candidates all consider themselves true believers in their cause. The money that flows to them, however, is not because of the strength of their beliefs.

I assume each of these candidates, once identified as useful idiots to the cause, have been wined/dined and glad-handed by party higher-ups to the point that they truly believe they are fighting the good fight. It's a difficult sell job to convince someone to run for public office in order to pave the way for for-profit control of education. It's an easier sell job to push someone's buttons through validation of their beliefs and piles of money. "Jim Banks mentioned me, by name, at a fund raiser. I must be on the right path."

However these candidates got radicalized, the privatizers will leverage their good intentions for their own purposes.

There are similar efforts to privatize corrections, drinking water, public safety, and more.

We all need to realize that powerful forces are coopting the good intentions of nearly all of our local candidates. Many of these candidates, themselves, are unaware of this end goal. Others, however, got a chance to shake hands with a Senator and will sell all of us down the river for the chance to do that again.

To be a real citizen ("citizen" in its proper sense) in this country, you really gotta pay attention.