When Conservatives Win School Boards

By Daniel Buck

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

Just south of Glen Rock, Pa., stands the community’s original, one-room schoolhouse, built in 1896. Across the street from the red-brick building, cows lounge about a farm, and cherry trees are flowering around a small pond. Towering on a hill above it is the modern campus of Southern York County School District, which boasts almost 3,000 students, three buildings, and sprawling athletic fields.

 

In the center of the complex, the American, state, and school flags all fly in front of the newly renovated and expanded high school building. A seemingly inconsequential detail, the mascot emblazoned on the school flag — an Indian head — initiated a community uproar and a subsequent school board turnover a few years earlier.

 

In 2021, the school board voted to remove the mascot for the school team, the “Warriors.” At a local brewery, board president Nathan Henkel explained to me that the retirement of the mascot reflected the district administration’s and prior board members’ broader “wokeness and a hatred of our history.”

 

All four conservative board members with whom I spoke agreed that the mascot’s removal was the topic that surfaced most when they were door-knocking for their respective school board campaigns. “People aren’t engaged unless they’re upset,” Henkel said, and the board seats had been uncontested for years. Electorally speaking, it was a tactical blunder by the incumbents to axe the Native American mascot. The AP covered the controversy. The small town became a national story. And the progressive board members, who would have otherwise likely cruised to reelection, drew opponents. The conservative challengers bought a billboard, plastering it with an image of the Indian head with their names inscribed next to it.

 

Although the mascot controversy played a significant role in galvanizing the community to elect the conservatives to the board, other concerns also motivated the candidates to run.

 

“I didn’t get involved because of the logo,” Henkel said. Rather, he and his wife, Jen (also a board member), felt that the school was lying to them. Their daughter received high marks, but they started to notice that her reading and writing skills were weak. They scheduled a classroom visit, witnessed chaos and a lack of discipline, and have homeschooled their children since.

 

The list of grievances continued: Covid closures “deprived kids of in-person learning,” which was “terrible for most kids, especially those learning to speak and read.” Henkel’s son got lectures about his privilege in third grade, and a coach asked his daughter to conceal a peer’s gender transition from the student’s parents. “My daughter had to participate in deception,” he lamented.

 

Board treasurer Jason Dekker, elected in a later cycle, was apprehensive about taxes and spending. Enrollment was dropping, but the district continued to hire more employees and fill the ledger with expensive facilities projects. “Our opposition believes that their constituency is teachers and administrators,” he observed. He was also worried, though, about the 101-year-old woman in the district whose fixed income couldn’t keep up with ever-rising tax burdens.

 

Current vice president Joe Wilson was inspired to run after bringing concerns about his son’s harassment to the board. The superintendent met with him and asked, “What can we do to make you happy?” The conversation left him with the sense that the district wanted only to pacify his frustration, not actually solve the problem at hand.

 

While the specifics that spurred their respective decisions to run differed, each recently elected board member voiced concerns over mismanagement and a desire to steward their community in a better direction.

 

In the years following Covid, school board races became unusually controversial. Formerly low-turnout affairs characterized by easy incumbent victories and apathetic campaigns, these local elections suddenly gained public scrutiny as anger over school closures and ideological content in classrooms created an upswell of parental dissatisfaction and, eventually, gave rise to insurgent school board candidates. Mainstream media outlets lamented the success of these “fearmongering” right-wingers, and national unions decried the “manufactured outrage” stemming from “small clusters of hate.”

 

Wilson and his board are no strangers to such criticism. He listed the epithets that have been leveled against him: racist, far-right, extremist, and even murderer. But the targets of left-wing activists expanded beyond their slate. Jen Henkel told me over the phone that her supporters found their businesses awash in negative reviews and nasty social media posts written about anyone affiliated with her campaign.

 

“The papers hate us,” Dekker said. Even so, every year that conservatives run, their margin of victory increases in Southern York County. “It’s the same 200 people” that lob the insults, but “we have massive support in our community.”

 

What the local papers call extreme, others might be tempted to label as basic good governance. Such is the story I found with every conservative school board member I interviewed in a variety of locations.

 

In Temecula Valley, Calif., for example, Joseph Komrosky, a professor of philosophy at the local community college, said that he had “no political aspirations” but was worried about the political messaging creeping into both his local school and the university where he worked. The pressure campaign against him has been ongoing and ruthless.

 

“It’s a spiritual battle,” he told me over Zoom, recounting the long list of personal and professional attacks he’s weathered. Someone anonymously contacted Claremont Graduate University, where Komrosky received his Ph.D., accusing him of plagiarizing his dissertation; the university reviewed his work and cleared him. A previous president of his university’s academic senate sent around emails critical of Komrosky, urging the board of trustees to have him removed from his position.

 

The pressure reached a pinnacle after California Governor Gavin Newsom criticized him by name on X after Komrosky lambasted the district’s use of a biography of Harvey Milk, whom he described as a pedophile. In response, Komrosky said he received death threats. Critics harassed his dean and even Komrosky’s wife. They called her a “deranged alcoholic,” despite 20 years of sobriety, Komrosky explained with exasperation. “They lie so much,” he said.

 

Opponents gathered enough signatures to trigger a recall election in 2024, and Komrosky lost. Undeterred, he ran again that fall and won reelection. He is now the Temecula Valley Unified School District School Board president for the third time.

 

Henkel and his board tackled plenty of cultural issues — protecting girls’ sports, opting out of the state’s “Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education” teacher-training program, and, of course, reinstating the mascot — but most of their reform has focused on academics and more mundane issues.

 

On the transparency front, the board now posts policies under consideration weeks before voting on them to allow time for public review and comment. It no longer deletes recordings of official meetings after a month, it publishes curriculum maps online, and it makes a greater habit of responding to emails from community members. Regarding safety, the board hired additional armed security guards for district schools and requested and received quarterly discipline reports. For the first time, three board members attended a bus depot meeting to listen to and address the problem of spiraling bad behavior by students on school buses. Responding to parental concerns, board members curtailed the use of Chromebooks in elementary school, have avoided tax increases since they earned a majority, and have worked with the curriculum coordinator to prioritize whole works of classic literature instead of excerpts and short stories.

 

In Orange County, Calif., Mari Barke and Tim Shaw won seats on the county board in 2018 and 2020, respectively. After Newsom ordered the closure of all schools in areas of high Covid risk in July 2020, Barke and her board voted 4–0 to sue Newsom in an effort to reopen schools; the closures ended before the lawsuit came to trial. Since then, they’ve focused on approving new charter schools in the area and hosting informational sessions on charter schooling, critical race theory in the curriculum, and school safety. For their efforts, critics called them “science deniers,” accused them of being “bent on killing children,” and smeared them as “white Christian nationalists.” Barke is Jewish.

 

In Kettle Moraine, Wis., the school district faced a lawsuit for a policy that allows a student’s gender transition even over a parent’s objections. The district lost the case and subsequently implemented a policy of following parental preferences on children’s pronouns. With the controversy over, board vice president Amy Richards, elected after the lawsuit, said that their meetings now focus on more banal questions of budgets, academic scores, and curricular review. Before showing me the school, the superintendent boasted that teacher retention had never been so high.

 

A recurring theme across my conversations was a concern about improper relationships between boards and district leadership. Richards saw her predecessors acting as glorified rubber stamps for school officials, whereas she prefers a “trust but verify” approach. Sometimes, she added, it’s as simple as asking an administrator a question.

 

Just a few miles south, in Hartland, Wis., board president Chris Adsit and I chatted at length in the parking lot. After taking me on a school tour and showing off newly renovated science classrooms and café spaces in the library, he was eager to discuss his prosaic accomplishments.

 

Adsit related a story from his first board meeting. Still unsure of how exactly it all worked, he raised his hand to ask a question just as the board was set to approve the purchase of a new water heater. His question was simple: Had anyone gotten competing quotes? Collecting bids wasn’t a district norm, but doing so on that occasion saved them several thousand dollars. After that, he and the superintendent spent the first year reviewing every school policy — even bringing stacks of papers for review on vacation — to align them with the school vision and get rid of often-conflicting directives.

 

Back in Southern York County, the billboard that the conservative slate bought in the last election is back to advertising a local crab shack. They don’t plan to buy any billboards next cycle, but they all plan to run again. And about their decision to run the first time, they have no regrets.

 

“Small people can have a big impact,” Jen Henkel told me. A freshman congressman can’t really accomplish much, but a five-person majority on a school board determines everything from local tax burdens to the very content of the next generation’s education — what books students read, what perspective on American history they hold, and who their heroes will turn out to be.

 

As we polished off our beers, Dekker explained that from his perspective, if you want to get involved in politics, “there’s no better place” than a school board.