Big red flag

Does someone who’s running for a school district board need to be concerned about making decisions about abortion if they get elected to office?

I’ve watched a lot of school board meetings, and I can’t say that the issue’s ever come up. And if it did, that would be a big red flag! Everything the school district deals with comes well after a child is born.

So, why then is that alluded to in one of the questions on a little survey being circulated to Lucia Mar Unified and San Luis Coastal Unified school district candidates? That issue, plus whether school boards should hold prayer at the beginning of their meetings, the religious exemption for vaccines, and how candidates feel about gay marriage, made Equippers Church Central Coast’s questionnaire.

The response options were basically: agree, disagree, no answer. 

“While it is uncertain whether you will face any or all of these issues in office, it is possible that related issues will come up and your answers to these questions will permit voters to better understand your general views,” the questionnaire said.

Seems awfully political for a church, amirite?

It is certain that people who sit on school district boards will be forced to listen to the culture-war topics that Christian nationalists love to hang their hat on. Book banning. Transgender issues. Race. The marriage of church and state. You know, the things real patriots think about! 

All of those make an appearance on the Equippers questionnaire. 

What’s not on there? How the candidate will deal with budget cuts—which every school district is facing. Before- and after- school care. School transportation. College preparation. Curriculum issues. Technology like cellphones and AI. How their life experience qualifies them to run a giant school district responsible for educating children from kindergarten through 12th grade. How to reverse declining attendance.

Those issues—those very real and relevant issues—were missing. 

But, you know, that stuff doesn’t seem to matter anymore in the grand scheme of American politics. The things we talk about are not economic, market, and government policy issues. They are cultural and identity issues—values that arguably, constitutionally, the people who govern us should have a say in. It’s no wonder everything seems like complete chaos, so life or death. These things are tied to who we believe we are as people. 

Those culture-war talking points are so much easier to paint as black and white than the complex governing issues that require us to really put our thinking caps on. 

It’s not surprising that a church would want to implement its identity on a whole school district or two. Imagine? Like Pinky and The Brain, eventually, Equippers could take over the world! We could all be Christians. And isn’t that, really, what every good Christian wants?

And Equippers isn’t alone. A group calling itself “People for Better Schools” asked very similar questions of candidates. “Do you believe … that literary, artistic, political, or scientific value is enough to justify giving minors access to a book containing graphic sexual depictions or descriptions in an LMUSD school library?”

I’ll answer that one! Yes? Well, wait a minute, how minor are we talking here? Like kindergarten or old enough to have taken sexual education? Obviously, what students are exposed to should be age-appropriate.

Or is sex ed also off the table now? We wouldn’t want teens with raging hormones to understand how their bodies work or what their reproductive organs are capable of causing. 

The internet is a way better place to see all that stuff. That way, kids can hear from their secret little algorithmic echo chamber with people who rant ideological sweet nothings into a social media post or TikTok video. That’s way better that than having a discussion supervised by a professional educator. We wouldn’t want anything “literary, artistic, political, or scientific” wrapped in education, where the kids can ask questions and discuss things somewhat openly—hear from opposing points of view, talk about society and its approach to these things, weigh in with their own opinions and experiences, learn about things like consent and protection, and discuss current events that are relevant to the topic, like Cornell University’s sexual assault scandal.

School is supposed to be a space where we learn to do so much more than read books, write, do math, and learn about history. It’s where we learn to interact with people who are different, how to discuss societal issues that are uncomfortable, figure out our place in the world and where we want to go, what we want to achieve. That’s the whole point of education. The move to stifle that is maddening. 

Is this what school board candidates can expect moving forward?

In 2024, those kinds of questionnaires circulated to school board candidates and more across the county. 

“I felt like it was very one-sided, and it felt like a trap to me,” then Atascadero Unified School District candidate Veronica DeCoster said at the time. “One of the things that was most concerning about it is you had three options—either support, oppose, or no answer—and there was no space given for you to explain your answer, so it was very black and white.”

Black and white, indeed. No need for gray. That’s where consensus and compromise live. In this world, you’re either with us or against us. ∆

The Shredder is a Grey. Send conspiracy theories to shredder@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Oct 8-15, 2026.