Rick Campbell never volunteered for campaigns before. But something about Francis Howell School District’s board election this year inspired the 70-year-old Vietnam veteran to get involved.
“I feel like I’m fighting for the soul of America,” Campbell said.
Outside a polling station Tuesday afternoon, Campbell greeted voters while holding a sign for Carolie Owens and Steven Blair. He said he’d been there since 6 a.m. He also previously knocked on doors in an effort to prevent actions that have brought him dismay, not only for Francis Howell schools, but the Republican party at large.
The party is “not the same” as the party he grew up with, said Campbell, a long-time Republican.
Campbell pointed to recent actions by local and state Republicans, such as state Sen. Bill Eigel, a gubernatorial candidate who last fall said he’d burn books he found objectionable on the lawn of the governor’s mansion. Francis Howell school board’s move to revise Black studies courses also rubbed him the wrong way.
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Campbell felt the “hard-right” majority on the board and elsewhere wanted to “ban any book that does not go along with their ideology.”
“That’s not the America I want to live in,” Campbell said.
Nearly 19,000 people in Francis Howell’s boundaries felt the same way Tuesday. A progressive slate of candidates — Blair and Owens — trumped conservative ones vying for two open seats. The defeat marked a shift in the direction that Francis Howell’s school board elections have gone over the past two years.
“I believe love and hope won tonight, not hate and fear,” Owens said Tuesday.
Five of the board’s seven members have been elected by conservative political action committee Francis Howell Families in the years since the pandemic. Since then, the board has voted to rescind an anti-racism resolution, edited curricula for Black studies courses, and considered a bathroom policy that would bar transgender students from using restrooms that match their gender identities. The proposal was tabled about a month after it was introduced.
Supporters of Blair and Owens watched election results roll in with anticipation Tuesday night. Francis Howell Forward, a PAC formed last January to support progressive candidates, spent months of work and $16,000 this calendar year alone to support the two candidates.
Before Tuesday, Forward supporters were “cautiously optimistic” that voters would side against candidates supported by the conservative PAC. They believed the majority of Francis Howell’s community were, like them, sick of the “political rodeo” for which the board has become notorious.
“It feels like more people are paying attention to them because of this,” Francis Howell Forward Treasurer Amy Easterling said in an interview last week.
At the O’Fallon Elks Lodge, a room of supporters erupted when unofficial election results rolled in. Not only had Blair and Owens won, but so did the other eight candidates supported by St. Charles County Families for Public Schools PAC across St. Charles County.
“People are drawn towards hope, and leadership that gives mutual respect,” Blair said. “I bet on the goodness of the voters.”
Supporters of the conservative Francis Howell candidates, Adriana Kuhn and Sam Young, had angled for a fully conservative board that would continue the work of the past two years.
Daiana Schandler, a mother of six children in the district, said Tuesday afternoon she wanted candidates who would combat Critical Race Theory in schools. Teachers involved with writing curriculum have denied the presence of CRT, a once-obscure academic concept that loosely describes the pervasion of racism throughout society, but the board's majority has vowed to rid it from Francis Howell entirely.
Schandler, who arrived at a polling place with two of her daughters — both Francis Howell alums now in the Air Force reserves — said she admired Kuhn and Young’s platforms on “back-to-basics” academics.
“I just don’t want to feel like I have to police the teachers,” Schandler said. “I should be able to trust my kids to go to school.”