Free Expression Friday: Christina Gagnier, Our Schools USA

ABFE spoke to Christina Gagnier, co-founder with Kristi Hirst of Our Schools USA, about the organization’s mission, methods, and growth. To learn more or get involved, check out their website.

Our Schools USA’s mission
[At] Our Schools USA, our core goal is to find parents, students and community members across the country, who may not yet even be engaged in the public education space, and get them engaged in accessing their local school boards. Our goal is to be the on-the-ground grassroots resource for those parents, for those students, for those community members who are seeing far right extremism invade their public schools and have no idea what to do about it. Really our goal as an organization is to be a nationwide leader empowering parents, community members and students to fight far-right extremism in our public schools.

It started with a school board…
I was a school board member. I was elected in 2018 and served for four years on my local school board. I live in the Chino Valley of California, which is southeast of Los Angeles. When I was elected to the board, parents and community members were voting on issues like graduation rates and quality education, the programs we were offering in public schools. And, you know, during the pandemic, there was a lot of anxiety and frustration. But I think for parents, particularly. You can't necessarily walk into your state legislature and start directly talking to your legislator, but you can go into a school board meeting, and you can air whatever those grievances may be, or whatever feedback you have directly to a school board. And so public school boards really quickly, unfortunately, became politicized. Our school board meetings just became these culture-war circuses. They were very nasty and vitriolic. It really trickled down to our school sites. [But] I just thought this was happening in Chino Valley.

…Then came the 2022 elections.
There were some intervening far-right, extremist forces that came in and sort of pushed the dial on the school board race, and our board had a far-right takeover. And in Southern California, and I know other people across the country can relate, we saw one school board after another be flipped by these far right extremists. I think a lot of parents [and community members] felt caught off guard in the 2022 election cycle because they were like, Who are these people? And how are they now running our public school boards?

Grass-roots, not top-down
Our parents and community members will sometimes drive what our issues are.  So I think a great example of this is: parents across the political spectrum are so tired of the culture wars in public schools. These feigned issues like critical race theory in public schools, book banning, and book banning-adjacent strategy — so passing policies that are basically censorship around books. You're [also] seeing this push from far-right extremists about gender ideology issues in schools, which again, are not actually issues on the ground in public schools. They have been created by the far right. So we aren’t an organization, necessarily, that is from the top-town, saying, “These are our three or four issues we’re going to focus on.” We are from a grassroots perspective hearing from parents and community members what they are seeing in their own schools, and then we are helping them respond.

Areas of Concern
But what I will say is, our big focus right now, due to what's happening on the ground, is this push from the far-right around censorship in public schools. What we really are hearing from parents, particularly, is they're just tired of the distractions. That they want their kids to get a good-quality public education. They don't want things in their public schools that single out and bully other kids, and they just want schools to get back to how schools were as much as possible pre-pandemic.

Our Schools USA is growing
We have chapters and partners in over 30 states. We also assist parents, though, and community members individually. Not everybody has the capacity to chapter, although we provide a ton of support if you do want to chapter with us. And so now we're working in 30 states. Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and then California. And I think that for us being provided, providing that chapter support has been really useful, because we're able to share intelligence across the country. The reality is that we're all seeing the same things, we're all seeing the same messaging, we're seeing the same things come before school boards, because it is a far-right, coordinated effort.

How to get involved
I really think involvement comes in little bits and pieces. We created the school board involvement pathway, where we just want someone to take an action step. So maybe you've never emailed your school board, you've never re-shared something about what's happening in your school board. Take that small step, it's not insignificant. Then we encourage people to attend a school board meeting, go see what it's like, go see the dynamics of your local board, try to learn about how your board operates, then maybe, if you have the courage — and I know public speaking is an obstacle for many people — speak up at a meeting. I think people sometimes have impostor syndrome, they think, “I can't be on my local school board.” You absolutely can be on your local school board. And we're here to help you with that.

And so if someone is reading this today, realize that we just started this 11 months ago, and we're already here. When we all work together, we can do amazing things. And Kristi [Hirst] and I, and the rest of our team, are just here to help everybody.