Recall election in North Idaho school district is all about far-right indoctrination | Opinion

The patrons of West Bonner County School District find themselves on the front lines of the far-right’s battle to seize control of Idaho’s education system.

The first domino to fall was the scandal-beset North Idaho College. Their local schools have been the second.

Next month, those parents will have a chance to vote on whether to oust Chair Keith Rutledge and Vice-Chair Susan Brown, who have led the effort to take over the public school system. The election will take place Aug. 29, as Idaho Education News reported.

Rutledge and Brown led the charge to name Branden Durst, an unqualified serial political entrepreneur and self-described “Christian populist” who had previously been subject to a domestic violence protection order, the district’s superintendent. In doing so they bypassed Susie Luckey, an experienced teacher and principal who was named Idaho’s Distinguished Principal of the year in 2018, as the Bonner County Daily Bee reported.

At a recent political rally held in a church, Rutledge also revealed rather frankly that he has no skin at all in the game.

“My kids never went to this school (district). I work in Sandpoint. I didn’t know anyone in the district. I knew nobody,” Rutledge said at the rally, providing evidence that his seven-vote victory required divine intervention.

So his interest is not personal or pedagogical. It is ideological.

And that ideology will not stay in the school board meeting room if the far-right retains its majority, as Rutledge’s later comments at the rally show.

“We are the first public school in the United States to get Hillsdale,” he said, his voice quavering with the kind of visceral emotion that one does not expect when discussing the selection of a curriculum.

The curriculum Rutledge was referring to was developed by Hillsdale College, a private religious school in Michigan that has long been an intellectual center for the religious right and has increasingly become increasingly important for the Christian nationalist movement.

There is a reason public schools don’t generally use the curriculum produced by Hillsdale. It reflects a very particular, and politically inflected, view of the world.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to stage a political takeover of the New College, Hillsdale was his model.

“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” his chief of staff declared, a columnist in Religion News Service noted.

When President Donald Trump formed his 1776 Commission to develop a “patriotic education” program, he named Hillsdale’s president and one of its vice presidents to head up the committee.

When South Dakota decided to rewrite its social studies standards to reflect conservative political standards, it brought in a Hillsdale emeritus professor to help write new standards.

“They were criticized by the American Historical Association as ‘excessively long and detailed in their prescriptions, yet totally inadequate in their vision of what history learning entails,’ omitting ‘any and all forms of historical inquiry in favor of rote memorization,’” The New Yorker noted.

So parents really do now face the problem that the far-right has been falsely invoking for years: The schools in West Bonner County School District could become centers for indoctrination rather than education. The momentum in that direction is already considerable, and this election might be the last chance to stop it.

But the biggest difficulty could be turnout. Idaho law requires not just that there are more votes to recall than not, but that there are more votes than the number the candidate won in their original election. That means unless there are at least 177 votes against Brown and at least 245 against Rutledge, they retain their seats and the majority required to continue steering the district.

The district’s children will pay the price if that happens.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.