School Boards and School Reopening Plans

• In Event: Enduring Lessons in Education Politics and Policy from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID pandemic has had a profound impact on public education in the United States. School districts have struggled to determine the best approach to teach children. Some school districts decided to start the 2020-2021 fully in person while other school districts decided to go fully remote. Many other school districts tried hybrid approaches or focused on the most vulnerable students. There was significant variation across the country in the type of plan put in place, but the variation cannot be explained by the severity of the COVID crisis within a particular school district alone. In most school districts, school boards play a crucial role in deciding the reopening plans of school districts. What role does descriptive representation on school boards play in types of re-opening plans? COVID-19 has disproportionality affected minority communities, with Black and Hispanic individuals experiencing higher rates of complication and death than white individuals. Because of this, we hypothesize that school board members who do not identify as white are more likely to take a conservative approach to school re-opening plans, with fewer in-person options. Similarly, we expect school board members who have a background in a health-related field to take a more conservative approach. Because of the way that COVID was politicized, we expect school board members who identify as Republican to be in favor of in-person instruction.

In order to understand the role of descriptive representation on school boards, we have collected detailed data on school board members in 10 states. For each member, we identified race/ethnicity, gender, occupation, number of children, age, and partisanship. The way in which this was done depended on the state. Some states, such as Florida, we were able to use publicly available voter registration files to obtain this information (with the exception of children and occupation). In states that do not make this data publicly available, we rely on multiple sources to make inferences. The first source is a school board member's personal website or Facebook page. We look for ways in which they identify themselves, i.e. language that they identify as a certain race/ethnicity, pronouns that are used to discuss the candidate to determine gender. If we cannot find language that they themselves use, we identify race/ethnicity and gender based on photographs of the candidate and name of the candidate. Partisanship is difficult to determine because the vast majority of school board elections are non-partisan in nature, but if a candidate does positively discuss a partisan candidate of a higher officer, we code this.

We join this data to district level data about COVID-19 school reopening plans collected by MCH Strategic Data. Their publicly available data contains information on 91 percent of school districts reopening plans. In addition, information about mask requirements and sports participation is available. Using regression analysis with state fixed effects, we test whether school board members’ demographics predict the type of reopening plan at the start of the 2020-2021 school year. In addition to school board member demographics, we include COVID case counts per 100,000 in the county that the school district is located, size of the school district, proportion of students who are on free or reduced lunch, and demographics of students.

Authors

• Karin Kitchens, Virginia Tech

• Sabrina Kylie Harris, Virginia Tech

• Kathryn Elizabeth Miller, Virginia Tech