Nuttiness allergy sweeps school board races

We’ve been looking at local school board races, and something’s missing.

Where’s all the nuttiness?

Voters are going to decide dozens of races for seats on local school boards, but we haven’t seen any of the unhinged accusations and publicity stunts that marked school board politics in recent years.

No outrage over the Vail teachers who wore shirts with fake blood for Halloween, unlike last year, when pundits thought the shirts (which the teachers wore the year before, too) were mocking the Charlie Kirk assassination.

No campaign to freak out voters in the Catalina Foothills School District over which bathrooms trans students use. That one took up a lot of time at governing board meetings in 2023. Eventually, a parade of students took the mic at a public meeting to tell the adults to chill out.

No breathless headlines about drag shows at local high schools, like what happened at the Tucson Unified School District in 2022 and 2023.

We’re not sure why school politics is so blessedly boring now. Did the COVID-era hysteria die down? Did the most extreme parents pull their kids out of public schools when the voucher program expanded?

Or is it just that so many elections were uncontested and county officials canceled them?

This year, 11 races were canceled, including the race for two open seats at Sunnyside Unified School District. That’s more than twice as many as the five that were canceled in 2022. (Up in Maricopa County, they canceled elections in 31 school districts this year.) When a race is canceled for lack of candidates, the uncontested candidates automatically win, and the school board seats that nobody is running for get filled by appointment instead.

One of the few mentions we’ve seen of education-related nuttiness wasn’t local. It came from Kimberly Yee, the state treasurer who’s running to be state superintendent of public instruction. She brought up the Restroom Litterbox War of 2021-22 at a campaign event, where she claimed public school students were telling teachers they identified as animals and teachers were putting out litter boxes for them.

The state Legislature also has seen its share of education wackiness. In January, Republican Rep. Lisa Fink introduced HB2093, targeting social-emotional learning (SEL) in schools. She claimed using SEL supports in public schools was a veiled part of the “woke agenda” — an attempt to push critical race theory and teach students about gender identity. (Maricopa County School Superintendent Shelli Boggs bought and sold Fink’s narrative on a more local level.)

But we’re not finding much nuttiness in Southern Arizona’s school board races. Instead, they’re mostly ho-hum affairs focused on actual challenges faced by public school districts.

For the school board races that are still happening, most of the chatter on the campaign trail and in local political arenas deals with school closings, security on campus and, of course, funding.

Prop 320 is a huge deal for all Pima County’s public schools. The ballot measure, should it pass, would put strings on the finances of every public school in the county — for better or worse.

At TUSD, the largest district in Pima County, school closures are the biggest news. District officials are expecting to close as many as 10 schools, and they started announcing the first ones this week.

Incidentally, the political timing is impeccable, given that two incumbents up for reelection — Val Romero and Jennifer Eckstrom — have had major decision-making roles in those closures.

School closures also are top of mind at the Amphitheater Unified School District. Officials closed four schools this year, and the aftermath is crashing the ballot.

With voters’ blessing, Prop 426 would allow Amphitheater to sell those closed campuses and get them off the district’s ledger. Sounds good, but maybe not to those living in neighborhoods where schools were shuttered.

Elsewhere in Pima County, Vail Unified School District constituents are going back and forth — loudly — about a ballot measure of a different color: Prop 423. The district is asking voters to approve the continuation of the 12.5% budget override voters passed in 2021.

If you want to dig a little deeper, the Arizona Luminaria asked TUSD candidates about school closures and other issues, and the Arizona Daily Star spoke to Amphitheater candidates about a wide range of topics, including the use of AI in schools.

What are we missing? What do you think school board candidates should — or shouldn’t — be talking about? Drop us a line at [email protected].

The closures will continue until morale improves: Tucson Unified School District officials are proposing one school closure every day this week as they move ahead with a plan to shut down as many as 10 schools. On Wednesday, officials said Cragin Elementary School would likely be the third school to close, Sierra Blaser reports for the Arizona Daily Star. Students at the school on North Tucson Boulevard would go to Blenman Elementary next school year. District data shows Cragin was designed for 600 students and had just 211 in the 2024-25 school year. The daily announcements will continue until the district holds a press conference on October 27, per Mia Kortright at the Tucson Sentinel. The district governing board will vote on the proposed closures at a December 8 public meeting.

The saga continues: After three decades of lawsuits and opposition from environmental groups, construction on the long-delayed Copper World mine south of Tucson will start before the end of the year, the Star’s Tony Davis reports. The actual mining operation should ramp up in late 2029 and run for at least 15 years. Hudbay Minerals Inc. says the mine will create several thousand jobs and generate more than $1 billion in local and state tax revenue over the life of the mine. Environmental advocates remain concerned the mine will destroy wildlife habitat, deplete groundwater and pollute the air.

Wait, did you go Number 1 or Number 2?: Tucson officials are going to track how many unsheltered people use bathrooms in city parks, Yana Kunichoff reports for the Luminaria. A unit in the city’s parks department will also track how often they use ramadas and whether any of the unsheltered people pose a safety risk. It’s part of the Safe City Initiative, in which officials try to help people get into shelters while also enforcing the city’s camping ban.

A smile on every face: More than 60 kids in Mexico got corrective surgery for cleft palates through a St. Andrew’s Children’s Clinic program, the Nogales International’s Graham Krewinghaus reports. The way the annual program works is U.S.-based surgeons fly to Hermosillo, the capital of the Mexican state of Sonora, and perform back-to-back surgeries over several days, at no cost to the families. (Curt covered the clinic years ago. It’s really wonderful.)

Old West meets NIMBY: The old Bisbee High School is now an Airbnb, and that’s got neighbors in a tizzy, Matt Hickman reports for the Herald/Review. The neighbors say paid parking spaces for the short-term rentals have narrowed the surrounding streets. They took a petition with 148 signatures to the city council, and now the city is conducting a formal inspection of the parking spaces. Hickman notes the argument highlights the fact that the city needs more housing, but most neighborhoods were built before cars came on the scene.

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Democratic Pima County Supervisor Andrés Cano put out a surprise announcement earlier this week to say he is definitely not under criminal investigation.

The unusual announcement came hours after his Republican rival, Jeff Rhodes, claimed Cano was in hot water with some government agency. Rhodes apparently told one local journalist that Cano was being investigated in Pinal County.

So when we heard about Rhodes’ October surprise, we called the Pinal County Attorney. And the Pima County Attorney. Hell, we called the Attorney General’s Office.¹

And Rhodes’ claim is now 0-for-3 with the agencies we called.

The alleged offense, for what it’s worth, was that Cano bought about $700 in T-shirts using his District 5 office budget.

We spoke to Cano, who said the T-shirts used the term “Rooted in Resistance” and were an homage to his mentor, former Pima County Supervisor Richard Elías.

Elías was widely known for his sign-off “Resist. Much love.”

Apparently, resistance comes in cotton.