In November, Hanover County voters will answer a question that sounds simple but could be the precursor of a historic shift in the way the county oversees the education of its 17,000 public school students: “Shall the method of selecting the school board be changed from appointment by the governing body to direct election by the voters?”

Preceding this referendum is a chorus of voices — from parents, educators, students and community members — calling for significant change in how members are added to the school board. What began years ago as low-toned complaints about the board’s lack of transparency and accountability to residents are now a cacophony of legitimate concerns that cannot be easily quieted. As a graduate of Hanover schools, I say emphatically: Bring the noise.

Hanover County is one of just 12 localities statewide where school board members are appointed by a local governing body instead of elected by citizens. Before 1992, all school boards in the state were appointed, according to Gina Patterson, executive director of the Virginia School Boards Association, which serves 131 school boards across the state.

“We were the last state that allowed elected school boards in the country,” Patterson told me by phone. “The beauty of Virginia is that we allow both elected and appointed school boards; we allow whatever is the best fit for the community.” 

In Hanover’s case, there has been continued consternation about what the best fit for the community really is, centering on whether the appointed school board is truly representative of Hanover students, what they need academically and what they and their parents want from their educational experience. 

Even a cursory glance at the school board’s actions over the past few years lends legitimacy to students’ and parents’ concerns that the majority-white, majority-male school board — appointed by the all-white, majority-male Hanover County Board of Supervisors — doesn’t reflect or respect beliefs, lifestyles or teachings outside a conservative, white worldview.

Hanover swiftly rushed to the defense of guns; not so quickly for residents shaken by a racist rally

There was the school names controversy, wherein the school board refused to change the names of Hanover schools bearing Confederate veterans’ monikers. The board staunchly refused to remove the racist school names for years, despite protests from hundreds of citizens who rightly viewed them as hurtful reminders of the Civil War and the white men who fought in it for the right to continue owning Black people as property. 

After the issue first surfaced for a vote in 2018, the Board of Supervisors booted off Marla Coleman, who was one of just two school board members to vote to change the names. (The other member, Ola J. Hawkins, was a Black woman; removing her would have been too obviously racist, they probably concluded.) Coleman has since publicly shed light on what she calls the “political” appointment process, which until now has been shrouded in secrecy by the Board of Supervisors. 

Amanda Kronenberg, a parent of a 9-year-old Hanover Public Schools student and a 15-year-old who attends Maggie Walker Governor’s School, said she first learned Hanover had an appointed school board at the time of the name change controversy. 

“I started to look into who was on the school board, what they do, who is my rep, and how they voted on this issue,” she said. “The person who was my rep at the time voted against changing the names; I was pro-changing the names. I didn’t like that they didn’t support the students that way, so I wondered when they were up for election and ‘never’ was the answer.”

After years of negative press about the school names, the board finally, if reluctantly, voted to change the names in 2020. By then, they’d lost the trust of many members of Hanover’s Black community and their allies, and that well-earned distrust persists today.

In 2021, the school board flagrantly rejected standards mandated by the state Board of Education to protect transgender and nonbinary students, leading to student protests and a lawsuit levied by five trans students and their families. The school board then hired notorious conservative Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom to craft its own policy for trans children, which requires these students to submit written requests to use bathrooms that match their gender identity and gives the school board the sole authority to accept or reject the requests. Kronenberg was also troubled by this kerfuffle, saying it “signaled that the school board or system didn’t care about trans students, which appalled me.”

The board’s policy also suggests the requests include students’ personal information, including disciplinary and criminal records, and a doctor’s or therapist’s note “verifying that the student has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and/or that the student consistently and authentically expresses a binary gender identity.” This needlessly burdensome process seems unfair and discriminatory toward students whose gender identity should have no bearing on the quality of education they get in Hanover and whether they can just use the bathroom where they feel most comfortable.

Last year, the school board’s self-directed equity audit revealed that “Black students in Hanover schools are overrepresented in school discipline and underrepresented in advanced courses, such as AP and IB programs, in the county for the second straight year,” according to WRIC. 

Despite that, a member of the school system’s Community Equity Advisory Board, formed partly in response to the racial equity concerns that bubbled up during the school names controversy, said there had been “no movement” from the school board on the advisory group’s top recommendations — that the school system submit to a third-party equity audit and that it hire a director of equity and inclusion initiatives — for at least three or four years. All of this sent the message that the school board doesn’t take its commitment to equity seriously. 

Finally, this year, the board has ruffled feathers by jumping on the book banning bandwagon. This June, it created and voted in a policy that outlines how public requests for books to be banned from school libraries will be processed and then banned 19 books, including “The Bluest Eye” by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

School districts struggle to implement new laws on sexually explicit books

I first read that book as a Hanover County high school student, devouring sentences between classes; it solidified my lifelong love of literature and gave me an example of fiction writing on a genius scale authored by a Black woman whom I adored and emulated as a budding creative writer. Sadly, other young Black aspiring writers in Hanover schools won’t get the same mind-opening opportunity — an essential point of public education — that I did. 

Throughout these firestorms, the common denominator is Hanover’s School Board, whose hardline stances against progressive actions to make the school system more welcoming, equitable and inclusive of all students clashes with large swaths of the constituents it serves. 

To me, appointed school boards like Hanover’s hearken back to the Jim Crow era, when all-white appointed school boards had sole authority over education in their localities, often to the detriment of Black students. 

A classic example of this dynamic was found in Prince Edward County, where in 1951, students of the county’s only high school for Black students, Robert Russa Moton High, and the NAACP sued the school board for refusing to equally fund Moton or give it basic resources for student success — like books in good condition or classrooms where students would be warm and dry. A Black teenager, Barbara Johns, led a protest of 450 students before the lawsuit; it set the stage for the landmark case that would end school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education. 

This model of appointed school board leadership belongs in the history books, not in Virginia’s modern school systems. But in Hanover, the growing number of folks who didn’t agree with the school board’s many missteps has had no recourse.

Until now.

Beginning last year, a nonpartisan, citizen-led group, Hanover Citizens for an Elected School Board, collected more than 10,000 signatures in support of placing the question of whether the county’s school board should be appointed or elected on the November ballot. In July, their work earned the court-ordered right to a referendum.

The group makes some very sane points. They highlight the fact that while school boards in Virginia have no taxation authority, they do determine how federal, state and local funds, some of which come from taxpayers, should be spent. Even if Hanover residents don’t have a child in school or any connection to the school board, their taxes still fund it. Should taxpayers continue to have no say in the school board’s decisions? 

A counter-effort to keep the school board appointed has geared up, fueled by a $15,000 contribution from the Hanover County Republican Committee. They’re fighting under the banner of voting no to “political school boards.”

But Hanover’s school board has always been political, by virtue of its members’ appointment by the Board of Supervisors, whose politics could be seen as clear as day even by Stevie Wonder.

This is Hanover (but it doesn’t have to be)

Another anti-elected school board group, Together Hanover, shared this frankly frightening presentation in an April Board of Supervisors meeting. If you don’t care to watch the full sermon, they allege that those seeking an elected school board have an “unstated goal through teaching CRT to create a race war and gender war” and are vying “to not only keep parents out of the classroom but to keep parents from knowing what’s going on in the classroom in the first place.” The rhetoric is closely aligned with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s dubious “Parents Matter” movement, which stokes unfounded fears about Virginia schoolchildren being force-fed critical race theory and equity education.

If parents matter so much, why shouldn’t they have a say in deciding who will represent them and their children on the school board? 

On Election Day in Hanover, there will be much to lose but also much to gain. Whether the referendum on electing the school board passes or fails, the fact that it’s on the ballot means Hanover citizens finally have a vote in the county school system’s progression or regression — and a chance to participate in the democratic processes that uphold this nation.