School Board Résumé Includes Experience, References And A Deleted Photo Album

Elizabeth Schultz is running for a school-board seat in Chesterfield County, Virginia, with eight years on the Fairfax County board and state and federal education experience behind her. Virginia Mercury reports that her candidacy also brings renewed scrutiny of deleted 2017 social-media posts involving Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.

One featured a photograph with McInnes at an event celebrating Trump’s first inauguration. Another mentioned him and included a Proud Boys hashtag. Asked about the posts, Schultz expressed uncertainty about whether she should have posted them and said the photograph preceded other things surfacing.

A photograph is not proof of membership in a group. It is not evidence that Schultz participated in the violence later committed by Proud Boys members. Those would be different claims, and this reporting does not establish them.

It is, however, a reasonable thing to ask a candidate about. Deleting the account does not convert the public record into a Victorian ghost that respectable people must pretend they cannot see.

Experience matters on a school board. Budgets are complicated. Building maintenance is complicated. A person who knows how the system works can be useful.

But experienced is not a synonym for please stop looking at the experience.

If the résumé is evidence of judgment, the public decisions are evidence of judgment too. You cannot hand voters a carefully laminated career history and then treat every other surviving document as a rude interruption of the lamination.

Schultz says her priorities include parental rights, building maintenance and privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms. Her opponent, Christina Brady, emphasizes infrastructure, classroom technology and support for students. Brady points to mold, deteriorating buildings and trailers used as classrooms.

Actual schools. With actual things that need doing. An almost indecent amount of material reality has entered the school-board race.

And yet the American political machine keeps finding ways to make the discussion arrive wearing combat boots and demanding to know which bathroom the culture war is allowed to use.

Could we fix the fucking building? Is that still an available political identity? I would like to register as the ceiling should remain above the children. Put me down for the radical doctrine that a classroom ought to be a room.

Schultz also lists maintenance. Good. Voters can ask both candidates what they would fund, how they would pay for it and what they would do first. This does not require pretending their records and broader priorities are identical. It requires treating the school board as something other than a regional franchise of national grievance television.

A sales-tax referendum could provide additional money for school construction and maintenance if voters approve it. The board would help decide where that money goes. These are consequential choices, even when they do not come with an exciting social-media feud.

I’m worn out by the requirement that every local service arrive with a bonus fight about civilization. I want competent oversight, usable buildings and candidates who can answer for what they chose to put into public view.

The school needs a maintenance plan. The candidate’s deleted account is not one.