Guilford Community Advocates Discuss Recent Electoral Campaign to Defend Public Schools from Extremist Attacks

The ARTLC is pleased to share this powerful discussion recorded recently featuring a group of advocates, students, parents, and community leaders from Guilford, Connecticut, about how their community responded to a sustained attack on the town's school system and Board of Education.

The last two years have been extraordinarily difficult for public educators. The pandemic and all the interruptions and debates it introduced - over masking in the classroom, remote learning, and more - have posed challenges for schools across Connecticut and the US. New studies suggest up to one third public school teachers are contemplating leaving the profession at this very moment.

These conditions were already taking a significant toll when, in the fall of 2020, a new wave of attacks on public educators began unfolding nationwide. Some took the form of bans on books addressing issues of race, gender, power and identity. Others took the form of state laws threatening to punish teachers and schools teaching related content. Teachers have been fired, school board members antagonized, public meetings disrupted. We cannot underestimate the gravity of these threats to public schools, which at their best are cornerstones of democracy.

Connecticut has witnessed several such attack campaigns. One of the most high-profile and enduring examples took place in 2021 in Guilford, a shoreline town of 20,000 people that has long taken pride in its highly-regarded school system. Like every region in the state, Guilford has been shaped by histories of race and class segregation. The 2020 census reported the town’s population to be about 88% white, though it also includes a growing presence of people of color, especially among the school-age population.

In the recorded conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, we learn about how Guilford parents, organizers, and community members mobilized a broad coalition of voters to defeat a slate of G.O.P. candidates that sought to take over the school board and that explicitly framed their campaign as an effort to curtail Critical Race Theory and anti-racist education. 

The campaign to take over the school board drew national media attention, but its origins extend well beyond one election to broader issues of segregation, whiteness, and civic identity in this community. 

The recorded conversation unfolds in two parts. In the first part, we learn about some of the conditions in Guilford that led up to this campaign, and the work that was already underway around issues of diversity and equity within Guilford schools.

In the second part, we hear about the extraordinary efforts that took place across a period of several months in the fall of 2021 to educate residents about the dangerous potential impacts posed by this campaign and its threat to public education. Participants describe the organizing they did to bring Guilford residents together in support of a public education system, capable of teaching with integrity, accuracy, and inclusivity, for all students.

Their deep and abiding faith in the capacities of educators, students, and others, to grapple with difficult histories, in ways that are complex and accurate, helped bring about new possibilities for this town and its schools. In so doing, their efforts and example hold lessons for everyone.