One fun thing about running The Pennant — we are only a few months old — is watching the mailbox fill up. We run about fifty-fifty fans to haters. Most of the haters hate us because we have opinions about data centers. Fair enough.
Sadly, today is not about data centers. Education was a stated focus when we launched, and we hired an education editor, a former teacher and reading specialist.
Last week, several of you forwarded the same letter that was sent out in an Ohio school district. Not from a principal. Not from a superintendent. Not from a PTA president. It was from a sitting school board member. We read it cold, and trust us, it was something.
Here is the question we cannot shake: Did the rest of you get this letter, too? Not literally the same one, but one like it, from some person of perceived authority in your district. We started to wonder if this is a trend playing out across Ohio.
If it is, we all lose in the classroom. We will, however, be exquisitely prepared to discuss the relevance of Indigenous Peoples' Day. So, there is that.
Here are some of the highlights.
One: The Mystery Victims. The letter overflows with people who have been hurt. "A recent graduate." "Alumni from 50 years ago." "IEP, Black, LGBTQIA+, Asian, Muslim, and Jewish families." Apparently, there is a lot of culturally offensive behavior whizzing through this community. Names? Zero. Examples? None. It is a true crime podcast that forgets to mention the crime.
Two: The Calendar. A big chunk celebrates keeping tests and field trips off cultural and religious holidays. Great. We are pro-kid and pro-not-scheduling-the-AP-on-Yom-Kippur.
We did wonder whether the words Christmas and Easter ever echo through the halls of this district, or whether those are simply the two holidays that, by happy coincidence, never need protecting.
And then, the showstopper: The Gravesites. The letter informs us that the community "literally paved over the gravesites of Black families." Serious charge. We also discovered it happened over a hundred years ago. We are not mocking the fact that a cemetery was paved over — that is awful. We are mocking the rhetorical move of opening a 2026 letter with a crime whose perpetrators have been dead since the Coolidge administration.
Half of downtown Atlanta sits on something. The Vegas Strip is built on a flood basin and some regret. If "someone paved over something a hundred years ago" is your case for present-day overhaul, you are going to have a very busy century.
A school board member has a job. Test scores. Budgets. Teacher retention. Bus routes. Whether the chemistry lab still has working fume hoods. The job is not, we checked, launching a movement. That is activist work. Activists are allowed to exist. They just usually don't also vote on the school budget.
We took a guess at what sits on the nightstand. White Fragility, almost certainly. Das Kapital for special occasions. And of course, a self-help book: The Revolutionary's Guide to Joy.
The sad part, and we mean this, is that the letter is clear about what its author wants. A culture change. The conversation went from test scores and budgets to vocabulary and framing. Coherent goal. Not the job. We do not blame the author. Nobody just wakes up one morning as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, overseeing school lunches and the prom budget. They showed up that way.
The blame, if any, rests on the community members who spend more time on the second Tuesday of each month at a wine pairing class than occasionally swinging by a school board meeting -- which, in this district, appears to run somewhere between a Saul Alinsky lecture and a Dave Chappelle skit, with a guest spot reserved for every comedian in America except Shane Gillis.
The real victims here aren't the kids. They are the parents who work their butts off to afford to live in the district. We're talking about the parents who do not have time to monitor the local cultural insurgent who sits on the school board, lives near the park, and is angry that pickleball isn’t more inclusive.
Elections have consequences. Especially school board elections. Especially when people fail to get to know who's running. This is what you get: a year-end letter that is more a call to arms than "have a nice summer, everybody."
So we are asking: Did you get a letter like this? Forward it. If it is one district, that is one conversation. If it is happening across Ohio, that is a different conversation.
Questions, comments, and letters to the editor are welcome. Email [email protected].