She Campaigned for a #Texas School Board Seat as a #GOP Hard-Liner. Now She’s Rejecting Her Party’s Extremism.
Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member, has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on after finding no evidence that #students were being indoctrinated by the district’s curriculum. Her defiance has brought her backlash.
#Virginia school board restores #Confederate leaders’ names to 2 #schools
The change comes 4 years after the schools had removed the names during the national racial reckoning sparked by #GeorgeFloyd’s killing.
The #Brevard#schoolBoard is choosing to follow badly worded laws, written vaguely on purpose, massive in scope, to follow a #ChristianNationalist agenda to #indoctrinate#students, while ignoring that these same laws would ban virtually every book from our classrooms and libraries.
The #PatriotAcademy classes urged participants to run for local office, especially #SchoolBoard, & to fight back against the “secular leftists” & “Marxists” in their country & communities. In Nov, Wenhold won a seat on the Palisades School Board. The position was unpaid, but it gave her a little bit of power. She wanted to use it to make sure students…were taught #America’s “true history” as a #Christian nation, as she had come to understand it.
Well I didn't win my election, but my interest in #SchoolBoard policy is not going away.
Tonight, immediately after the new board members are sworn in, I will be presenting a public comment to #BVSD about their use of #GoGuardian, a technology that presents itself as a monitoring tool to ensure that kids visit age- and developmentally-appropriate websites on their school-issued laptops.
The report highlights key problems about the software misidentifying benign websites with run-of-the-mill, unharmful content as potentially harmful or containing explicit content. Poetry by the Bronte sisters, the text of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and even the text of Romeo and Juliet set off red flags. So did words in the Texas driver’s handbook, and health information websites. These false positive warnings are touted by GoGuardian not as a bug but as a desirable feature of the product.
My concern here is that routine use of GoGuardian sends two very damaging messages to students: It normalizes routine surveillance, and it tells students that they cannot be trusted to use their computers responsibly.
I will be giving public comment to the new board asking them to direct school administrators to investigate the district's contract with GoGuardian, and to seek out a less invasive, more accurate method of protecting children who use computers.
Looking through the school board candidate list. A lot of single no-contest candidates. There will likely only be a few elections running on February 13, 2024.
You can review the list here: https://filings.okelections.us/
On Tuesday evening, the #LouisRielSchool Division's board of trustees voted unanimously to take #DisciplinaryAction against Ward 1 trustee Francine Champagne, after an online comment decried as #racist was brought to the board's attention.
Tomorrow is election day in Colorado, and 24 hours from now, the race will be over.
I was out canvassing at the University of Colorado campus in #Boulder today (and I will be back out there tomorrow). I met a lot of students who were busy and hadn't yet voted, and were grateful for the information. I also met a bunch who I would characterize as actively, maybe in some cases gleefully disinterested in participating in democracy. Not only could they just not be bothered, they seemed pleased to tell me they weren't voting. I cannot fathom that level of nihilism and I could not reach them. That's a failure mode we need to address.
I also met the folks who have been campaigning for city council, and for ballot measures I deeply oppose. We were all not just civil, but slightly joyous about this being the end of a grueling four months of forums and questionnaires and ordering signs and designing literature and doorknocking and lit-dropping and canvassing. It's a lot! People were really nice face to face. Even if I disagree with someone's policies, we can treat our fellow humans with dignity and joke about the things we have in common.
I did meet a lot of people who were extremely positive about my campaign and a few who were so vitriolically negative that the hostility took me aback when I encountered it. The latter has been, fortunately, very rare.
Some of the volunteers for a campaign I am not allied with were very pleasant when I introduced myself, but I caught two of them mocking the shirt I was wearing and its meaning as they walked away. "Hackers! That's just what we need on the school board," one sarcastically joked to the other.
Not wanting to come across like a gigantic asshole, I thought to myself (rather than shouting it out loud), thanks for the endorsement!
Yeah, I worked on a project that contributed to law enforcement agencies around the world shutting down one of the most pernicious and harmful botnets. Sure, I helped Microsoft find and begin to repair a problem that affected literally every Windows computer and completely broke their trust model.
Goodness knows, perish the thought of what might happen if someone with that level of community engagement and a desire to help others might get elected to public office!
It has been a long, difficult, and emotional rollercoaster of an election campaign. Win or lose I will stand proud of the work I did to highlight the best of what my community of hackers and makers has to offer the world.
Hackers can and do make the world a better place every single day, in small ways and big ways, for individuals and whole populations.
Even if a couple of arrogant old rich white dudes don't appreciate it, hackers are saving their butts, too.
So yeah, hackers: Just what we need on the school board.
Hackers: Just what we need on city council. Hackers, just what we need in the mayor's office. Hackers, just what we need in the state house and senate. Hackers, just what we need in the federal house and senate, and in seats of power up and down the chain of command until we even have a hacker president. Hail to the hacker chief!
This is just the beginning. We are going to #ElectMoreHackers and pentest and red team and blue team and patch the shit out of our politics and our country until we eliminate bugs large and small from the system. We're going to do it our way, not by coloring inside the lines but by looking for the best place to jump over them to get things done. And I hope people can suppress their nihilism and disdain for politics long enough to see that we can make this a success, and change the world for the better.
Ballots are being sent to voters this week. We're in the home stretch. With your help spreading the word and your support, we're going to #ElectMoreHackers !
Hey, hacker fam. Quick update on what's going to be a big week.
Tomorrow I'm flying out to Bellevue and Wednesday I'm speaking at #BlueHat about the work @SophosXOps has done helping #Microsoft protect all Windows users from a very devious attack.
After I return, I'm in full-swing campaign mode running for the #BVSD#SchoolBoard. I've been doing door-knocking and meet-and-greet for days. Yesterday I spent hours giving out water to marathon runners here in #boulder
Next week though - I'll be participating in a candidate forum hosted by BVSD and you will be able to watch it live from anywhere because it will be broadcast by #livestream on BVSD's Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@bouldervalleyschooldistric5781/streams). October 18 from 6pm-7:30pm MDT (UTC -6)
You can read up now on the forum and ** you can even submit questions.**
@matthew_d_green Running into this locally in my #SchoolBoard campaign here in #Boulder. There is an organization made up of the kinds of angry people who constantly start arguments on NextDoor about homelessness. They have organized a ballot measure called "Safe Zones 4 Kids" which literally has nothing to do with kids, but is about forcing the city to criminalize the unhoused population. And now, the proponents of this ballot measure seem to have a ton of money, even though the measure does nothing for child safety, but is literally just about forcing the homeless to constantly move around.
Tonight at 5pm is the first of four candidate forums I will participate in as a #BVSD#SchoolBoard candidate. It isn't a debate, but more like a moderated panel discussion where all the candidates will be asked the same questions, some of which have been provided to us in advance.
The forum will be hosted at the Avalon Ballroom in #Boulder. It is open to the public. I've heard that about 100 people have already confirmed they will attend.
I've been preparing for this event for the past week. It feels like my first real test as a candidate, but I'm ready. Let's go #ElectMoreHackers!
Liberal and moderate candidates take control of school boards in contentious races across US (apnews.com)
Liberal and moderate candidates have won seats in high-profile polarizing elections against social conservatives across the U.S.