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“But I don’t have the experience or credentials to …”
Neither do the people that are there!!!
[Image description: Tweet from Jennifer Iacopelli (@jennifercarolyn), time stamped 12:58 AM Jan 30, 2022: “School libraries don’t need you to donate copies of Maus and other banned books. They need you to step up and run for the school board so the books don’t get banned in the first place.” Description ends]
You literally could not do worse than the people who already have these positions.
The biggest qualification for local elected officials is the ability to work and not get paid for it. School board salaries vary a whole bunch by state and by district within the state. Most of them are very low.
City council, school board, county commissioners… these people have a lot of power over the local area, and they get little attention. It’s often not difficult to get elected to them, because those are cases where a few dozen votes from friends really do make a difference.
Pick a key local issue (like library books) and start campaigning. And when people seem dubious about voting for you, ask them what the person currently in the office has done for schools and students.
Odds are, they don’t know. Tell them your plan - three bullet-point items designed to appeal to parents, employers, and the general public.
(“Reduce censorship so our students get a good understanding of the diversity in the world today; make sure there are after school programs that let them learn to be good team players; have better health practices in schools so they’re not disease factories.” Or whatever.)
Very few people actually campaign for small local elections.
oh god that’s SUCH a good point. positions like this pay dick-all. my experience is that at a local government level, all elected officials are either retired or have a day job because the elected positions don’t actually pay enough for full time. and every time there’s a public utility rate increase, or a vote on a millage to help pay for the rec center, there’s people who raise absolute hell about elected officials secretly giving themselves raises with the money. and that’s, like. the opposite of the problem. the optics of voting for their own raises are too shitty. so the job pays crap and no one wants it. most of the time only one person even runs and it’s the person the last guy talked into running so she could quit without feeling bad. people with shitty agendas have NO problem getting these jobs despite a complete lack of qualifications and there’s no incentive to make them pay better because ‘pay elected officials more’ is a deeply unpopular opinion.
Konami “we fired several of the greatest game developers in history cause they wouldn’t make us gatcha” VS Square “we sold several entire studios and some of our most influential western IPs of all time to buy crypto” Enix.
