One of the spray-painted signs in Round Rock (courtesy of Manya Blaisdell)
This year’s Round Rock ISD board election isn’t nearly as nutty as the last one. You probably recall that the 2022 election featured the “One Family” slate, five far-right ideologues who tried, and failed, to take over Round Rock’s politically moderate school board. Unlike that contest, no candidates this year are publicly railing against “pornography” in school libraries or calling for the RRISD superintendent to be fired.
But this is still Round Rock, so public school supporters like Manya Blaisdell, who has two children in the local schools, remain vigilant about extreme tactics from right-wing activists. And Blaisdell was not particularly surprised when she awoke on Oct. 18 to find that her home and neighborhood had been targeted.
“I didn’t see it until I was in my car, backing out of my driveway,” Blaisdell said. “There was a hammer and sickle spray-painted on my school board sign – indicating, what? That they’re all communists? I saw an F and a U on my Melissa Ross sign and just X’s on a few others. And then there was a Star of David on my Colin Allred sign and another FU on Kamala Harris.
“That was upsetting for me, but for my kids, it was incredibly upsetting, because they immediately went to, ‘We’re being personally targeted as Jews.’ We’re a Jewish household, and I had to talk them off the ledge, and tell them you cannot see our mezuzah on our door from the street at night, so there’s no way they would know that we’re Jewish.”
Blaisdell said she later learned that signs throughout her neighborhood had been spray-painted, but no others with a Star of David. She decided to leave the vandalized signs up as a signal that she was not intimidated, and has added a few more supporting science, reproductive freedom, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Blaisdell’s signs included several for school board candidates Estevan “Chuy” Zárate, Melissa Ross, and Mingyuan “Michael” Wei, each of whom is endorsed by the pro-public education group Access Education RRISD. The candidates want to see more state funding for local schools and support the district’s new anti-bullying policy.
“It was incredibly upsetting, because they immediately went to, ‘We’re being personally targeted as Jews.’” – RRISD parent Manya Blaisdell, whose signs were vandalized
Ross and Wei are also in favor of the district’s $1 billion bond proposal that seeks to repair and update Round Rock’s schools (as a sitting board member, Zárate can’t, by law, express a position on the bond though he did vote to place it on the ballot). The bond is opposed by the two outgoing members of the board – Danielle Weston and Mary Bone – conservatives who are widely blamed for the culture war that has slowed routine business during school board meetings and turned them into marathons lasting past midnight.
Running for Weston and Bone’s seats are, respectively, James Steele and April Guerra. Guerra is a newcomer to Round Rock and members of Access Education don’t consider her to be connected to the community’s far-right activists. On the other hand, the group fears that Steele and Joshua Escalante, running against Zárate, are stealth candidates, trying to conceal their conservative views to get elected. The statewide expert on extremist school board candidates, Frank Strong, recently wrote in his “Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the November School Board Elections” that Escalante’s wife has ties to the far-right group Moms for Liberty and that Steele shares posts on social media criticizing what he calls transgender indoctrination and critical race theory.
Blaisdell has been working as a greeter at the polls and hopes that electing the Access Education candidates will, in the words of Zárate’s campaign manager Shannon Probe, “make the school board boring again.” “Yes, exactly!” Blaisdell said. “Make it boring again! It shouldn’t be Friday Night Lights at the school board.”
