Candidate filings for Oregon’s May 20 Special Election are in, and school boards are in the hot seat with it being the first election since the start of Donald Trump’s second term and the subsequent threats to the Department of Education.
May elections are held in every Oregon county during odd-numbered years to elect representatives for local schools, water and transportation districts.
School board races in Oregon are nonpartisan elections, meaning that a candidate’s party affiliation is not listed on the ballot. However, candidates aren’t required to be nonpartisan — and candidates from both sides of the political spectrum are pushing their own politics onto the school board.
Oregon Right to Life, a pro-life political action committee and affiliate of National Right to Life, is seeking to seat as many pro-life candidates onto local school boards as possible. The organization hosted a series of eight virtual training sessions about getting involved in January and February. Eugene Weekly attended two of the eight forums, which detailed how to appeal to pro-life voters, and, if elected, how to influence the board and school policies. Opponents fear these tactics will lead to book bans and interfering with school curriculums.
Hosted by Sharolyn Smith, Oregon Right to Life’s political director and lobbyist, the virtual sessions walked pro-life Oregonians through the process of joining a school board and what impact they could have on the community if elected.
During the Jan. 15 training session, Smith said that Oregon Right to Life has a “database of pro-life households, pro-life voters and pro-life people in Oregon” that it uses to increase voter turnout in smaller elections like school boards. It was announced at the Feb. 11 virtual session that candidates affiliated with Oregon Right to Life could access the lists for their door-to-door and phone call campaigning. “As long as we can turn out more of our people than their people,” Smith said, “we can achieve a win.”
Smith declined to be interviewed for this article. But in response to an email from EW, Smith writes, “Oregon Right to Life PAC works to elect pro-life community members to all levels of office. We have been involved in school board races for many years, promoting candidates with pro-life values who want to see better transparency in education and parental involvement in their children’s health care.”
Emerge Oregon, by comparison, trains Democratic women to run for local, state and federal office — including notable alum U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle. According to CM Hall, Emerge Oregon’s executive director, there are 28 Emerge alumni serving on Oregon school boards right now, including members of the Bethel, Eugene 4J and Springfield School District boards.
“If you have good candidates, people get excited about them and they turn out to vote,” Hall says, “period.”
Oregon Right to Life has been involved in Oregon school board races since 2021, Smith said, and the organization endorsed 73 school board candidates in 2023. Emerge Oregon has been recruiting and training Democratic women to run for school board seats — and other local, state and national offices — for 16 years.
“What we’ve seen on school boards across Oregon, led by so-called ‘pro-life’ or ‘parents rights’ activists, is less focused on core functions like increasing graduation rates, literacy and student health,” Hall says, “and more focused on distractions like banning books, interfering with curriculum and limiting the role of professional nurses.”
Student health care was a focal point of discussion during the Jan. 15 and Feb. 11 Oregon Right to Life virtual training sessions.
“We want to have pro-life people on our school boards to be able to promote transparency and keep parents involved in their children’s health care,” Smith said Jan. 15, “especially as continued policies get passed in the Legislature that kind of weaken that relationship between medical provider and parent with their children involved.”
These policies include House Bill 2002, which Smith says “allowed minors to receive controversial medical treatments and procedures without parental knowledge or consent.” HB 2002 expanded access to reproductive care, specifically allowing minors under the age of 15 to seek abortion without parental knowledge or consent.
Oregon public school health centers do not provide abortions.
“There’s nothing political about ice packs, bandaids and diabetes management, with the informed consent of parents,” Hall says. “Voters deserve candidates who want to equip our young people with scientifically-based accurate information about everything from history to their own bodies. Anything less than that is compromising their future success and jeopardizing their health.”
Candidate filings for the May 20, Special Election were due March 20. The deadline to file candidate statements, photos, statements of endorsements and pay filing fees is March 24. Candidate filing information is available at Apps.LaneCounty.org/Elections.