School boards in this country are elected. This is generally for the best for a number of reasons I’m not interested in getting into here and now. This ain’t the site for it, after all.
Yet we should remember that while they’re elected, they’re elected to handle a specific part of the government: Public schools.
That’s what they should be focused on–what they can control within the confines of the schools they’re responsible for or things that they think others should do that would impact public education–not broader political issues.
Yet the Shawnee Mission school board thinks otherwise.
Closing Monday night’s meeting, the Shawnee Mission Board of Education officially proclaimed June to be National Gun Violence Awareness Month.
Board President Mary Sinclair, representing the SM East area, read the proclamation, which affirmed the district’s commitment to gun safety measures and to honoring and remembering victims and survivors of gun violence.
The proclamation, a largely symbolic measure, passed 6-0.
It includes Shawnee Mission’s continuing commitment to provide gun locks free of charge to all members of the community and to the teaching of proper gun storage in the home.
The district’s proclamation originated with the Johnson County chapter of Moms Demand Action, an advocacy group that has pushed for tighter gun regulations around the country over the past decade since a heavily armed gunman shot and killed 20 first graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
Maybe it’s just me, but the idea that a school board is pushing a proclamation written for them by a gun control group and does so without any real pushback from the media is a huge problem for me.
It’s not so much that the media didn’t push back as the fact that we know if a school board pushed a proclamation written by the NRA, it would be the source of massive controversy. We’d have reports on every news program in the nation talking about what happened and why the people of that community should recall every school board official who voted for the proclamation.
In fact, Shawnee Mission was reportedly the only school board contacted that agreed to this, which alone should raise a few eyebrows.
The truth of the matter is that Moms Demand Action is a heavily partisan group looking to curtail the rights of law-abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong. The school board has picked a side in a debate that, frankly, exists outside of their purview.
“But school shootings-”
Yes, those are awful, but no school board in the nation has the authority to enact actual gun control. As such, it makes more sense to focus on the things they can control such as security, mental health services, and identifying potential threats and trying to intervene before it becomes an issue.
If they did that, they’d accomplish much more than worthless proclamations that are little more than a virtue signal that makes their allegiance clear to the anti-gun zealots who pushed them into doing it.