All of the school board candidates who were endorsed by the Jackson County Republican Party failed in their election bids Tuesday, a stark contrast to neighboring Josephine County, where the Grants Pass Daily Courier reported that all of the GOP-backed school board candidates in Grants Pass won their races.

Taryne Saunders and Robin Lee, who ran for Medford School Board; Kevin Christman, Rick Sharp and Lisa Walker Jennings, who ran for the Phoenix-Talent School Board; and Connie Payant, who ran for Central Point School Board, were all endorsed by the local GOP, and all finished well behind the winners. 

School board races are nonpartisan. But in a political climate where “culture wars” dominate news cycles, political party endorsements of school board candidates have become increasingly common, with the parties battling over whether race, sex, gender, contraception and other topics should be part of the curriculum. 

Information from the Jackson County GOP outlined the criteria to endorse candidates in the May 16 election. For school board members, the party asked: “Will they champion the prioritization of academic excellence and parental rights while exposing and mitigating harmful, divisive policies that come from Salem?”

Through interviews with the Rogue Valley Times, the Jackson County GOP-backed candidates made their positions known. 

Saunders and Payant both said they ran for school board because they saw problems with their districts’ curriculum. They called for a back-to-basics lesson plan that emphasized reading, writing and math and less on mature subjects like sex education. 

“(Students are) not learning the basics of life,” Payant said before the election. 

Saunders believes the Medford School District has “just added so much more to education than is needed, all in the name of inclusivity and equity. It’s more than our children need, at their age.”

Robin Lee, who said she ran for Medford School Board because, “I heard the Lord clearly tell me ‘run for school board,'” admitted she had never seen the Medford School District’s curriculum, but nonetheless had concerns about it — particularly “the current trend of sexualizing kids.”

Christman, a self-employed artist whose two children attend Talent Middle School, said before the election that he would like to “see more parental inclusion and communication about age-appropriate subject matter.”

Jennings, a real estate broker who graduated from Phoenix High School and has two children in district schools, wrote in the Voters’ Pamphlet that she wanted “a return to the fundamentals of education and leaving the distractions of political and moral issues to parents or legal guardians.”

Sharp, who has two daughters in district schools and one who graduated from Phoenix High School, wrote in the Voters’ Pamphlet that he supports parental rights and would promote respectful parental involvement. 

Michelle Atkinson, who received nearly twice as many votes as Saunders in the race for Position 5 on the Medford School Board, said in an interview Thursday that during campaign season, she knocked on doors of people who wanted to know which side of the aisle she was on.

“It was sometimes an awkward question at the door,” Atkinson said. “I really stressed that this is a nonpartisan position and that we have to be working together with people of many different ideologies and value systems.”

That said, Atkinson said she did not believe her opponent’s GOP endorsement hurt her in the race for position 5.

Atkinson also said she “does not have a problem” with a political party endorsing candidates for nonpartisan office. 

“Freedom of speech, right there — and that’s fabulous,” she said. “That doesn’t bother me at all.”

Michael Williams, who won the race for Medford School Board Position 6 against Lee, has a slightly different view. In order to appear as nonpartisan as possible, he would only accept endorsements if he could have both sides. He pointed to support from Oregon Moms Union and the Medford Education Association as an example.

“I wanted to run a different kind of race,” Williams said. “The point of this is to be nonpartisan — and that means we’ve got to build bridges and have conversations with everyone because everyone’s kids are in school.”