North Texas school districts have garnered much media attention over the last couple of years as parents and community members became increasingly active in school board politics, calling on elected officials to reform curricula and policies accommodating the usage of bathrooms and pronouns according to gender identity.
Two local school districts have borne the brunt of the coverage: Carroll ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, a number of Carroll ISD students repeatedly used a racial slur in a video that went viral on social media in 2018. Media reports highlighted the backlash, which resulted in a “diversity and inclusion” training being proposed for all students. The program was opposed by parents who expressed concern the district was setting up “an environment where you are guilty until proven innocent of ‘microaggressions.’”
The issue became central to subsequent school board elections, which saw new trustee candidates run and win on a platform of rejecting the training proposal and returning to academic fundamentals.
A six-part podcast produced by NBC called Southlake covered the saga, spending a good deal of time reporting on one of the key organizers who pushed back on the training proposal: Leigh Wambsganss of Patriot Mobile and Southlake Families PAC.
“The [Cultural Competence Action Plan] created a student and staff diversity police, required documenting and punishing ‘unintended’ ‘nonverbal’ microaggressions in Pre-K-12th, mandated diversity and inclusion training as a requirement for graduation, required social justice audits of all of [Carroll ISD’s] curriculum and student clubs, and required hiring to be based on race and sexual orientation instead of teaching qualifications, to name just a few problems with it,” Wambsganss told The Dallas Express in an interview.
Wambsganss said a lot of parents were unaware of some of the details in the plan, so she publicized them through Southlake Families PAC.
“I had close to 3,000 parents sign a petition opposing it. That’s when I knew we could organize and make a difference for Carroll ISD,” she said.
Wambsganss claimed a lot of the news coverage was biased against conservatives, not the least of which was NBC’s Southlake podcast.
“As election time rolled around, we all knew a new episode [of the podcast] would be released, purposefully planned to affect elections. Thankfully, we have the resources in our community to get the truth, backed up by documentation, out to our residents,” Wambsganss said. “We did this by writing our own newspaper with all of the data collected from Open Records Requests and evidence provided by teachers in our district. The Colleyville activists did something similar.”
Wambsganss was referring to a comparable push by parents and community members in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD for changes to district policy they perceived to be politicized and not reflective of its constituents’ values.
NBC’s Grapevine podcast was launched in early October and conveyed a similar narrative to its predecessor, highlighting the apparent role of religiosity in local activists’ push to get their preferred candidates elected to the school board and suggesting it was part of a concerted push by followers of an allegedly “far-right” interpretation of Christianity.
The Dallas Express asked Wambsganss if she had listened to the podcasts.
“I did listen to it because people texted me saying ‘[the creator’s] spreading the same lies in [Grapevine-Colleyville ISD],’” she said. “It is clear that he enjoys the self-aggrandization where truth or telling multiple sides of a story is not a priority. There were hours of public comment testimony from concerned parents that are fair use, he did not use anything of substance on the conservative side.”
Much of the Grapevine podcast has thus far centered around a controversy involving a district English teacher and a student who identified as transgender. The mother of the student had claimed the teacher “maintained a personal library on gender identity in her classroom and had promoted the book The Prince and the Dressmaker to be passed around her class for all of the students to read” in an effort to normalize transgender topics.
“Most conservatives don’t listen to those podcasts. The ones that do know that it’s propaganda, not journalism. The extreme left loves them,” Wambsganss said. “NBC needs to start counting their coverage in the leftist candidate’s campaign finance reports as a marketing donation, because it’s not journalism.”