The Christian Far Right Took Over a Texas School District. Parents Want it Back.
Board members banned books and stripped vaccine curriculum. Now, a group of parents are running to make the school board boring again.
Cy-Fair, like all Texas districts, has a nonpartisan school board. Elections to fill the seats are often boring because there’s really only one campaign slogan that works: “I want what’s best for kids.” The race in 2021 was different. Far-right firebrand and megadonor Steven Hotze entered the picture.
Hotze sent out campaign mailers, branding his chosen three as “Christians, Conservatives, and Patriots.” Opponents were “Liberals, Leftists, Socialists, Communists.” Patriotic candidates would defend “historic American values,” oppose “Sharia law,” and uphold “Biblical marriage.”
Then came the books. In the 2022–23 school year—as Texas became ground zero for the national book-banning surge—Cy-Fair fielded 58 challenges to library books, up from just six in the previous three years combined.
In May 2024, approving the science curriculum was quietly slotted into the consent agenda, where it could easily have passed without comment. The 25 science and technical education titles had already cleared vetting by district experts and the State Board of Education—hardly a bastion of leftist orthodoxy. But Blasingame had something else in mind.
“I move that the board approve the posted instructional materials in 7.B for the 2024–25 school year with the following revisions,” she read. Thirteen lessons were cut in subjects like biology, environmental science, health science theory, and cultural diversity. Trustee Justin Ray asked Blasingame to explain the rationale—more as a tee-up than a challenge—and she obliged. In a chapter on vaccines, she said, “it discusses polio and all those” implying that vaccines were being presented as lifesaving, settled science, something she disputes. An extension lesson got into “a lot of COVID discussion.” In a chapter on earth systems, there were “topics of depopulation, and an agenda out of the United Nations.” In environmental sciences there was “a perspective that humans are bad.”
Some of her reasoning might sound like typical right-wing talking points; they also align with the fundamentalist Christian movement. In those circles, vaccines are at best debatable and at worst a product of the abortion industry; the UN is a vehicle for one-world government that would champion global depopulation efforts; and any limit on human consumption of natural resources is an affront to God’s command for his people to rule over the earth.
“Students don’t know that things aren’t there,” Schweighardt told me.
Part of why they don’t know, he said, is that there are no textbooks. The missing chapters—the ones that showed up later, downloaded, printed, and bound in Julie Hinaman’s three-ring binder—weren’t ripped from physical pages or blacked out. They simply vanished. The very digital format of textbooks had made the removal surprisingly seamless.
One Cy-Fair teacher told me most teachers are afraid to discuss current events or ethics at all. That’s because, along with the new curriculum, teachers told me they are required to steer clear of any topic that might be deemed “political.” That includes climate change, gender expression, vaccine mandates, and racial justice. The list of taboo topics didn’t come all at once, they said, but has steadily grown with the various policies adopted by the board over the past two years.
Kids like Schweighardt may not notice missing pages, but they do notice when teachers won’t discuss current events. When the class reached infectious diseases—now rewritten to remain “value neutral” on vaccines—some students found it odd that no one mentioned the deadly measles outbreak unfolding in Texas. Even at his high school, which Schweighardt said skews more conservative, politically, he felt like most kids would at least engage in a debate on the topic. “It seems like there’s no reason not to teach facts,” he said.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politi...ian-right/
Board members banned books and stripped vaccine curriculum. Now, a group of parents are running to make the school board boring again.
Cy-Fair, like all Texas districts, has a nonpartisan school board. Elections to fill the seats are often boring because there’s really only one campaign slogan that works: “I want what’s best for kids.” The race in 2021 was different. Far-right firebrand and megadonor Steven Hotze entered the picture.
Hotze sent out campaign mailers, branding his chosen three as “Christians, Conservatives, and Patriots.” Opponents were “Liberals, Leftists, Socialists, Communists.” Patriotic candidates would defend “historic American values,” oppose “Sharia law,” and uphold “Biblical marriage.”
Then came the books. In the 2022–23 school year—as Texas became ground zero for the national book-banning surge—Cy-Fair fielded 58 challenges to library books, up from just six in the previous three years combined.
In May 2024, approving the science curriculum was quietly slotted into the consent agenda, where it could easily have passed without comment. The 25 science and technical education titles had already cleared vetting by district experts and the State Board of Education—hardly a bastion of leftist orthodoxy. But Blasingame had something else in mind.
“I move that the board approve the posted instructional materials in 7.B for the 2024–25 school year with the following revisions,” she read. Thirteen lessons were cut in subjects like biology, environmental science, health science theory, and cultural diversity. Trustee Justin Ray asked Blasingame to explain the rationale—more as a tee-up than a challenge—and she obliged. In a chapter on vaccines, she said, “it discusses polio and all those” implying that vaccines were being presented as lifesaving, settled science, something she disputes. An extension lesson got into “a lot of COVID discussion.” In a chapter on earth systems, there were “topics of depopulation, and an agenda out of the United Nations.” In environmental sciences there was “a perspective that humans are bad.”
Some of her reasoning might sound like typical right-wing talking points; they also align with the fundamentalist Christian movement. In those circles, vaccines are at best debatable and at worst a product of the abortion industry; the UN is a vehicle for one-world government that would champion global depopulation efforts; and any limit on human consumption of natural resources is an affront to God’s command for his people to rule over the earth.
“Students don’t know that things aren’t there,” Schweighardt told me.
Part of why they don’t know, he said, is that there are no textbooks. The missing chapters—the ones that showed up later, downloaded, printed, and bound in Julie Hinaman’s three-ring binder—weren’t ripped from physical pages or blacked out. They simply vanished. The very digital format of textbooks had made the removal surprisingly seamless.
One Cy-Fair teacher told me most teachers are afraid to discuss current events or ethics at all. That’s because, along with the new curriculum, teachers told me they are required to steer clear of any topic that might be deemed “political.” That includes climate change, gender expression, vaccine mandates, and racial justice. The list of taboo topics didn’t come all at once, they said, but has steadily grown with the various policies adopted by the board over the past two years.
Kids like Schweighardt may not notice missing pages, but they do notice when teachers won’t discuss current events. When the class reached infectious diseases—now rewritten to remain “value neutral” on vaccines—some students found it odd that no one mentioned the deadly measles outbreak unfolding in Texas. Even at his high school, which Schweighardt said skews more conservative, politically, he felt like most kids would at least engage in a debate on the topic. “It seems like there’s no reason not to teach facts,” he said.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politi...ian-right/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
