A Glimpse into School Board Politics in Tennessee

One of these responses is not like the others

2 min readJul 18, 2022

Tennessee Lookout has a story out about the first partisan school board races in the state. The piece examines the issue through the lens of races in Williamson County.

The responses in the District 10 race are pretty interesting. That race features incumbent Eric Welch and challengers Doc Holladay and Jennifer Haile.

In summarizing the race, Welch offers this comparison between his candidacy and that of Holladay:

I’m focused on students, and what needs to be done to provide them a world-class education that they can build a successful future on. Holladay is focused on social media hot-button issues that really aren’t applicable to Williamson County Schools.

Here’s how Holladay sums things up:

The polarization of political views has especially created a divide in how we want to educate and raise our children. The left has held the steering wheel of public education for decades now, and look at what that has produced in our schools: Marxism, socialism, grooming our kids in gender ideology, pornographic material in our libraries, divisive & racist curriculums like (Critical Race Theory), “white privilege,” “guilt training,” vilifying our founding fathers and our country, untold psychological and developmental damage from useless masking, a massive push to jab them with potentially harmful experimental gene therapy drugs and an effort to divide them ideologically from their parents.

And Haile has this to say:

Race, gender and inequality, “CRT” as I understand it, simply does not exist in the K-12 curriculum. What we are talking about is the discussion of the human experience. I think if we approach discussions of race, gender and equality as an issue involving fairness, kindness and understanding, we remove political agendas. Of course, any curriculum must be age-appropriate and reviewed by parties who are knowledgeable about the subject; but the answer is not to pretend it does not exist and/or fail to adequately prepare our students for a diverse world.