Two sets of numbers, from a small district’s election in the Idaho panhandle this week, tells an important story and raises some worthwhile questions.
In the general election of 2021, Susan Brown won the zone 2 seat, and Keith Rutledge the zone 3 seat, of the West Bonner County School District board. She won with 176 votes out of a total 349 votes (for three candidates), and he won with 244 votes out of a total 481 votes (for two candidates). Each in other words won with slightly more than a majority of the vote in six precincts (one of which cast zero votes).
On Tuesday, Rutledge, the board chair, and Brown, the vice chair, were on the ballot again, this time for voters to decide whether to recall them. This time, close to two-thirds of the voters chose to recall both Brown - 624 to recall, 322 to retain, a total of 946 - and Rutledge - 762 to recall, 454 to retain, a total of 1,216.
One obvious point from that comparison is the reversal of fortune, from a close win to a sweeping repudiation. But the other point may be more significant: About two and a half times as many voters cast ballots in the special recall election than had in the regular election a couple of years before.
People will have varied interpretations of why that happened. But what should be clear is that something significant happened in the community, an area centered around Priest River between Sandpoint and the Washington line.
It wasn’t a matter of deception on the part of the board members; a look at what they had to say before the 2021 election made clear where they were headed. (I’ll focus here on Rutledge.)
School boards in Idaho are nonpartisan, but Rutledge did have an endorsement from the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and apparent approval from the Idaho Freedom Foundation (theoretically non-political but highly supportive of agitator-wing Republicans).
In a questionnaire on the IFF’s website, Rutledge regularly cites his concern about classroom indoctrination with “leftist ideas.†An education plan from the state Board of Education “has no business being taught in our schools regardless of the reasons given,†and “Sexual orientation and gender identity have no business being taught in school for any reason for any age. What's the point? More indoctrination?â€
He was clear enough about where, in a general sense, he was coming from. So was Brown.
The couple of years that followed have been tumultuous for the district. Many of the problems, some financial and some relating to education methods, grew out of board actions or inactions. The tipping point was the hiring of a new superintendent, Branden Durst, who was a long-time IFF associate (and former state superintendent of public instruction candidate, and conservative activist) without professional education experience and lacking the needed certification for the job. He was approved by a board majority, including Rutledge and Brown, instead of a deeply experienced and much praised local school principal.
Few people seemed to pay much attention to the school district before 2021. But after that election came problem-making that began to interfere with the education of local children, with impacts too close to home not to see. Once those concrete realities started to hit home, attention was concentrated. (Will the same happen in the North Idaho College district in Coeur d’Alene? We will see.)
The Idaho Ed News quoted one parent and recall organizer, Kylie Hoepfer, as saying, “The ‘against [recall] folks’ paint us in bad light saying we are woke liberal donkeys, and most of us behind the recall are conservative Republican, who just wanted school board members who listened to the community.â€
Rutledge and Brown may have done their community a major long-range service: The voters seem to be paying attention now.
And they’re voting.
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