To be clear, book banning predates the 21st century. From the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools, white parents and legislators have treated classrooms as battlegrounds for their ideological wars. The push to privatized education is one side of this coin, and the other is the consolidation of power in school boards. Elected school board members have oversight of budgets, programming, extracurriculars, and more, so even when your governor isn’t infringing upon curriculums, school executives are. Further, white parents have seized control of Parent Teacher Associations at the expense of BIPOC youth by running Black educators out of town or sabotaging diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, “School boards serve as political subdivisions of the state and this is important because our state can override our decisions and Republicans are introducing legislation to limit our power,” he said. Shelley Jacksonthe Executive Director at Instituto and a governing board member for Roosevelt School District in Phoenix, Arizona. The district where Jackson serves is almost 82% Latinx and she’s seen firsthand how creative school boards have to get in supporting students and teachers without putting them in the violent path of these bans. Jackson is insistent that “school board members are the last line of defense in keeping as much autonomy and truth as possible in the classroom such as through curriculums that go through us for approval.”