Steven Monacelli:

You recently responded to the series we published about a network of consultants and PACs backing ultraconservative candidates for local school boards. Your post on X said: “We need to digitize local election finance reports and establish campaign contributions limits. Without them, our elections are for sale, and it takes an obscene amount of work to figure out who’s buying.” Why do you think that? 

The school board issues are obviously at the forefront of everyone’s mind right now, because we’ve had more and more big-name PACs start to participate in those elections. Our school board races have gotten unnecessarily politicized in ways that make it very potentially unpleasant to serve on school boards and certainly don’t end up in good outcomes for Texas students. In addition to over 1,000 school boards in Texas, we also have over 1,200 incorporated cities, 254 counties, and municipal utility district boards of directors. We have all of these different elected positions where there’s very little transparency in the finances.