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The ballot was short, as it often is during an off-year municipal election. There was a vote for an alderman running unopposed.

There was the vote on Proposition B for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County, the power grab by the County Council to take hiring and firing duties away from the county executive. Like a majority of county voters, I said no to that one.

And there was a school board election. Three candidates were running for two seats on the Rockwood School Board. This is why I went to vote, to help make sure Izzy Imig was officially sent packing. She had already resigned from the board, having been accused of shoplifting from a Target store. It was an inauspicious ending to a short political career by somebody who seemed miscast for the job from the beginning.

That’s the reality for a lot of the so-called conservatives who won election to school boards in the past few years, trying to turn these important public bodies into laboratories for right-wing wedge issues. They never seemed like they really cared about the job at hand. The trend started during the pandemic. Schools were shut down and residents in various areas, including Rockwood, got together on Facebook to urge for re-opening, even as people were dying from COVID-19.

Soon, the groups turned into petri dishes for disinformation. I wrote about a friend of mine who joined one of these groups with his wife. For fun, he shared the wildest conspiracy theories he could find. His wife shared scientific information about masking and social distancing. She got kicked out of the group.

Imig and Jessica Clark were elected to the Rockwood School Board, as others with similar views won elections in districts such as Francis Howell in St. Charles County. The truth about school boards is when managed properly, they’re boring. They hire superintendents to do the heavy lifting. They set some broad policies and recognize students and teachers for good performance. They manage money so local residents will approve bond issues when they need new school buildings.

Imig, Clark and others wanted to relive the pandemic. They wanted to engage in culture wars. There were accusations about Critical Race Theory, then transgender this and transgender that. DEI was turned into a four-letter word. In Francis Howell, they “revised� Black history and Black literature courses and took steps backward on diversity initiatives. Last year, Clark resigned from the Rockwood board after making headlines for mocking students with disabilities and calling a teachers’ union “terrorists.�

Parents, taxpayers and voters had enough after a few years of madness.

So I walked into the voting booth and colored in the boxes by the names of Mara Voracheck-Warren and Sarah Boyer. So did a clear majority of voters. The same was true in St. Charles County districts, notably Francis Howell, where culture-warrior candidates lost for the second election in a row.

“We have a chance now to make normal happen,� said Sarah Oelke, after she and Amy Gryder won the Francis Howell election.

Normal is what Ted House told me he wanted to see return to St. Charles County politics when we talked a few years back. The longtime judge and ex-state lawmaker was heading to retirement, leaving St. Charles without an elected Democrat in a county or state office. The county is much more diverse than its recent election patterns, House told me. Free of the political restraints of being a judge, he planned to do something about it. Consider his return to elective politics a success.

House and some retired superintendents started a committee called St. Charles County Parents for Public Schools and supported the return to normalcy pushed by their slate of candidates. The group helped pull off a grassroots victory so school boards can get back to the daily grind of reading and writing.

“The culture war attack lost its steam,� House told me this week. “A lot of folks are done with people trying to use a narrow partisan agenda to manipulate votes.�

Indeed, that’s the old normal of school board elections, which in Missouri are supposed to be nonpartisan. House wants to make sure they stay that way.

“Our objective is to become obsolete,� House says of his group. “We want to go back to normal, nonpartisan school board elections with no drama.�