This year, the ACLU of South Carolina team ran a campaign to educate Charleston County voters about their school board candidates. We invested more than $30,000 to help make sure that voters could make an informed choice on a down-ballot race that gets far too little attention.
We don’t endorse candidates at the ACLU, and we didn’t endorse candidates for the Charleston County School Board. But we did learn about the candidates, and we reached out to voters to share what we learned.
Here’s what happened:
Civil liberties mattered at the ballot box
Voters showed up for civil liberties in this election, supporting candidates who oppose banning books, censoring classroom instruction, and bringing religious doctrine into public schools.
Winning candidates Carolina Jewett (District 2 in Mount Pleasant) and Darlene Dunmeyer-Roberson (District 8 in outer West Ashley) responded to our questionnaire about the civil liberties issues that are most impacting today’s students. Their responses can be viewed here.
These two candidates affirmed their commitment to the freedom to read and the right to learn free from viewpoint-based censorship. A third winning candidate, Kevin Hollinshead (District 4 in North Charleston), declined to answer our questionnaire.
The ACLU of South Carolina is proud to have helped make the stakes clear in this election. Through our efforts, we reached thousands of voters with digital advertising and texting.
Moms for Liberty maintains its majority
Voters chose not to send Moms for Liberty-backed, far-right member Ed Kelley (District 2) back to the board. But with the election of Michele Leber (District 6 in West Ashley), the Charleston County School Board will still be controlled by a Moms for Liberty-endorsed majority that has launched countless attacks on public education. While we are disappointed by the leadership of the board, we are not deterred. South Carolinians oppose these efforts to infringe upon our civil liberties, and we will show up and speak out to ensure the board’s efforts to infringe on students’ freedom do not go unchecked.
Since the 2022 election ushered in a Moms for Liberty-endorsed majority to the Charleston County School Board, we’ve seen harmful attacks on public education. With Kelley’s loss and Leber’s victory, Moms for Liberty maintains a 5-4 majority on the board.
Over the past two years, we’ve stood with our partners in opposition as the Moms for Liberty-backed school board members have:
- Voted to start all board meetings with Christian prayer.
- Forced the removal of trusted community members from the Health Advisory Committee that reviews sex education curriculum and makes recommendations.
- Hired, fired, and hired Superintendents without engaging with all board members or the public.
- Held unannounced and secret meetings to keep away other school board members and the public.
- Shifted to spending the bulk of meetings in executive session and held unannounced meetings to keep away other school board members and the public, violating the state’s open meetings law.
- Introduced a classroom censorship policy, which would ban most conversations about sexual orientation or gender.
In short, it’s been a mess—and Charleston’s families and educators deserve better.
What we did in this election
That’s why we decided to educate voters about the candidates for school board. We wanted them to have trustworthy information about the candidates vying for their support.
In August, we sent a questionnaire to all 10 candidates running in the 4 Charleston County School Board districts that were up for election this year. Half of the candidates responded. The other half wouldn’t tell us what they think about some of the most pressing issues impacting education today. You can see all the responses here.
To help voters cast an informed vote, we contacted them through two methods: digital ads and texting. Voters saw our digital ads more than half a million times combined on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix. We reached an additional 14,000 voters by texting them directly. Through our outreach, we let people know about the candidates’ positions on an issue that’s important to us here at the ACLU: book banning and the freedom to read.
This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com.
Privacy info.
The work continues. With our coalition partners in Charleston County, we’ll keep an eye on the Charleston County School Board — as well as school boards across the state — and show up to speak in defense of civil liberties when the time comes.
