After dozens of extremists funded and trained by people outside her home state of Minnesota won school board races in 2022, long-time political campaign worker Kyrstin Schuette said, “Someone needs to do something.”

She decided that extremists were able to win in part because school board candidates who support public education didn’t have access to the knowledge and expertise that other candidates have.

So she started the School Board Integrity Project in order to provide school board candidates with the kind of practical help she had provided to statehouse, congressional, and presidential candidates: Help figuring out their message, raising the money necessary to run a campaign, and reaching the voters they need to reach.

She worked with more than 80 candidates in races races across Minnesota in 2023, almost all of whom won their races. “It was beautifully overwhelming,” she says.

Candidates she works with must live up to the values she has laid out as important: integrity, belonging, trust, excellence, and respect. If those are your values, she said, “you’re one of our candidates whether you know it or not.”

Most people, she says, want school board members who live up to the principles she has laid out, so the job of the candidates she works with is to make sure voters understand the stakes and the issues involved in school board races.

They need, among other things, to point out that the extremists who are coming in with money and training from outside local communities are looking to divide communities rather than unite them and are working to undermine public schools, not improve them.

In Episode 6 of Democracy and Education, Kyrstin talks with Karin Chenoweth about how she got involved in politics to begin with, how she thinks about school board races, and how she’s hoping to take her projects to other states in the next election cycle.