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By October of 2021, the conservative website and social media handle Moving Saratoga Forward had posted a drumbeat of concern about critical race theory allegedly being taught in the Saratoga Springs City School District. At the time, the specific fear was about critical race theory being part of a new national elementary reading program, and several people showed up to the Oct. 28, 2021, Saratoga Springs Board of Education meeting to voice their displeasure.
Sharon Dominguez, who is currently running for a Saratoga Springs school board seat, was in attendance that night. In fact, she said, it was the first school board meeting she’d decided to attend. Yet Dominguez denies that any specific issue inspired her to go to that October 2021 meeting.
“It wasn’t necessarily anything in particular,” Dominguez told me by phone last week after declining an in-person interview following a candidate forum put on by the League of Women Voters of Saratoga County. “It was just another way for me to be involved.”
Dominguez, who is married to the former jockey Ramon Dominguez, is one of five candidates seeking three seats on the school board. She has supported fellow newcomer Joseph Sabanos. The election is May 16.
There’s good reason to think Dominguez isn’t being forthright. In fact, she wants her true views to remain out of the public eye. As a school board candidate, the benign and vague messaging that Dominguez uses about transparency and school safety is much more muted than the aggressive advocacy in which she engaged leading up to her decision to run for school board.
After voters largely rejected so-called “parents’ rights” candidates in last year’s school board elections, with 88% of union-backed candidates winning seats, according to the New York State School Boards Association, new candidates like Dominguez may have simply adopted a more subversive strategy, hiding true agendas behind rah-rah language like “fair education for all.”
After examining Dominguez’s path to the current school board race, her candidacy seems to be one small example of a larger effort supported by top Republican lawmakers and wealthy GOP donors to take over school boards across the country, with leaders using boogeymen like “critical race theory” and “wokeism” to gain supporters.
Critical race theory is a more than 40-year-old academic concept that focuses on racism as something embedded in democratic and legal institutions rather than merely being individually held beliefs.
“School board elections have become much bigger trigger points. They’ve attracted more outside money from groups that you wouldn’t normally think of as being donors to board elections,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, who has been studying how critical race theory discussions in particular have impacted local school boards. “These groups are coming in and backing certain candidates that they think might support their agenda. And then, because school board elections in general don’t attract a whole lot of money, a little bit of money can go a long way.”
In turn, school boards have become the front lines of America’s culture wars.
“We see racial-identity politics and gender-identity politics as being something that folks on the right see can mobilize voters,” said Lyon. “And when we’re talking about these low, salient, school-board elections, even mobilizing a few voters can make a huge difference.”
At that Oct. 28, 2021, Saratoga Springs BOE meeting, a man named Kris DuBuque came to the microphone twice. Presenting himself as a parent in the Saratoga Springs community, he wore a navy blue mask down around his chin, as he aired grievances to do with pandemic protocols and critical race theory.
He gave his home address as 509 Broadway in Saratoga Springs, which is actually the address for Temple Sinai. DuBuque, who did not respond to a request for comment, resides in Ballston Spa. Saratoga Springs Superintendent Michael Patton called out DuBuque’s fake address during the Dec. 7, 2021, board meeting.
Nonetheless, during that Oct. 28, 2021, meeting, DuBuque said he was part of a group called NY Informed of Saratoga County, which is part of the larger statewide organization focused on addressing parents’ concerns over school curriculum, critical race theory, mask mandates and potential COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Online, NY Informed has also called for drastic reforms, including the abolishment of the federal and state departments of education.
DuBuque said membership in the Saratoga group had grown to more than 100 at the time of the meeting, and he said he’d welcome talking to people interested in learning more about NY Informed.
A photo obtained by The Daily Gazette depicts DuBuque huddled with a few Saratoga Springs parents, including Dominguez. She told me this meeting was when she was introduced to NY Informed.
In April of 2022, the statewide NY Informed group, which currently has 4,500 Facebook followers, proactively recruited people for leadership positions, with a post encouraging members to run for school board seats, including step-by-step instructions about how to register.
Dominguez, who has two high-school age sons and said she has lived in the district since 2007, denies that NY Informed or any other group influenced her decision to run, which she said she made this February.
“I think what makes me unique as a candidate is that I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. I’m an independent,” Dominguez told me. “I believe I represent a large majority of those of us in the middle.”
But in February of 2022, just months after meeting DuBuque, Dominguez co-created the parent group Excellence in Education. That group, which no longer has an active website, billed itself ostensibly as one focused on improving educational outcomes for students and providing families with more transparency about what is being taught in the classroom.
The group’s actual advocacy work has been more aggressive, targeting curriculum and often focusing on critical race theory. I spoke with Dominguez for an April 2022 article about the group’s concerns over sexually explicit language in a short story. Dominguez said this week she stands by her concerns with the short story and said, “At no point did we call for any book to be banned in Saratoga Springs.”
On critical race theory, Dominguez told me: “The superintendent and our board members said it is not part of our curriculum.”
Excellence in Education quickly received backing from Moving Saratoga Forward, including a May 2022 Moving Saratoga Forward newsletter linking to Excellence in Education’s “two huge revelations” about 9th grade English Language Arts curriculum and critical race theory allegedly being taught in the Saratoga Springs district. Moving Saratoga Forward has also engaged with NY Informed. For instance, in a Dec. 9, 2021, Facebook post, Moving Saratoga Forward asked NY Informed supporter Carmela Frias, who also spoke at that Oct. 28, 2021, meeting, if she would be applying to be part of the school district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee.
Moving Saratoga Forward is run anonymously. But Rob Arrigo, a town of Wilton resident who has served as the chair of the Saratoga County Libertarian Committee, has been publicly linked to the group, including during a July 20, 2021, Saratoga Springs City Council meeting.
In an email to me, Arrigo denied involvement, writing: “I am not affiliated with Moving Saratoga Forward.”
But on some of the earliest Moving Saratoga Forward Facebook posts in June of 2019, Arrigo was the only person to engage.
Regardless, we do know that in 2019, Arrigo brought in a high-powered conservative Republican political consultant to assist with efforts in the Saratoga Springs school board elections. Saratoga Parents for Safer Schools, which Arrigo co-managed in support of three school board candidates, paid more than $9,000 to Go Right Strategies, a Florida-based firm run by Spence Rogers, with connections to Ted Cruz and others. Issue One reported the firm profited heavily from election denialism in 2022 by working for an unsuccessful GOP secretary of state nominee in Arizona. In 2019, Go Right Strategies supported the Saratoga Parents for Safer Schools’ data and messaging efforts, according to Gazette reporting.
We also know that in 2021, Arrigo’s fellow Libertarian Committee member Amanda Ellithorpe won election to the city’s school board by fewer than 20 votes after receiving a $5,000 donation from “Fight Back Now, LLC,” which was established through a Nevada clearinghouse shortly before the donation was made, according to records obtained by The Daily Gazette.
Like DuBuque, Arrigo does not live in, nor send children to, the Saratoga Springs district. Arrigo’s home district is Schulyerville. It’s worth noting, Schuylerville’s current school budget is $38.6 million compared to Saratoga Springs’ $137 million budget.
Lyon, of the Rockefeller College, said the goal in conservative efforts to take over school boards often comes down to interest in influencing sizable school district budgets. In an effort that mirrors what the Koch brothers did at the state level, where they spent heavily to win seats that could give conservatives power where the rubber meets the road, conservatives are now focused on school boards, Lyon said.
To do this, they’ve used the culture wars.
“On the right, what you see is a concerted effort on the part of the economic elites to push some of these social issues and couple them with economic policies that might not be popular for the middle and working class,” said Lyon. “So the efforts to increase parents’ rights are tied up with privatization and school choice, which some see as ways to reduce the cost and role of government.”
Lyon said the particular focus on critical race theory policy dates to then-President Donald Trump’s September 2020 remarks about the topic at a White House Conference on American History. Following these remarks, Google searches of the term spiked after being almost non-existent. From critical race theory, the message has evolved, but the effect is the same. “They are ways to get a broader base of support,” Lyon said. “You can tap into ideas like parents’ rights and fears that parents have – particularly white, conservative parents who might not be comfortable with some of the things that their children are coming home talking about, or white, more conservative grandparents who might not be comfortable with the way that they see society changing.”
As a result, we’ve seen these culture battles play out at school boards across the country. Locally, the war is still raging. Recently we saw efforts to ban an LGBTQ+-themed book in Ballston Spa, and outrage on both sides emerged after a Mohonasen school board member invoked a pedophilia organization when raising concerns over an LGBTQ+ club. Many people from outside these districts, clearly connected with likeminded people on social media, showed up to meetings where these topics were discussed.
“School board politics historically have been very, very localized,” Lyon said. “And then we see this big shift, and I think it has to do with the nationalization of our media.”
Nationally, conservative leaders have amplified the message and further inflamed the culture wars on school boards.
Take these words by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose North Country district included Saratoga County until recent redistricting, after she voted in support of the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in March.
“Parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education, and House Republicans are working to protect their right to know what is going on inside their child’s classroom,” Stefanik said, according to a news release. “In the face of the woke agenda and radical CRT the Far Left is pushing even in the midst of devastating learning loss, we are ensuring parents have the transparency to know if their child is being properly equipped in the classroom.”
Interestingly, this year’s school board races in New York aren’t as overtly dominated by culture wars, according to the New York State School Boards Association.
“Last year was kind of a unique point in time. Coming out of the pandemic, there was a lot of angst in school board meetings. A lot of this was driven by COVID – the mask policies, the remote learning. And then that became issues about curriculum, library books, etc.,” said David Albert, a spokesperson for the New York State School Boards Association. “Those issues continue to some degree, but on the whole, we’re not seeing those issues looming large in this year’s school board races.”
But if you read between the lines of the data, it seems parents’ rights candidates might have simply gotten the message that in order to win local races, they have to appear less extreme.
Like last year, races are seeing more first-time candidates than in the past, with roughly a third of incumbents choosing not to run each of the last two years as compared to about a quarter of incumbents not running in prior years. Meanwhile, the number of people running for seats has dipped slightly from last year compared to this year, but not by a huge margin. This year, there are 1.3 candidates vying for every open seat compared to 1.5 candidates vying for every open seat last year, according to New York State School Boards Association’s analysis.
So are fewer parents’ rights candidates running, or have candidates with those ideologies simply changed their strategy?
In Dominguez’s case, we can see her record. Online and at meetings, she’s called out critical race theory and gone to battle over school curriculum. She’s derided mask mandates and shared fears about the COVID-19 vaccine. Then we can compare this to the much more toned-down candidate who spoke at Wednesday night’s forum, saying things like librarians are professionals who can be trusted to vet books and “the best way to create an inclusive and diverse environment is to celebrate differences.”
Dominguez says a major tenet of her platform is “providing families with more transparency about what is being taught in the classroom.”
Frankly, many parents would agree with this fairly anodyne message.
But those words are also identical to language that Dominguez employed as part of Excellence in Education’s advocacy, when extreme claims were disguised behind softer messaging.
Clearly, Dominguez isn’t as committed to transparency as she claims.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
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Categories: Andrew Waite, Email Newsletter, News, Opinion, Saratoga County, Saratoga Springs
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Thank you, Mr. Waite.
For what it’s worth, we’re lucky these people’s limited abilities to understand these topics are on par with their ability to hide their agenda (when they try).
They are not the heros they think they are. They do not speak for “We, the people”.
Thank you Mr. Waite for your reporting. I was curious why Dominguez’s yard signs featured nothing school related. Now I know. Her website is similarly vapid and vague.
I hope others are inspired to vote for candidates who want public school to succeed, not succumb to dumb.
Run as anything but a liberal for the school board and get dragged by Mr. Waide on the front page. This is his third front page take down of a conservative. Charter schools-Desitine Preparatory, school board member Mr. Chad McFarland and now candidate and mother Ms. Dominguez. This is tiresome.
“Tiresome” certainly describes the fake Christians corrupting the teaching of civil rights in education. And trying to force it on the majority dishonestly.
That includes the corruption of the term “conservative”.
Most Americans are getting tired of it.
Good job Andrew!
Next- How about looking into the Desantis supporting local politicians who support similar attacks on education as well as women women’s rights and civil liberties.