Wenatchee Students Speak Out Against Propaganda Designed To Influence School Board Elections
And Chelan County Auditor Skip Moore predicts a win for incumbent Wenatchee School Board President Maria Iñiguez
Wenatchee High School students Victoria Mena, Israel Valencia and Evan Williams this week voiced their displeasure with a piece of political propaganda designed to look like a newspaper that arrived in about 6000 Wenatchee mailboxes ahead of the Nov. 7 school board elections. The mailer, featuring articles by Wenatchee School Board candidates Randy Smith and Tricia Cleek, was produced by a Chelan-based activist named Glenn Dobbs. He paid about $5000 to produce and send it to Wenatchee voters before election day, and it included the same talking points many Wenatchee voters have seen on their daily commutes or seen on handouts distributed in workplaces like the Chelan County PUD in the months ahead of election day.
The campaign was a full-court press that saw Chelan-Douglas Health District board members and the local Moms for Liberty chapter join with religious leaders and professional political activists like Dobbs to convince Wenatchee voters that Wenatchee Public Schools are failing, students are being indoctrinated with “transgender ideology” and “liberal wokism.”
All of those sources also insinuated that the Wenatchee School District is committing fraud by allowing students who don’t meet state standards to graduate.
“Test scores plummeting, graduation scores rising. How does that work?” Grace City Church Pastor Josh McPherson said during a sermon on Sept. 24.
That type of rhetoric makes students like Mena and Williams angry.
“I feel offended,” Williams said. “Because they don’t pull the right info. They don’t actually talk with the students. They just kind of twist everything to fit their own ideology when none of that is really true.”
Dobbs’ claim that Wenatchee schools are “failing” is not true. According to the data on the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s website, the district is a bit below the state average. But that doesn’t make for a dramatic headline. It’s simple enough to check the sources Dobbs and company cite, but to make it easier I’m linking to the OSPI’s state average “report card” as well as the Wenatchee School District, Eastmont School District, Cascade School District, Cashmere School District, and the Lake Chelan School District data so you can compare the numbers yourself.
But for Mena partisan hyperbole directed at the system in general isn’t the biggest issue. In her mind, it’s Dobbs’ framing of Wenatchee High School French teacher Mathias Needham as some sort of communist agent poisoning students’ minds with revolutionary rhetoric that is unacceptable.
“It’s putting a bad name to that teacher and this stuff can not only harm our school but his job,” Mena said. “If they see that and thought it was true they can possibly fire him. And he would have nothing left.”
The article Mena was referring to was ostensibly penned by Dobbs and in it he accuses the district of adopting “overtly Marxist programs which promote the revolutionary ideology of Oppressors vs. Oppressed; the ‘Oppressors’ being White Males, Achievers, Parents, Catholics, Christians, Conservatives, Police, republicans, Patriots and Capitalists” and Needham of providing a safe space for the celebration of that ideology.
Yet according to the original article in the WHS student newspaper “The Apple Leaf” written by James Koepke, Needham simply wanted to give students space to talk about ideas that are unpopular for some folks.
“Marxism club’s basic goal is not to spread political ideologies to the public but to offer a safe space for students to be themselves without judgment as well as de-bunking commonly accepted myths and stigmas surrounding marxism and related ideology,” Koepke wrote.
Mena also called out Josh McPherson for his role as a leading critic of the Wenatchee School District in the community.
“Another prominent showing of this type of ideology is in Grace City Church,” she said. “He (McPherson) is harming the school district, the students, the teachers and religion itself. It’s making Christians, and anyone who has a religion, look bad.”
The pair expressed their frustration with folks like McPherson, Dobbs, Dick Black and others after years of the school board, district staff, teachers, and students being bullied and even threatened because of the Covid-19 pandemic response.
But was Dobbs’ mailer, and the coordinated campaign it was a part of, successful?
Not for Tricia Cleek. She lost her race against incumbent Martin Barron by about 1500 votes. Randy Smith, the only other author with a byline in Dobbs’ mailer, currently trails Maria Iñiguez, the incumbent and Wenatchee School Board president, by just 19 votes. There are 111 ballots left to count. Those will be tabulated on Nov. 28, according to the Chelan County Auditor’s website.
But Chelan County Auditor Skip Moore said he expects Iñiguez’s lead to hold.
"Nineteen votes out of 111, the odds of them all going one way or the other are slim," Moore told KPQ. "And usually, the trend holds that has been established."
The goal, which was to pack the Wenatchee School Board with a right-wing majority comprised of former Bethesda and current GCC-member Tricia Cleek, Julie Norton and Randy Smith, was not accomplished.
Time will tell if Moore’s prediction is right, but he’s most qualified and experienced person in the county to make it.
Time will also tell if right-wing activists like Dobbs, Black, McPherson, Bill Sullivan, as well as local political bosses like Cary Condotta will change tactics because of their failure in these school board elections.
My Two Cents
The decision to use the term “right-wing” instead of “conservative” is intentional. There was a coordinated partisan campaign to influence the 2023 Wenatchee School Board elections and to ignore that is journalistic malpractice, in my opinion.
However, I don’t want to frame these types of shady, probably illegal tactics as something a traditional conservative voter would condone. The “win at all costs” mentality, along with the willingness to lie and frame opponents not just as folks you disagree with but as literal traitors are so toxic and dishonorable that it’s an insult to conservatives to call what Dobbs and Co. did this year conservatism. These types of behaviors are emblematic of a movement within modern conservatism that threatens to consume the Republican party and someday become the norm, but for the moment campaigning like this isn’t mainstream enough to be called simply “conservatism” or “Republican.” Therefore, I chose to use the term right-wing. I’m sure some will think I am being too generous, but c'est la vie.
One other thing I would like to call attention to is the fact that the Iñiguez/Smith race proves how every vote really does count, and voter turnout was very low in this election.
According to the 2021 census, there are about 80,000 people in Chelan County. According to the auditor’s website, there are 51,438 registered voters in Chelan County and only about 22,000 cast a ballot in the Nov. 7 elections. That’s less than a quarter of the population making decisions for everyone else.
Local elections make a big impact on our daily lives and the lives of kids who attend public schools. If you have a child, or a grandchild, or own property, or simply care about living in a healthy, functioning society you should care very much about school board elections.
If there is any bias in my writing, or within me, it is the sincere desire to see more people participate in our democracy and for the political process to reward public service – not personal ambition fueled by rancor and divisiveness.
Nov. 26 Update: An Audio Interview with the Author of the Marxism Club Article
I sat down with James Koepke, the author of the WHS Apple Leaf article mentioned in Dobb’s mailer, on Nov. 22 at Pybus Public Market. We talked about what the mailer made him think and feel when he learned about it.
You can listen to that here:
Cudos to these young people for speaking out! And I agree with your distinction between conservative and right wing. In fact I might add the adjective extreme right wing. As to voting. How dang hard is it to to fill out the ballot mailed to you and drop it in a mail box! In these times, voting is more important than ever!
The GOP is no more IMHO. I label them as being in a cult and MAGAntz. That Americans in general are so laid back re keeping their democracy by not voting is a horrible disservice to the millions of service folks who fought for just that freedom and too many died preserving it. V O T E !!!