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- Opponents of a Texas school district's diversity plan just won control of the school board.
- Andrew Yeager beat his opponent in a landslide to secure the seventh seat on the board in Tuesday's special election.
- Yeager was backed by the Southlake Families PAC, which spent more than $37,000 on the campaign in just one month.
Opponents of a Texas school district's diversity plan just won control of the school board after Tuesday's special election that saw thousands poured into the race by a conservative political action committee.
Andrew Yeager – a self-described conservative who ran to fill the seventh seat on the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) Board in Southlake, Texas – beat his opponent, Stephanie Williams, in a landslide, amassing 65.95% of the vote.
Yeager was backed by the Southlake Families PAC, a group dedicated to "advocating for our strong community values and tradition of excellence," according to its website.
Southlake Families describes itself as "unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values."
According to campaign finance documents, the PAC donated more than $37,000 into the race in just one month before the election, from September to October 2021.
Yeager campaigned against the district's proposed Cultural Competence Action Plan, a diversity plan to be carried out in the district over the course of five years in an effort to "strengthen expectations of students" in the district and "emphasize cultural awareness," according to a draft of the plan.
The diversity plan was first proposed in July 2020 to be adopted the following month, but was then postponed until at least 2021 as the school district prioritized pandemic-related issues and hiring a new superintendent, Spectrum News 1 reported.
The creation of the plan was in response to a viral 2018 Snapchat video in which CISD students were heard chanting racial slurs, NBC News reported. But some parents pushed back against the plan, part of a larger nationwide backlash against so-called "critical race theory."
The district was under fire just last month after an administrator in the district was recorded telling teachers to "balance out" classroom libraries with "opposing" views on topics such as the Holocaust.