BY STEVE NUZUM
The vast majority of students obviously can’t vote.
However we personally feel about the election, students did not choose the winners and losers. And yet elections have such profound consequences for young people.
I would imagine many students were extremely anxious leading up to the election. Whether they followed the nuances of policy debates and the armchair quarterbacking of news media-- and more students do exactly that than we probably think-- they have been paying attention and soaking up the mood of the adults in their lives.
And yet they have no control over the outcome, and almost none over the process.
Some teachers are already voicing concerns about a potential increase in problematic student behavior following the election, similar to what was reported in 2016.
Following the 2016 election, a survey of 10,000 educators from Teaching Tolerance found that significant majorities believed the election had negatively impacted school climate and student anxiety, as well as “verbal harassment, the use of slurs and derogatory language, and disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags”. And, specifically, 80% of teachers surveyed said they were seeing “heightened anxiety on the part of marginalized students, including immigrants, Muslims, African Americans and LGBT students.”
The anxiety and negative rhetoric seem to have increased even more during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, groups like Moms for Liberty and some state and national politicians seized on anxiety about the death toll, lockdowns (even in areas, like South Carolina, where lockdowns were extremely brief compared with those in much of the world), masks, and vaccines. Gathering political power from the conflicts-- including loud and occasionally violent clashes with school boards, teachers, and librarians-- some of these groups then seized on “CRT” and library books as new issues to stir up outrage as lockdowns, masks, and vaccine requirements were fairly quickly phased out.
The resulting rhetoric and policy decisions have probably only intensified. For example, I have already seen social media posts from educators wondering what to do if students repeat hateful post-election language, like far-right troll Nick Fuentes’ statement, “Your body, my choice. Forever”. And the FBI is currently investigating a post-election text campaign “informing” nonwhite Americans that they must report to a location to be enslaved.
As always, our kids are watching all of this.
While politicians in South Carolina and elsewhere use government power to formally ban books from schools under the very thin pretense that doing so will “protect” students from “harmful” ideas and information, kids, of course, live in the real world with the rest of us.
They are generally exposed to a wide variety of news and content on television and online-- including lots of extremely adult content many adults seem to be choosing to pretend to not know they are accessing, no matter how many library books we ban. (For example, multiple studies and surveys of American adolescents have found that the majority report having accessed pornographic materials online, frequently through social media.)
So while banning books and content is at best a kind of security theater (and at worst an intentional attack on the students whose experiences are represented in those books and in that content), our kids can see that we are doing this. And for LGBTQ+ students, or students of color, or non-Christian students, or any other students who may feel especially targeted or attacked, these are likely especially scary times. In order to gain power and influence elections, powerful politicians and groups have threatened the peace and security of these groups.
I’m not in the classroom anymore, so I certainly won’t lecture teachers on how to respond. In fact, I find myself wondering how I would show up for my students these days if I were still in the classroom. (I know that after hard times in the past, I usually tried to be extra open to how students were feeling, leaving space for them to talk, if they wanted, and to find distraction in a book or alternate conversation topic, if they didn’t. I also know that it has become much harder in the past few years for teachers and students to discuss current events at all.)
But I do think it’s important to consider the consequences of elections on those who can’t take part in them.
In South Carolina, we elected a large number of candidates who explicitly ran on a platform of increasing tension and hostility between communities and schools.
Around half of the South Carolina school board candidates who were explicitly endorsed by Moms for Liberty won or retained their seats. Moms for Liberty, both nationally and through its local chapters, has explicitly opposed books that represent the experiences of LGBTQ+ people and people of color, and books which have focused on issues like racial justice and systemic discrimination. Its members have disrupted school board meetings and doxed and harassed school staff and librarians. They are now in greater control of the school districts where the majority of children in this state attend school every day.
On the national level, we elected a president who has spread misinformation about public schools, including by repeating the bizarre claim that schools are performing gender reassignment surgeries on students, and has made anti-public education policies, such as abolishing the federal Department of Education-- which administers Title I funding and investigates allegations of discrimination against students-- a central part of his campaign. The election has given greater control over the executive and legislative branches of government to groups like the Heritage Foundation, which wrote Project 2025. Both the president elect and Project 2025 have vowed to roll back civil rights protections for students and slash free school lunch programs.
This cycle, some candidates on the right spent $215 million in advertising painting transgender Americans as a threat (with around $21 million in ads coming from the Trump campaign, itself.)
In other words, however any of us may feel about the election overall, there have been and will almost certainly continue to be increasingly negative consequences for many students. The political rhetoric of the campaign cast a brighter and more negative spotlight on LGBTQ+ youth (particularly transgender and nonbinary youth), immigrants, and children of immigrants.
These are, of course, students who, statistically, already suffer increased negative mental health consequences. And while many political organizations and political figures have spent the past several years trying to literally illegalize discussions of some of the ways in which these communities are suffering, cruel policies often pushed by the same groups and individuals have been having real and often measurable impacts on our students.
Again, these students did not choose these candidates or these policies. They certainly didn’t elect incumbents who have held onto office. They certainly didn’t draw South Carolina’s partisan (and racially discriminatory) voting district lines. And they didn’t create the issues on the ground (both real and imaginary) that became the basis of many electoral battles.
I believe what students need to see is adults— and certainly not just adults they see in school every day, who are often equally harmed by hateful political rhetoric and anti-school policies— standing up for what is right and taking action to defend both democratic institutions and marginalized communities. Now is the time to come together and agree wherever we can on ways to protect and reassure those who had no say in the outcome of this election.
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