SCHOOL RACE POLITICS

Like others, we bemoan the increasing injection of partisan politics in the contests for local school boards but it is now a fact of life in 2022. As much as anyone might want to write off the couple of candidates who are entangled in this web as they make runs for the Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills school boards, the two candidates appear to gaining some traction. In the Birmingham race is Colleen Zammit, who has done two mailings of oversized postcards, one of which was put out by the The Great Lakes Education Project, heavily funded by the DeVos family, GOP royalty in Michigan who continue to push for siphoning public tax dollars off for private and religious schools. Both Zammit and Lauren Wilson in the Bloomfield Hills district are endorsed by the right-leaning Get Kids Back To School PAC, which was launched by Matthew Wilk, at one point the president of the Northville Board of Education until the board removed him from that position after he posted on social media some anti-COVID preparedness messages. His group has now entered the debate over supposed “woke’ issues in schools. Both Zammitt and Wilson were recently featured at a fundraiser in Birmingham which we are told had a good turnout. It was described to us by an attendee who said the crowd included a number of “big last names,” including the likes of GOP congressional hopeful John James, who lives in the local area even though the district he seeks is really centered in Macomb County.