In a way, Shannon Johnson sees herself as a contributor to the conflicts that brought Billings to this electoral juncture. The other seeks to maintain the district’s institutional momentum and focus on ongoing efforts its present members are already engaged in. One slate of candidates has been inspired to action by a board it views as unresponsive to parental concerns. Since then, the list of issues has grown in parallel with national controversies about critical race theory, objections to specific books and socially oriented material in math curricula. Four of the south-central Montana city’s eight candidates hail from a grassroots group called Make Masking Optional, which rallied against the August 2021 decision by Billings Public School Superintendent Greg Upham to mandate masks across the district. Similar to Missoula’s busy school board election cycle, the dynamics in Billings trace back to the intense division over school masking policies last summer and fall.
For the last maybe eight years, I’m thinking, between six and eight years, we have not had an election where it was a contested race.” What else you need to know: “In fact, most of the time it’s election by acclamation by the board because there’s only one person. “Previous elections have been pretty quiet,” McCulloch said. For incumbent Scott McCulloch, who faces two challengers this cycle, the issue is indicative of the unusual forces at play in 2022, characterized by energy and competitiveness the district hasn’t witnessed in decades. Three incumbents who participated in the vote face challengers critical of their shared position, and candidates in the contest for an open fourth seat are similarly situated on opposite sides of the divide. That episode is one of a growing number that have come to define the school board election in Billings this spring.
“At the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of passionate parents who love our kids fiercely, and I’m not going to let any government body tell us what we will or will not do.” Billings school board candidate Shannon JohnsonĪfter half an hour of internal debate, the board voted unanimously to retain both books. They heard from concerned parents and advocates on both sides of the question, some voicing the same objections raised in Texas and Virginia and others urging the board to defend LGBTQ inclusivity by keeping the books. Members of Montana’s self-styled parental rights movement objected to what they considered inappropriate or obscene content in both books, and the removal challenge by a Billings parent ushered the national controversy onto the trustees’ agenda. The books - an autobiographical novel called “Lawn Boy” and the graphic-novel-style memoir “Gender Queer” - had become flashpoints elsewhere in the country as far back as last fall. But the bulk of the meeting - roughly three hours - centered on a single agenda item: the requested removal of two books from high school libraries. Trustees discussed potential adjustments to career and technical education at the high school level, and deliberated about extending the district’s lease on a facility housing its early childhood intervention services. 24, the Billings School Board tackled a range of issues that any viewer of the virtual meeting might have considered routine, even mundane. They supply all sorts of clues about vital statistics (birth, marriage, and death announcements), obituaries, local news, biographical sketches, legal notices, immigration, migration, and shipping information and other historical items that place our ancestors in the context of the society in which they lived.Over the course of four hours on Jan. Newspapers can be used to find valuable genealogical information about historical events in the lives of our ancestors. Check the local library or historical society in the area in which your ancestors lived for more information about other available newspapers. The date range represented in this database is not necessarily the complete published set available. Over time, the name of a newspaper may have changed and the time span it covered may not always be consistent. The images for this newspaper can be browsed sequentially, or via links to specific images, which may be obtained through the search results. The accuracy of the index varies according to the quality of the original images. The newspapers can be browsed or searched using a computer-generated index. This database is a fully searchable text version of the newspaper for the following years: 1910-77. Billings Gazette newspaper was located in Billings, Montana.
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