They wanted to talk about vaccines-some even wanted to talk about the infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci. He and other parents wanted to talk about mask mandates. “They’re fucking filibustering,” he said. One man turned to the group, shaking his head. But as the meeting wore on, some of the unmasked attendees became noticeably annoyed. The 62 people in the audience-40 masked, 22 unmasked-mostly sat patiently and watched.

The board honored two students who had been named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, and it listened to a report on a recent budget audit before its members lobbed questions at the presenters. The principal of Indian Hill Elementary brought a video to show how students had played with engineering manipulatives that a teacher had purchased with money from a grant she’d received. Most of the October meeting’s agenda was standard fare for a school board. One woman in Grand Blanc was arrested in August for threatening the county’s health director, who had issued a mask mandate for students in kindergarten through the sixth grade.

The acrimony had spilled out beyond the board meetings as well. Though nothing particularly divisive was on this agenda, recent meetings had featured verbal disputes between board members and jeers from the audience, as well as raucous public-comment periods when masking policies, “ critical race theory,” and vaccines were discussed, and when audience members trained their ire on others in the crowd as much as on elected officials. Grand Blanc’s experience has been no different. The cost of these fights is immense: The basic functioning of one of the workhorses of the American system-an institution whose thankless and typically invisible work powers the country’s schools-is impossible when it is swept up in the nation’s divisive politics. But since the early days of the pandemic, school boards have become the center of some of the most explosive fights in American life-over book bans, mask and vaccine requirements, and how and whether the history of racism is taught. School-board meetings do not have a reputation for excitement. If there were additional interruptions, the meeting would be adjourned. “Please keep the board’s need to conduct school business in mind as you observe our meeting tonight.” If the audience could not abide by the board’s rules, she said, the room would be cleared for a recess. “The board of education is gathered here tonight to conduct school business,” the president of the board, Susan Kish, said, reading aloud from a prepared statement. Then things deviated from the standard script. The board and its constituents stood in unison to pledge their allegiance to the flag before observing a customary moment of silence. The meeting began with a single bang of a gavel. A group of unmasked community members slid their chairs closer together a few women stepped to the side to pray. The audience piled into the six-feet-apart, gray folding chairs in the cafetorium.

On October 25, a cold wind whipped against the cars filing into the East Middle School parking lot in Grand Blanc, Michigan, for a school-board meeting. At first, it looked as though it might be. I t should have been an unremarkable community gathering.

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