To Central Bucks School District parents, Change your grandstanding into action

What are you doing the first Tuesday of every month?
Many parents in the Central Bucks School District (CBSD) started attending school board meetings this year for the chance to participate in public comments. Each speaker had three minutes allocated for their comments, but the number of public comments skyrocketed recently, commonly extending school board meetings longer than three hours.
These public comments have become like bread and circuses; raucous parents masquerade divisive social issues as concern for their child’s education. Parents and community members debate critical race theory, mask mandates, bathroom policies for transgender students, a Gay Straight Alliance student library, and other hurtful, unproductive social issues.
For the students and teachers, more important problems plague them. Mental health and behavioral issues skyrocketed, as evidenced by a substantial increase in suicides and attempted suicides as well as numerous counts of vandalism. Instead of feeding into unproductive partisanship, I urge parents to spend their Tuesdays at home, checking in with their kids’ mental health.
I graduated from Central Bucks West in 2019 and my sister attends Lenape Middle School. As a student, discussions of the school board rarely graced our family’s dinner conversations, but now it is a staple of our weekly family Zoom call.
Recently, the New York Times’ podcast, The Daily, featured Central Bucks in its two-part series, The School Board Wars. Walking around my university campus listening to parent comments, I blinked back tears. Even three years past my graduation, the harmful comments parents made struck me.
For my sister, her school days are bookmarked by her peers’ struggling with parents condemning their identities and beliefs. With the desire to stay informed, she listened to a couple of school board meetings. Instead of being empowered with her knowledge, she is now jaded and hopeless, frustrated with the callousness of parents that seem more interested in partisanship than the issues she and her peers face daily.
As with all of us, the pandemic transformed students’ lives. Most notably, the lack of regular socialization exacerbated mental health concerns; creating immense challenges for adolescents that may not possess positive coping mechanisms other older people have previously developed.

To help assist Central Bucks students, the district sponsored, “Crushing Stigma: Building Mental Strength for Life,” a panel event aimed at parents featuring mental health professionals. To promote this event, many secondary students spoke on the importance of mental health to their daily experiences. Students know the importance of their mental health, so why are their parents arguing about mask mandates instead of protecting what’s going on in their kids’ heads?
An easy way to improve teenagers’ mental health is to create meaningful family conversations over family dinners. Research in 2012 found a positive correlation between frequency of family dinners with an increase in positive coping mechanisms and life satisfaction.
The researchers note that frequent family dinners did not correlate with zero poor coping mechanisms – like substance abuse or self-harm – but greatly decreased the likelihood of reliance on these mechanisms. Personally, I’ve been plagued by a pervasive family history of mental illness.
In this semester, one of my most mentally and emotionally challenging years, I found myself drifting back to the strong relationships I developed with my family over dinner. Those relationships are far more long lasting than the inconvenience of wearing a mask during class. Instead of attending the school board meetings, parents should impact their children’s lives directly by connecting with their family over dinner.
I value engagement in local politics, and I don’t want to dismiss the importance of being politically active. However, if parents still desire connection to local politics, CB Engage encourages parents to participate in the school board’s sub-committees. Involvement in the curriculum committee or the policy committee can directly influence daily life in the classroom, whereas the public comment section leads to grandstanding on social issues but minimal action.
So, what are you doing during the school board meeting next month? I hope you have committed to supporting your children and connecting with your family. Your kids’ mental health depends on it.
Cassidy Pitts of Doylestown is a student at Penn State University.

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