The upcoming May 18 election doesn’t have much on the ballot, which makes it tempting to skip or overlook—but please don’t! In particular, there are four positions on the Bend-La Pine school board up for grabs, and it seems that there is a very shady group of candidates running for each that should raise red flags for anyone reading closely.

In particular, these candidates are: Jon Haffner, Maria Lopez-Dauenhauer, Gregg Henton, and Wendy Imel. If you’ve browsed the Voters’ Pamphlet you’ll note that they are the ones with no prior experience and no endorsements or qualifications, only meandering short personal essays about how kids haven’t been able to be in school due to COVID-19… even though kids are back in school, and have been for a while now. Start digging a little deeper, though, and the red flags start to pop up.

It starts with the fact that all four of these candidates have entirely refused to participate in any candidate forums, interviews, or any public engagement—something unheard of for anyone running for public office. The Bulletin outlined it on April 19th:

This year, something unprecedented has happened to Carol Loesche, president of the League of Women Voters of Deschutes County: Four Bend-La Pine School Board candidates have completely ignored her calls and emails to participate in her organization’s traditional nonpartisan candidate forum.

Those four candidates are Jon Haffner, Gregg Henton, Wendy Imel and Maria Lopez-Dauenhauer.

“It’s just wrong,” said Loesche. “Their job is to let the voters know what their positions on things are. To not even participate, how are we supposed to know what they stand for?”

The Bend-La Pine School Board races, like all Oregon school board races, are nonpartisan. However, Loesche said she was told by another League of Women Voters member that the four candidates who appear to be skipping the forum are Republican-affiliated.

The Bulletin editorial board has also had difficulties setting up interviews with these four candidates, according to Richard Coe, editorial page editor. Henton and Lopez-Dauenhauer have responded via phone or email, but have not committed to an actual interview, he said.

Haffner, Henton and Lopez-Dauenhauer did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Bulletin’s city desk. Imel briefly spoke with The Bulletin on Friday, but a full interview could not be arranged by Monday afternoon.

Bizarre, and this didn’t go unnoticed by The Source Weekly’s endorsements either:

During this election season, we’ve extended invitations to candidates in all contested school board and parks board races. Unfortunately, not every candidate chose to take part in our interviews, nor the forums conducted by the League of Women Voters and The Bulletin. In some cases, the candidates chose not to respond at all or to disparage this newspaper in their refusal to participate.

Democracy (and political candidacy) is not an armchair sport.

For voters to fully understand who they’re voting for, it’s paramount for candidates to take part in forums that introduce ideas, and yes, sometimes even controversial topics.

The Source rightfully endorses their extremely qualified opponents, as does The Bulletin.

Seriously—if you run for public office, you do the public work and engagements. Period. If you don’t, then you’re simply not qualified to serve.

Oh, we’re just getting warmed up.

Users on Reddit have been discussing these candidates, and in particular you may want to check out this thread: A warning to Bend-La Pine school district parents. And then there’s this thread which pointed to the Bend Votes blog which discovered that Lopez-Dauenhauer and Imel showed up on Fox News to discuss the election(!).

So, these candidates refuse to engage with the community they propose to directly impact but instead go on Laura Ingraham’s racist Fox program to push their crazy right-wing ideas. Got it.

As it turns out, these four aren’t so interested in “kids back in schools” (already done) as they are in taking over the local school board to push some crackpot conservative Republican agenda, and I can’t sum this up nearly as well as Laura Camacho has done here.

The opponents to the candidates I’ve endorsed in my Voting Guide for the Deschutes County Special Election of 2021 are members of “Schoolboard2021” – running on the same platform, and endorsed by the ED300 group, whose agenda is to serve the “30,000+ Oregonian parents advocating for getting students back to school full-time.”

In all appearances, it seems like an attempted coup of the Bend-La Pine school board by riding on the ginned up emotions of parents who have bought into the “Kids Back” movement and who will vote for anyone touting this single issue.

I think the “Kids Back” movement is possibly being co-opted by opportunists to get unwitting parents to vote with them on this single issue that they hold dear, in order to install politicians who will introduce an entire agenda that they hope their single issue voters will just ignore for the sake of getting “Kids Back” into the classroom.

It’s crucial to see what is happening now, so we can head it off at the pass.

Conservatives groups have long been infiltrating local political positions – especially the school board, as it has so much influence on kids and families – so that they can stem the tide of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (derided as “political correctness,” “wokeness,” or “socialism”), which they see as a threat.

I’ve only lifted a few select paragraphs from that essay, but Camacho has done the heavy lifting here and you need to go read her full post.

Do not vote for these people; they are incredibly shady and at best, they are unwitting puppets of the organizations that want to get a foothold in local politics to push conservative “values” (i.e., white supremacy). At worst they are actively awful people who I guarantee don’t have any interest in what’s best for kids and education.

Now is the time to vote for their eminently qualified opponents who will shepherd real progress: Carrie McPherson Douglass, Marcus LeGrand, Shirley Olson, and Janet Sarai Llerandi.

Let’s get it done and done right.