by Jake Nichols
My name is Jake Nichols. My wife and I live in Carmel, Indiana. I’m a father of three daughters, all of them students in the Carmel-Clay School District. I also help run my family’s business, a truck dealership with 700 employees and deep roots in central Indiana. We’ve been blessed to watch our daughters grow into thoughtful, independent women within a community that is defined by its compassion and inclusiveness. It is a community that we are determined to give back to.
This July I explored the possibility of running for my local school board. The five-member board is responsible for financial management, policy alignment with the law, and supervision of superintendent. Our schools are great, but keeping them great is a huge endeavor. Like everywhere else, we have concerns about the safety and health of our kids, the recruitment and retention of top-notch educators, and not over-burdening our community with onerous taxes. After a lot of deliberation, I concluded that my skillset as a business and community leader would have a positive impact on the board and that if I really wanted my daughters to get the very best from their education, I needed to step forward.
But I was also hesitant. Over the past few years, our school board meetings have been plagued by heated protests. Our teachers, administrators, and school board members have been the target of harassment, both online and in person. The grievances expressed reflect a familiar pattern of national talking points; policies put into place to promote diversity, equality and inclusion are undermining academic standards and even somehow threatening the very physical safety of our children. None of this rhetoric was consistent with my experience as a parent in this school system.
There has been a robust debate in response to these issues. The district has provided compelling data. Parents and teachers have stepped forward with concrete examples of the efficacy and innocuousness of the policies in question. The community has responded with open, yet discerning minds. Tough questions have been asked, but instead of providing any semblance of answers, the activists at the center of this drama have only provided more fearmongering and misinformation, much of it funded from elsewhere.
For my part, I had started this journey perhaps naïvely believing that the issues confronting a school board were so basic and so urgent as to transcend politics. Even in our hyper-polarized times, surely a consensus still exists in support of giving kids the very best education. We need schools to be open, and safe. We need our teachers to be taken care of and our parents heard, and we need to do all this in a manner that is economically sustainable. There is an awful lot for a school board to do, and not a lot of extra time to devote ideological rabbit holes. For these beliefs, I’ve found myself within the crosshairs of those determined to take hostage our most dire civic functions.
Across our nation, aspiring officeholders are confronting similar realities. Extremism, in all its forms, is on the ballot this year. It isn’t a contest between the right and the left, but rather between those who still believe that democracy can be a vehicle for the public good and those who see it as an easily hijacked vulnerability of a free society. I’ve been a politician for a couple of months. This experience has given me the opportunity to meet my neighbors that I would have not gotten the chance to do so. On the one hand, the rage and the distortion I see on a daily basis are extremely dispiriting. Sometimes it is enough to make any decent person wish to retreat to the civility of private life, but I’ve also had a chance to witness all of the positive energy that powers our republic. I’ve seen the force of civic engagement, that a handful of concerned citizens can rival kings and tyrants. I’ve seen that my community can do a little better and that a lot of us determined to do so.
As part of our commitment to an informed electorate, Indy Politics is running articles from various candidates as to why they are running. If you are a candidate, feel free to e-mail us at abdul@indypolitics.org.
