A Republican homeschooling mom came to love her public schools. Now she’s fighting other conservatives she thinks will destroy them
KOOTENAI COUNTY, Idaho — Moms answer other moms, especially when it involves their children and schools.
Yet here it was, Election Day in the parking lot of Lakeland High School in North Idaho and Suzanne Gallus — a hyperorganized Republican mom who once homeschooled her seven children and is now a public-school advocate and school board campaign operative — was staring at her phone. Stunned.
“Nobody’s responding,” she said, pacing in a teal puffer on the chilly November day. “I’m sending texts to these parents, right? Like ‘Hey, Tina, don’t forget to vote today.’ I sent 10 of those texts and nothing. And these are people I know!”
Not 20 feet away, Mary White sat in a tent with a heater, an “All Aboard the Trump Train” flag, and a sign identifying her as a “MAGA REPUBLICAN” who serves as the precinct 305 chair on the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, known locally as the KCRCC. She was doing what Gallus was — only for the other side, reflecting a division unfolding around the country that has traditional conservative Republicans opposing MAGA Republicans.
As trucks and cars pulled into the driveway heading for the polls, White stepped up to provide cards listing KCRCC-backed candidates on the ballot. Sporting a “Kootenai County Republican Women” name tag, White said that about “70 percent of the time, people vote for who’s on this list.”
The candidates that Gallus was supporting and advising were not.
Headlines around the country after Election Day announced a blue backlash to President Donald Trump and his policies. Success by moderate school board candidates over ultraconservative ones, including in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania — and reported losses by Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates in contested races — spurred talk of a tide turning away from extremists who in recent years have had success campaigning on efforts to control books, curricula and what teachers can say in classrooms.
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But the race for two seats on Lakeland Joint School District 272 board offered a frank reminder that supporting the ordinary nonpartisan function of public schools remains a firefight. The district of roughly 4,500 students is in Kootenai County (pronounced KOO-tun-ee), located in Idaho’s panhandle, where speeding freight trains cut through the landscape and which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024 (75 percent compared with 67 percent statewide).
The Lakeland races were not a referendum on school issues, but about allegiances in a deeply divided community of far-right Republicans and traditional conservatives. And they were, for a mom like Gallus, an indicator of challenges ahead for the public schools.
Public education has become tethered to far-right ambitions since former Trump adviser and political strategist Steve Bannon in 2021 urged hard-liners to take over school boards as an efficient way to gain power. In that vein, the outcome of the Lakeland races was shaped by the KCRCC, whose strategy of rating, vetting and recommending candidates is putting ultraconservatives in posts countywide, from school and library boards to city councils and mayors.
Their goal is to find and elect the most conservative candidates. Brent Regan, who chairs both the KCRCC and the far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation, a think tank, said by email that the party tries to “enhance freedom and prosperity by promoting fiscally and socially conservative candidates,” including some who are “well-qualified for office but don’t know how to participate in elections.” Critics argue candidates are chosen regardless of their experience as part of a deliberate strategy to weaken public institutions. “I’ve been told it’s called ‘disruption politics,’” said Gallus.
In August, she had helped to recruit two candidates — Chris Beaty, an affable “volleyball dad” and robotics engineer, and Allison Burnett, mom of three, school volunteer and co-owner with her husband of two popular local pizza restaurants — to challenge the KCRCC-backed candidates.
One of them, Jeff Brodhead, a retiree and recent transplant from Washington state with no experience in education, stumbled into his candidacy, saying that running “hadn’t really crossed my mind” until he was approached by the KCRCC. On his KCRCC candidate form posted on the group’s website ahead of Election Day, Brodhead shared that, “Our Creator CANNOT BE EXCLUDED FROM EDUCATION ANY MORE!” The other was David Quimby, a volunteer wrestling coach who had been on the board since 2022 and was backed by the KCRCC in his reelection bid. He has often voted as a block with the two ultraconservatives, Michelle Thompson and Ramona Grissom. The election results would determine control of the five-member board — and, to Gallus, the function and fate of the local public schools.
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Farmland and prairie in Koontenai County, Idaho, is giving way to an explosion of new housing developments settled by an influx of newcomers, many from California, Oregon and Washington, so-called “blue state refugees.” Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Lakeland High School, a polling place on Election Day, is one of 11 schools in Idaho’s Lakeland Joint School District, which enrolls about 4,500 students and covers some 385 square miles. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Lakeland school board candidate Jeff Brodhead who had not thought of running until he was recruited and then endorsed by the KCRCC, stands across the road from the Hauser Lake Fire Station, a polling location, in Hauser, Idaho, on Election Day. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Long-time Kootenai County residents, several of whom are one-time Lakeland school district educators, gather early every morning at CJ’s Family Tradition Restaurant & Lounge in Rathdrum, Idaho, to discuss topics, including the flood of newcomers and the contentious school board meetings. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Allison Knoll, a former drama teacher at Lakeland High School, was told to stop rehearsals for The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon because the play had not been approved by a curriculum review committee, a new process instituted by the school board. Knoll said her class was forced to have study hall for about five weeks as they awaited approval. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report
Gallus, a deeply religious Catholic with a waterfall of white hair, was not always a public school advocate. A Minnesota native, she moved from the Seattle area with her husband, Pete, to Idaho in 2012 for the same reasons many do, including a bigger house, more land and the outdoors. As her children reached school age, she dove into homeschooling: “I am sort of a teacher by nature,” she said.
But by 2017, she felt done. Her children, then ranging in age from a preschooler to teenagers, were playing sports and meeting friends. She felt they needed peers and exposure to perspectives other than her own. Just before Christmas that year, Suzanne and Pete proposed to their children that they attend public school the next fall. Her daughter Dorothy, a seventh grader who had friends at Lakeland Middle School from playing soccer, was particularly excited. Weeks later, Dorothy enrolled; her five school-age siblings joined her at local district schools (and a nearby charter) in the fall.
Not long after, Dorothy began exhibiting signs of anorexia nervosa. Gallus and her husband sought treatment for her, which later became complicated by Covid. At school, Gallus recalls the district being extraordinarily supportive. Office staff and teachers volunteered to help watch Dorothy eat (a common practice). Friends reported to Gallus on Dorothy’s progress. Administrators were flexible with her coursework.
Still, she struggled. In November 2020, Dorothy, then a high school junior, died by suicide.
Among the first to arrive at the Gallus home to comfort the family were administrators from Lakeland High School. They helped Gallus draft a letter to the school community. They coordinated rides to Dorothy’s funeral at a local Catholic church, and helped when students organized their own memorial for Dorothy. Gallus was moved “that people were not shying away from this, like they were actually coming into this with us,” she said.
The tragedy awakened Gallus to the rarely discussed complications of people’s lives. As she spent time with other parents whose children were in treatment for eating disorders, she learned that many also struggled with their gender identity, which, she said, compelled her to push against demands of rigid conformity.
“The consequences, the pain of appearing that everything is fine” is dangerous, said Gallus. “Everything is not fine.” She says recognizing the importance of acknowledging that explains why she is open about Dorothy’s ordeal. “I’m not ashamed that she was sick and she was in horrible pain for years,” she said. “And I don’t want my kids to be ashamed of that.”
Still, grief was a black hole that left Gallus foundering after Dorothy’s death. She’d sit alone at her children’s basketball games, as people felt unsure about approaching. Finally, some parents did, and asked her to join the Lakeland High School’s booster club board. “They knew me enough to know, ‘Well, maybe this is what she needs,’ right?” Gallus said. She started getting to know other parents, who soon raised a worry that something was up with the school board.
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Mary White, a precinct member of North Idaho’s Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, sits at right under a tent outside Lakeland High School, a polling location, on Election Day. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Mary White, whose sign identifies her as a “MAGA REPUBLICAN” and precinct member of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, hands a voter a list of the KCRCC-endorsed candidates. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Tim Remington, pastor of The Altar church, in his office in Rathdrum, Idaho. On Wednesday mornings this fall, he hosted the group that questioned candidates as part of the KCRCC rating, vetting and endorsement process, in the basement of his church. Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report -
Carter Knoll, Roy Gallus and Bentley Knoll hold signs for Lakeland school board candidates Chris Beaty and Allison Burnett in a supermarket parking lot in Rathdrum, Idaho, the evening before Election Day. (Carter and Bentley are the sons of Allison Knoll, a former Lakeland drama teacher who quit last spring; Roy is Suzanne Gallus’ youngest child). Credit: Joan Morse for The Hechinger Report
The Lakeland Joint School District, which has 11 schools, shines academically. Its test scores and graduation rates are consistently above state averages. A large rural district covering some 385 square miles, it still manages to support community schools in the area’s far flung neighborhoods. Lakeland schools are also one of the largest employers, making it an economic and community hub for families.
For decades, the district had operated on an even keel, a taken-for-granted point of local pride. People paid little attention in 2019 when Thompson, the current board chair, and Grissom, the current vice chair, beat out longtime school board members in a low-turnout race. The KCRCC didn’t make endorsements then. At the time, school board service was also not lighting up local community Facebook pages.
But as the KCRCC in November 2020 began a formal process to rate, vet and recommend local candidates, including for school board, people started tuning into meetings. Soon, parents including Gallus noticed Thompson and Grissom taking what some said was an aggressive tone toward administrators and staff during meetings. This was not the collaborative spirit parents were used to. (Grissom declined to be interviewed or to answer emailed questions. When reached by phone, Thompson declined an interview but said via email that she does not “believe I’m aggressive or combative” and is, rather, “passionate about protecting children and ensuring parent rights aren’t trampled on.”)
Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents
In 2021, tensions grew and Thompson faced a recall, which failed. It was also when Gallus recruited Bob Jones, a retired superintendent, who won, and helped Mark Worthen, a 30-year veteran teacher (he died in 2023) face Quimby for an open seat. Quimby won, and soon used his platform to complain about building maintenance and question spending on classroom materials, suggesting that teachers could write their own curriculum.
The 2023 school board elections foreshadowed a new intensity. Grissom and Thompson won KCRCC nods — and reelection. The board soon instituted a new review process for teaching materials that supplement curriculum, far exceeding what was typical. Any book or video teachers planned to use in class had to be submitted to a committee of parents, local residents and school board members. Reviews often took weeks.
Theater teacher Allison Knoll felt the impact. While her students were rehearsing The Brother’s Grimm Spectaculathon, a play based on the classic fairy tales, her principal, Jimmy Hoffman, called her to the office and told her to stop. Hoffman confirmed this, adding that all materials “need to be approved before they can be put in front of our children.” As a result, said Knoll, “We had study hall for about five weeks.”
Some on the evaluating committee labeled the play “satanic,” she was told. They accused Knoll of teaching “witchcraft,” she recalled, adding that, “every fairy tale has witches.” The play was ultimately OK’d, but only after students had lost weeks of rehearsal. Knoll selected plays based on who enrolls in her classes and their specific interests. “I don’t know the makeup of that until they walk in there,” she said.
When she and other teachers shared their frustration over the review process with the board, said Knoll, we “were treated like we were a nuisance.” Knoll, who considered herself among the “most conservative” drama teachers in the area, felt targeted. She had also tried to start an extracurricular knitting club (students had asked her to), but after twice completing a club application for school board approval (a requirement added in 2022) and being told it lacked state learning standards, which she found puzzling, she dropped the effort.
By last spring, Knoll had reached her limit, and quit. She read her letter of resignation aloud at a school board meeting and posted it on social media.
In an interview, Quimby said the new review process protects students from being taught content to which parents might object. Quimby, though, said for the most part he doesn’t read proposed materials himself and instead leans on teacher friends to help. “I hate reading,” he said. “I ask them if it’s a good book or not and they tell me.” Thompson said in an email that the process is “very streamlined.”
The friction between the school board and district teachers and staff was not just over policies. There was also money, specifically the supplemental levies that are a fixture of school funding in Idaho, which has the lowest rate of per-pupil spending in the United States. These levies are crucial in North Idaho, where districts are geographically large (think bus routes) and must compete for staff with nearby Washington, which offers higher pay.
In Lakeland, the levy provides about 25 percent of the district budget. Because they expire after two years, levies are a constant at the ballot box. In Lakeland, for decades, they had routinely passed. But then in March 2023, the district put the supplemental levy before voters — and it failed for the first time in more than 15 years.
The school board members had to decide: Should they try again in May? It was a common tactic in Idaho. Grissom opposed putting it on the May ballot. The other school board members, however, voted in favor.
Gallus went to work. She formed Friends of Lakeland Schools, a political action committee, and launched a swift and intense campaign to support the levy. She cajoled business owners and distributed fliers and signs. She targeted voter turnout among parent voters, those most likely to support the levy. It narrowly passed. The success of the campaign cemented Gallus as a local political organizer.
Around this time, she also started connecting with other school levy supporters, and found herself getting involved with Republican activists who were members of the North Idaho Republican PAC, a group that has emerged in opposition to the KCRCC. Christa Hazel was among them. Hazel had once been a KCRCC member, but had grown upset at what she described as tolerance for alt-right views, including white supremacy and antisemitism. Her father, Wayne F. Manis, is a storied retired FBI agent who prosecuted white supremacist groups in the 1980s. She quit the KCRCC in 2017 and publicly shared why.
Related: The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives
Tensions in Lakeland spilled out into the open last November when the supplemental levy run every two years for school funding failed — yet again. (State law no longer allows levies to be run in March, so it ran in November.) Quickly, the board organized community meetings to decide whether to trim the ask to $7.5 million instead of $9.5 million per year before running it again in May 2025. At one such meeting, Quimby criticized a budget line for staff stipends that compensates them for extra work, like mentoring first-year teachers.
“We’ve got to cut them away,” he said. “Nobody in the real world gets these stipends.” Many in the crowd were furious. “People get paid for their work!” one person shouted.
Board members Thompson and Grissom voted against putting even the lower levy on the ballot. To get it on, Jones, then 81 and home recovering from a heart attack, cast a phone call vote to yield a 3-2 majority, drawing loud applause from the audience as he joined the meeting. (Thompson said in an email that her “opposition was to the superintendent’s recommendations” around proposed cuts, although the vote determined if the levy would be put before voters.)
The lower levy passed, but forced the district to cut 25 positions, along with bus routes. Now, some students get picked up at a Dollar General instead of their homes, angering parents. Weeks after the vote, the superintendent, Lisa Arnold, announced she was retiring early. She cited health issues but acknowledged the levy fight “played a little part” in her decision.
The new superintendent, Rusty Taylor, comes from a small district in Arizona and is also a high school and Division II college basketball referee, which he believes helps him in his new post. He pointed out that after a non-call in the final seconds of a game last year, a coach “got in my face and yelled with all he had. And I didn’t say anything.” That training, he said, is handy now. “It does you no good to react,” said Taylor, who vowed “to build trust with the board, and whoever’s on the board.”
On Election Day, the KCRCC leadership was determined to ensure that those they tapped would prevail. The group’s recommendations were hard to miss: Every voter had been mailed a printed card of the candidates it was backing, and giant replicas of those cards stood in public spots.
Tim Remington, the pastor at The Altar, a local church, helps to coordinate the process for questioning candidates and rating them. Following that rating, which unfolds in hourslong sessions in the basement of the church, the full KCRCC votes on recommendations. Incumbents have to deliver on the party’s agenda to win fresh support before the next election, said Remington, a one-time Republican state legislator with a bristly gray beard.
As a result, he said, “We really are getting the most conservative people.” The process is so effective that, according to Regan, Republicans from Texas, Washington, Arizona and other central committees in Idaho have come to observe and learn about it.
Burnett, the mom and pizza store owner, decided not to seek any political endorsements for fear of alienating customers aligned with either the KCRCC or the North Idaho Republicans. Still, she thought it wise to introduce herself to both groups, and was struck by the questions she was asked at her KCRCC meeting.
“My first question was what were my opinions on gay marriage,” she recalled. “I just immediately thought, you know, ‘How does this relate to the school board?’” Then she realized the questions were hardly about her school board bona fides: “They’re trying to determine how red you are.”
Her opponent, Brodhead, was recruited by the KCRCC, and easily won its support. On Election Day, he stood under a tent near the Hauser Lake Fire Station, a polling location, with a handgun peeking out from his waistband and a T-shirt proclaiming “Jesus is Enough!” that he showed off by lifting up his gray sweatshirt.
He said creationism should be taught in school alongside evolution (which, he said, is “a theory”). Why was he running? “To protect kids from what’s being pushed from the left, which is atheism,” and, he said, “satanic.” When asked if he had evidence of this happening in Lakeland schools, Brodhead said, “I don’t want it to happen. So it’s a preventative thing.” Brodhead also said that his “wouldn’t be a viable campaign” without KCRCC support: “There are a lot of people who listen to what they have to say.”
That was precisely what Gallus had worried about. As voters in vehicles slowed outside Lakeland High School on Election Day, every one seemed to have a KCRCC ballot card in hand. Gallus was concerned about Beaty’s prospects because Quimby was well known. But Burnett, she felt, would carry the day.
Later that evening, the results showed Quimby and Brodhead the winners. Come January, the five-member Lakeland school board will boast a 4-1 ultraconservative majority.
For Gallus, a veteran at rallying support and getting out votes, those unanswered texts told the story. In election after election, parents had shown up to keep the schools doing what was, well, just normal. They were drained by constant calls to arms. Observed Gallus, “They’re just sick of this.”
Following the results, Gallus said she was by turns “despondent” and “trying not to be too dramatic.” Yet she has a laundry list of worries, from levies failing (or not being brought) that likely would mean cuts to sports, teachers, nurses and counselors, and to bus routes — and even to school closures. She worries about teachers departing or teaching in a climate of fear. She is concerned about the board “bringing a ‘Christian nationalism’ type curriculum into the district” and, above all, making “decisions based on a political agenda, … not doing what’s best for kids.”
Next year, in Idaho, even bigger fights are ahead. In addition to 105 legislative contests, seven statewide posts, including governor and superintendent of public instruction, are up for election. Given that all of the statewide officers and 90 of the legislators are Republicans, the May 19 primary will be more critical than next November and is expected to be a showdown between far-right Republican challengers and traditional Republican incumbents. Remington said the KCRCC is sharing its rating, vetting and recommendation program with ultraconservative party officials around Idaho.
“It’s going to go statewide because it works,” he said.
For Hazel and Gallus, that KCRCC ballot card has put local politics, including the Lakeland school board, in a chokehold. They believe that the key to tilting power back to traditional conservative Republicans is to gain control of the KCRCC itself. The group holds elections for its 74 precinct seats every other year; it’s happening again this May. In 2024, Gallus helped Hazel recruit and coach traditional conservative Republicans in the Lakeland area in a bid to take over; they won 30 seats, but need at least 37 — the goal for May. KCRCC chair Regan, who critics say has ruled with an iron fist, only won his chairmanship by four votes. Hazel is determined this spring to orchestrate his defeat and that of KCRCC extremists.
The recent election revealed not just the challenges ahead for the Lakeland schools, but laid plain that elections — even in a small community — have become about aligning political teams, about the ability of those in power to “get and keep people on your side,” said Gallus. Which is why Hazel’s bid to reclaim the KCRCC for traditional conservative Republicans feels urgent. People are already volunteering to knock on doors, said Hazel. “May is going to be a serious slog,” she said, “but my crowd is ready for it.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about North Idaho was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Idaho Education News. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Sign up for the Idaho EdNews newsletter.
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