School community organizing can engage, empower, and equip racially, politically, and culturally diverse community members to shape school policymaking. In this study, I present a case where school community organizers navigated an oppositional sociopolitical climate in a predominantly white and affluent Southern suburb to resist book bans and curriculum changes. Relying on ten in-depth interviews with community organizers, educators, a school board member, and a journalist, an observation of a community organizing event, and document analysis of school board meetings, district documents, and newspaper articles, I took a critical approach to developing a rich description of the social and political dimensions of the case, as well as understanding how community organizers strategically advocated for racial equity and LGBTQ+ rights in educational policymaking. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the data, I generated findings that highlighted how cultural knowledge and relationship-building developed a strong movement for educational equity and shifted normative beliefs and unequal power structures in educational policymaking. At a time when public schools and culturally inclusive practices are facing resistance from the political right, this study offers normative and political lessons for structural and substantive policy changes, as well as evidence that community organizing efforts, despite power differentials, can influence the education policy subsystem.
