A Baptist pastor in North Carolina won his race for the local school board Nov. 8, pledging to stand against the national movement to cast doubt on public education and limit the teaching of race and American history.
Alan Sherouse, pastor of First Baptist Church of Greensboro, defeated conservative candidate Demetria Carter 55% to 45% in the race for a seat on the Guilford County Board of Education.
“I’m very excited to serve and I am excited that Guilford County has embraced a positive message about our school district,” Sherouse said, adding that message “focuses on the right things,” such as “improving our facilities and working for equity and supporting our teachers and rejecting any effort to turn our schools into a cultural battleground that is bad for everybody.”
Alan Sherouse (center) watching election night returns on a laptop computer.
The Greensboro News and Record reported of the race: “In their campaigns, Sherouse and Carter often stood out as complete opposites in their views on social issues. For example, while Carter said that she was ‘appalled at the LGBTQ agenda in our schools’ and that teachers should not reveal their sexual orientations, Sherouse meanwhile emphasized that schools should be safe places for LGBTQ students and for students from all different types of families, and he said teachers should feel free to share their sexual orientation, for example, being able to display pictures of their partner in the classroom.”
Carter’s official campaign platform opposed “social experiments, such as anti-racism and critical pedagogy” and “psychological manipulations, such as Critical Race Theory, white privilege, and social emotional learning.”
The newspaper said Carter “was recruited to run” by members of the group Take Back Our Schools, part of an orchestrated national movement to elect school board members who advance a range of conspiracy theories, who deny structural racism and want to purge school libraries of books they deem inappropriate.
Sherouse told the paper his decision to run was partly motivated by seeing “all of our schools threatened,” by a larger “regressive” movement targeting schools.
Sherouse, who is the son of a Baptist pastor, came to Greensboro in 2013 from New York City, where he was pastor at Metro Baptist Church in Hell’s Kitchen. He is a graduate Palm Beach Atlantic University, Wake Forest University Divinity School and Vanderbilt University.
He has been active in Cooperative Baptist Fellowship life and recently served on the CBF Governing Board. He and his wife, Jenny Sherouse, are the parents of four school-age children.
While it is not unprecedented for a full-time pastor to serve on a local school board, it remains rare.
“Even the possibility of this reflects the health of the church and the commitments to education and community impact core to who First Baptist Greensboro has been,” he said in a Facebook post announcing his candidacy.
In a social media post the morning after the election, Sherouse said he’s “excited to serve and grateful for the community confidence an election reflects. I’m also proud of our work. We presented what we believe in. At moments where there was opportunity to be strategic or subtle, we chose to be straightforward. We have said what we mean, not just what seems prudent to say.”
He added: “We’ve also confronted a lot of misinformation and sensationalism throughout the last months. The national movement targeting school districts — including its local iteration TBOS — is well-plotted and well-funded. And we were significantly outspent, out-signed, out-mailed (and yes, out-trucked). The fact that a majority of people voted for a hopeful and positive message about our schools is, for me, a powerful reflection of our community countywide and the gifts of living here.”
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