When the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD board started removing chapters related to vaccines and climate change from state-approved textbooks, a group of parents and community leaders slowly mobilized, espousing the mantra, “Don’t get mad. Get elected.”
A trio of school board seats are up for grabs in a November 4 election and while it’s not clear yet whether all three incumbents Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Lucas Scanlon will seek re-election, a slate of progressive “pro-public education” candidates has already filed to “take back” the district from trustees they refer to as Christian nationalists.
The current school board, which has a 6-1 conservative majority, has been criticized not just for altering district curricula but for wasting time talking about pronouns and book bans while dismantling bus routes to save $4 million.
“We have already seen this board spend valuable time and energy on issues that are not directly germane to student learning and safety at the expense of student learning and safety,” said Lesley Guilmart, who is running for Blasingame’s at-large Place 5 seat. “We need to get back to a place where the folks deciding policy and steering the district are prioritizing ensuring excellent learning outcomes and safety and a great value for our community.”
After the transportation schedule was altered to stop offering bus rides to those who live within a mile or two of their school, 17 students were injured while walking or cycling to campus. Following a public outcry, the scrapped bus routes were added back into the budget in June.
The election challengers — Guilmart, Cleveland Lane Jr., and Kendra Camarena — are all parents of Cy-Fair students and have backgrounds in education. All have voted in Democratic primaries but say they are committed to leaving politics out of the boardroom, as dictated by state law.
Of the three incumbents, only Henry, the current board president, has filed his intent to run, according to Cy-Fair ISD documents. The filing deadline is August 18. Cy-Fair ISD trustees serve in at-large positions rather than representing the districts in which they live. Their terms are four years, unpaid.
None of the incumbents responded to repeated requests for an interview.
Blasingame, who currently serves as the board vice president, is considered the ringleader of the Christian majority and has been the most vocal about her rejection of church and state separation. Christian nationalists believe that the government should promote Christian values in all public spaces, including schools and businesses.
What’s at stake in the November election, according to Tara Cummings, a parent and former public school teacher and psychologist, is “our kids’ futures, which means our futures.” Cummings is a board member of the political action committee Cy-Fair Strong Schools and an administrator for the organization’s 737-member private Facebook group.
The school board election is crucial because it comes at a time when Texas “won’t adequately fund education and when our state passes a voucher bill that will divert funds from public schools to private schools,” Cummings said.
Since the board has gone far-right and allowed personal beliefs and political agendas to dictate policy, Cy-Fair ISD — once a destination district because of its school system — has slipped in rankings to surrounding districts like Klein and Tomball, Cummings said.
Blasingame has also acknowledged the shift in student performance metrics, saying in an email to Texas Monthly that 13,000 students in the district are not reading at grade level. The solution, she wrote, is Judeo-Christian values, which “have a profound impact on society and productivity. Human flourishing instead of human suffering is at stake.”
According to the magazine, “the district’s data puts the current number of below-average readers in Cy-Fair closer to 6,000, and an academic officer clarified that they are not necessarily below grade level. They simply tested below national norms.”
Cummings and other parents became heavily engaged in 2020 as campuses were debating virtual education, mask mandates, and social distancing during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ahead of the 2021 trustee elections, Cummings said there was a “fabricated critical race theory mania,” anti-Black Lives Matter campaigns, and politicized debates that she didn’t think had much to do with K-12 education. The Christian nationalists won the election.
“In 2021, Christian National extremists Scott Henry, Lucas Scanlon, and Natalie Blasingame were elected to the CFISD board of trustees, and they’ve wreaked nothing but havoc ever since, “ states a post on the Cy-Fair Strong Schools Facebook page. “In November 2025, they’re up for re-election, and to save CFISD from further damage, we must VOTE THEM OUT.”
Cy-Fair ISD is the third-largest district in Texas, composed of about 46 percent Hispanic students, 20 percent white students, and 20 percent Black students. About 60 percent are economically disadvantaged and 21 percent have limited English proficiency.
“If we don’t right the ship now, our students are going to suffer,” Cummings said. “We are hemorrhaging educators to other neighboring districts where they may get paid better but also where they don’t have the extremism that we have from our board. It breaks my heart but I can’t blame them because we already expect way too much of our educators and now, to not be given any dignity or respect, I’d be out too.”
There doesn’t seem to be a mentality of, “This is what we voted for,” when controversial topics such as campus chaplains, instructional materials, censorship, and the pronoun policy have come up, Guilmart said.
“There has been a vocal outcry at the board meetings, and the majority of the folks who are present and advocating are resisting these measures,” she said. And most parents didn’t choose the current board members. Eleven percent of Cy-Fair ISD’s registered voters turned out for the 2021 election, and 16 percent cast ballots in 2023, Guilmart said.
The Christian Nationalists
An article titled “The Christian Far Right Took Over a Texas School District. Parents Want it Back” appeared in Texas Monthly in June, outlining Blasingame’s call from the Lord to saturate Cy-Fair public schools with Christianity.
“The Lord put on my heart that my agenda is to tear down the over-interpretation of the separation of church and state that has shut God out of schools,” Blasingame wrote in an email, according to the report.
Blasingame, Henry, and Scanlon were financially supported in 2021 by Republican megadonor Dr. Steven Hotze, who was accused in 2020 of paying a former Houston police captain to attack an air conditioner repairman in an attempt to obtain fraudulent mail ballots. The charges were dropped in May.
The physician sent out campaign mailers on behalf of the CFISD candidates who were ultimately elected in 2021, identifying the slate as “Christians, conservatives, and patriots.” He labeled opponents as “liberals, leftists, socialists, and communists.”
Another big donor, Cypress Tea Party leader Bill Ely, spent more than $90,000 through his CyFair 4 Liberty PAC to support four conservative candidates in 2023. Ely did not reply to a text message seeking comment for this story. Cummings blogged about her concerns with the trustees’ political ties at CyFairFacts.com, where she posted campaign finance reports and screenshots of Hotze’s mailers.
Guilmart, Lane and Camarena have each received campaign donations from Texas Rep. Jon Rosenthal, D-Houston, who is currently serving, albeit reluctantly, as the vice chair of Gov. Greg Abbott’s select committee on redistricting. Rosenthal beat Justin Ray by 317 votes in the 2020 election for House District 135. Ray, a former councilman and mayor of Jersey Village, was elected to the Cy-Fair ISD school board in 2023.
The Houston Press reported on Blasingame’s unique approach to public education in 2015, when the now-trustee had just made her first bid at the school board and lost by 1,100 votes.
“She believes kids need to be able to work talk of God into their everyday lives and that includes in school,” the story states. “She calls it ‘letting kids access their full selves’ and says without it, all the high math scores in the world won’t help them with life.”
The report also highlighted Blasingame’s town hall meetings at churches where she spoke of Satan and the “evil that exists in this world and is creating discord and dividing people.”
There’s an appearance, Cummings said, that the conservative candidates are “bought and paid for” by the far-right MAGA Republicans, which goes against the state law mandating that school boards must be nonpartisan.
“They’ve been the kingmakers since there’s been this shift toward more partisan elections in selecting and supporting CFISD school board candidates and the emergency services district candidates,” Cummings said of the Republican donors. “Their plan is to take over everything from the most local positions possible.”
The board is currently stacked 6-1 with Christian conservatives who often vote together in a bloc. Julie Hinaman is the only current member who doesn’t join in lockstep with the conservative slate. Chatter on social media indicates that Scanlon will probably not seek re-election and the Republican megadonors are no longer supporting Henry because he didn’t back a proposal for campus chaplains. Instead, they’re pushing for candidates George Edwards and Radele Walker, neither of whom has filed.
It’s not unheard of for candidates with conservative values to run and be elected to nonpartisan Texas school boards. Panels across the state have long debated whether to teach or even acknowledge creation and evolution and if books once considered classics are now inappropriate. The argument is about parental choice, book ban advocates say, stressing that some don’t want their high schoolers reading about rape, violence, and sexuality for a class assignment.
An effort to ban and censor library books was led by board member Todd LeCompte prior to his 2023 election, board member Lucas Scanlon, and their wives. Since 2022, the trio of Blasingame, Henry and Scanlon recruited their spouses and donors to serve on committees, including the School Health Advisory Council, a state-mandated panel that oversees sex education.
The challenger candidates said last week they want more transparency and committee representation from a broader cross-section of the community. Fifty-two of the 58 book reconsideration requests submitted in the 2022-23 school year came from board members, their wives, or LeCompte’s campaign treasurer Monica Dean, according to reports.
The board has fired librarians and moved to a subcommittee structure that allows more decisions to occur privately. Some teachers have opted to take their classroom libraries home, not wanting to deal with the scrutiny from the school board, candidates said.
Axed from the library shelves were books like Flamer, a graphic novel about a child who is bullied at Boy Scout camp and is grappling with his sexuality. Trustees have challenged The Handmaid’s Tale, Antiracist Baby, and The Bluest Eye. All the titles targeted for removal include subject matter about race, gender identity or sexuality, according to Houston Public Media.
“Their argument was parental rights, that [the questionable books] are trying to indoctrinate my kid into this leftist woke ideology,” Cummings said. “You’re the one who’s infringing on my right to decide what my kid can have access to. They pushed and pushed, and the district caved and revised its library policy. Now you have to opt in and it’s a lot more cumbersome for parents.”
The board now has final say on what books are purchased or replaced. They’ve also instated a policy that students are only to be referred to with pronouns consistent with what’s on their birth certificates.
“This is a complete waste of time and it’s harmful to that very small percentage that it does actually impact,” Cummings said.
What was more controversial, perhaps, was when the board removed entire chapters from digitized textbooks that made references to vaccines and climate change. Teachers aren’t allowed to talk about potentially controversial current events like the deadly Texas measles outbreak.
Blasingame proposed curriculum revisions at the tail end of a May 2024 board meeting. Only Hinaman questioned the measure.
“I recommend that we adopt and accept the instructional materials as approved by the expert educators within Cy-Fair ISD,” Hinaman said at the time. No one backed her, and Blasingame went on to say that concerns were expressed across he district about biology texts that discuss vaccines and COVID-19 and environmental science books that reference depopulation and “a perspective that humans are bad.”
The lessons were rewritten to avoid the statement that vaccines and climate change are settled science, Blasingame said. The state requires that students learn about vaccines but teachers are not to opine on whether they’re good or bad but rather to explain how they work.
“It seems to me that the thought process behind it is that there are some controversial subjects in these textbooks that might not be suitable,” Henry said at the May 2024 board meeting.
Cummings doesn’t doubt Blasingame’s sincere belief in the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” an evangelical notion that Christians should aim to influence and control religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. The philosophy is rooted in the idea that Christians have a responsibility to “take dominion” over these areas to advance God’s kingdom and prepare for the return of Jesus Christ.
“The Lord put it upon her heart that she is to take the education mountain in Cy-Fair and then set the template for the state of Texas,” Cummings said. “She’s kind of doubled down that Judeo-Christian values should be the driving factor in the decisions that we make. I’m kind of surprised that she’s not more savvy in trying to couch it, to hide it, but that just tells me that’s how strongly she believes it.”
Other board members in the conservative majority are not as vocal as Blasingame but have said they make decisions based on their Christian faith. It’s important to remember, Cummings said, that this is public education.
“We’re not cranking out Christian soldiers,” she said. “To not have a separation of church and state is unconstitutional. And public schools are for everybody. Public schools do not have the luxury of selecting which students they will serve.
“People’s faith is really important to them and that is something that occurs in the context of the family,” she added. “Not that your faith shouldn’t come into play at all while you’re at school, but that shouldn’t be the driving factor.”
Cleveland Lane, one of the challenger candidates, who is running against Henry for Place 6, said he’s a Christian but wants to ensure that public schools are a safe space for everyone.
“You want to make sure that all your different nationalities, people from around the world, feel included in the learning environment that they’re in,” he said. “When you’re isolating individuals out, I would say that takes away from the parents’ rights because you’re trying to indoctrinate and tell people what to believe.”
But this is Texas, and religious decisions favoring Christianity are also being made at the state level. A new law effective September 1 mandates that the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in every public school classroom. Several lawsuits have been filed, including one naming Cy-Fair ISD, arguing that the mandate violates the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
The New Slate of Candidates
The Cy-Fair Community Voices Coalition, which includes several PACs, Republicans, Democrats, faith leaders, parents, grandparents, former school board trustees, and educators, formed with the goal of “taking the board back in the direction of sanity,” Cummings said. The coalition conducted interviews and background checks and selected three candidates to run against the incumbents.
Camarena, Guilmart and Lane announced their plans to run in May.
Guilmart is a former CFISD educator and instructional leader for the Harris County Department of Education. She is currently the president of the non-profit Cypress Families for Public Schools and works in higher education, according to a Cy-Fair Strong Schools press release.
Guilmart also previously worked for Teach for America, as did Blasingame, who will be her opponent if the incumbent seeks re-election. Because they have similar career backgrounds — both served in school administration roles — Guilmart said she’s well-positioned to challenge Blasingame and it’s important to “strike a contrast.”
Guilmart said she’s running because she’s a concerned parent and experienced educator. Her family moved to Cy-Fair ISD in 2009 for the schools, she said.
“I have witnessed a concerning trend on our school board over the past couple of election cycles to where we now have a 6 to 1 pretty extremist partisan majority on the school board that has made decisions that have actually harmed students,” she said. “I believe that every single child, no matter their address or ZIP code, deserves an excellent public education and I want to make sure that we get Cy-Fair ISD back on track.”
A path to ensuring excellent education for all starts with feeling safe, welcome, included, and respected, Guilmart said. Acknowledging that some rash decisions have been made over the past four years, the candidate said it’s a lot easier and faster to break something than it is to build or repair or put it back together.
“Imagine holding a crystal vase over a tile floor and dropping it,” she said. “It shatters instantly. That’s super easy to do. It was really quick. But the process of cleaning it up takes time, and then if you want to glue the thing back together, that takes even more time. Hopefully, if we have a new board majority of pro-public education trustees, we’ll be able to get to work right away on cleanup and repair.”
Lane is an associate professor at Prairie View A&M University, where he trains future science educators and pre-health professionals. He has two children in Cy-Fair high schools and one who is a graduate of CFISD.
The candidate said he’s most concerned about community involvement, safety, and doing “more with less” when it comes to the district’s $1.2 billion budget. Kids need to be taught history and science without censorship, he said.
“When you start censoring and editing information, it leaves a hole in the students’ understanding,” Lane said. “They want to know why. They need to hear all those puzzle pieces. It’s better to give them all the information out there and let them make the decisions. Let the parents have that conversation.”
Lane, who made an unsuccessful run for school board against LeCompte two years ago, said Cy-Fair parents and teachers want all students to have a fair chance at being the best they can be.
“My whole vision is, I want to contribute to the growth of kids,” he said. “As we move forward, we have to make sure that our kids are able to be put in the best situation possible. What’s at stake is the growth of the community and the growth of students. Our district has to stay competitive because we’ve got so many surrounding districts. We’ll start losing teachers. We’ll start losing administrators, and eventually we’ll start losing students.”
Lane attended private school during his elementary years but is a product of Galveston County’s public middle schools and high schools. While working on his undergraduate degree at Prairie View, Lane said he wanted to do research and stay in the lab. But he started teaching and “the love came out of me.”
“It was like, this is what I’m supposed to do and I’ve been doing it for 28 years,” he said. “My kids all know that during the summer, they’re in Daddy School. We’ve still got to keep reading and keep learning. If you’re friends with my kids, you’re going to have to learn about something. I just want to make sure that all the kids in the district get the best opportunity possible, and they’re not limited in any way. I don’t have all the answers but I want to be a part of the growth.”
Camarena is a former educator who now leads economic development and partnerships in the office of Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones. She said she is a strong Christian and grew up in the Presbyterian church.
Like Guilmart and Lane, Camarena said her concern is not that a majority of the current board members practice a Christian faith; it’s that their method of governance isn’t welcoming to all students.
“I think it’s extremely important that we respect all families and also respect parental rights,” she said. “I want to ensure that every student feels valued. My concern is that if we push one religion forward, I don’t want any other student who comes from a different religious background to feel that they are in any way devalued because they think differently.”
Religion can be taught in the context of history and even world geography, she said, without prioritizing one faith over another. If elected, Camarena said safety will be her top priority. She referenced the motivational theory Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which lists safety as a key component to support learning.
“We also have a financial stewardship priority, which will be to continue and build upon some of the previous work, knowing that there are some restrictions because of funding availability and how funding is allocated,” Camarena said. “The beginning is safety but the overall is student achievement in my mind’s eye. We want to see our students be successful and have the opportunity to grow themselves so they can develop a career.”
