Isle of Wight County’s School Board voted 4-1 on June 12 to outsource the periodic review of its more than 400 written policies to the School Board Member Alliance, which formed three years ago as a rival to the Virginia School Boards Association.

The vote comes just under a year since Isle of Wight disaffiliated from the VSBA over objections to the association’s annual lobbying of the Virginia General Assembly. Following last year’s vote to cut ties with the VSBA, the board tasked a three-member committee — John Collick, Brandi Perkins and Vice Chairman Mark Wooster — with bringing the policy review services formerly outsourced to the VSBA in house.

Board member Michael Cunningham cast the lone dissenting vote on a motion by Board Chairman Jason Maresh to again outsource the review, but this time to the SBMA for $2,900 per year. Collick, Perkins and Wooster supported Maresh’s motion.

Cunningham argued that the SBMA, being a relatively new organization compared to the 1906-founded VSBA, hadn’t yet proven itself a reliable alternative.

Maresh said the idea of outsourcing policy review to the SBMA came about after he and Perkins met via videoconference on May 22 with Jill Turgeon, who serves as the organization’s policy and governance specialist and is a past member of the Loudoun County School Board.

Maresh said Isle of Wight would retain the final say, as it did when it was a VSBA member, over the final wording adopted in its local policies. The SBMA would “review all the legislative updates” passed during the most recent General Assembly session and “provide recommendations,” Maresh said.

In addition to the post-General Assembly session review, the SBMA would four times per year review groups of policies for periodic updates, Maresh said. Per state law, school boards must review each policy at least every five years.

The cost is “significantly less than what we were paying for the VSBA,” Maresh said.

During the 2023-24 school year, Isle of Wight County Schools spent $23,853 on VSBA dues, which included a legal assistance fee, policy review services and the Board Docs platform the School Board uses to disseminate meeting agendas. The board still uses Board Docs and pays roughly $12,000 annually – or $500 more than its discounted member rate – for the service as a non-VSBA member.

Collick, Maresh, Perkins and Wooster each hold individual SBMA memberships, which cost $250 apiece. The individual memberships required under the SBMA’s bylaws are a key difference from the VSBA, which only allows entire school boards to join.

Isle of Wight is one of at least six Virginia school boards to drop its VSBA membership since 2023 over claims of liberal bias. The VSBA, which prior to 2023 had 100% of the state’s school boards as members,  denies any partisanship.

The VSBA has advocated for the expansion of the Virginia Human Rights Act to include students’ sexual orientation and gender identity, and for allowing localities to increase their local sales tax rates by voter referendum to fund school construction. The SBMA, meanwhile, touts on its website that its members were among the first to adopt model transgender student policies Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration released in mid-2023, rolling back policies developed under Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam, that had urged schools to conceal a student’s gender identity from parents who may be unsupportive. The SBMA also states support for “parental rights” and “school choice,” two conservative causes that in recent years have encompassed GOP efforts to require parental consent to check out books deemed “sexually explicit” from school libraries and to allow tax dollars to follow students whose parents move them from a public school to a private one. The SBMA also describes itself as nonpartisan.