Meadow School students Bryden Smith, left, and Zachery McGee build a smoker in agriculture class.
On a Friday at the community cotton gin, farmers and retired farmers gathered for their weekly coffee-and-doughnut meet-up, which includes the Baptist pastor and the Meadow Independent School District superintendent, Bric Turner. “You would be ostracized if you were a woke person in this community,” said Robert Henson, an 80-year-old retired cotton farmer and nightly Fox News watcher.Henson left early to drive an hour out of town to watch his grandson, a pole-vaulter at Meadow, compete in a regional track meet. Henson graduated from Meadow in 1960, and his family has attended school in the district for nearly 100 years without interruption, since his aunts moved here from Oklahoma in 1926.
Shop students are building a giant black smoker on the bed of a trailer; they hope to use it next year in regional brisket and rib cook-offs. Other students are building robots, keeping score of which one moves the most blocks or heavy tuna cans ahead of a competition in Lubbock. Parents in recent years have asked the school librarian to pull a handful of books from the shelves, but there haven’t been clashes over curriculum or LGBTQ issues, even as it is quietly acknowledged that some kids are gay.Though many of the children and families work in the fields before and after school, all 25 students in this year’s graduating class are expected to go to college or technical school.
The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the movement nationwide, as shutdowns eroded conservative parents’ trust in their public schools, while Zoom gave them a window into what was being taught, Bedrick said.