The president of the Riverview School Board is the latest local official caught up in a presidential politics kerfuffle.
A resident this week publicly called for Jennifer Chaparro to resign, citing a social media post expressing her personal views about the presidential election results.
Chaparro posted a dark screen with writing over it:
“If Trump is what America stands for, then I no longer identify as American. Kamala didn’t lose, we all did.
“If you voted for him, you voted to support a convicted felon, a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, pathetic excuse for a human being who has no regard for basic human rights and our democracy. You overlooked all of these things because you cannot stand to see a woman, especially a woman of color in power.
Feel free to unfollow me.”
Chaparro said she posted the message on her Instagram and Facebook pages. Oakmont resident Nick Paradise said he became aware of the post on Nov. 8. He demanded she resign from the board at the district’s public planning meeting Nov. 11.
“Jen, I think you should resign and even back up your big talk and renounce your American citizenship,” said Paradise, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran as a cross-filed candidate for a school board seat in 2023.
Chaparro isn’t the only school board president getting criticism for airing political grievances on social media. The president of Slippery Rock Area’s school board is facing similar backlash on a larger scale after expressing her disappointment about Donald Trump being elected president for a second time. Unlike Chaparro’s post, the Slippery Rock Area school official mentioned specific policies, such as reproductive rights, in her post and used profanity while calling people “selfish.”
Chaparro’s post gained more notoriety when it was picked up by KDKA Radio personality Colin Dunlap, who posted it to his X account, where it received 58,000 views and almost 200 comments, mostly criticizing Chaparro.
Lew Irwin, a political science professor at Duquesne University, said the nationalization of politics has been happening since the early 2000s.
The internet helped to speed up the consolidation of local journalism to make national stories more accessible to the masses, and the emergence and subsequent rise of social media in the early 2000s made it easier for national politics to be incorporated at local levels.
“There have always been people who have wanted to impose ideological issues or partisan perspectives on local politics,” Irwin said. “That is not a new phenomenon. What is really different now, is how they’re able to organize themselves.
“In the past, there would be people on the fringes that would want to nationalize local politics, but they didn’t really get a lot of traction because, for the most part, local officials were more interested in solving problems and dealing with local issues.”
Now, says Irwin, social media tends to place users in information bubbles, where what they see is tailored to the media they consume the most. Other points of view get filtered out.
“Everybody is operating in this environment where people are separated by the information streams they get, and inside those information streams the content is getting evermore provocative,” Irwin said. “(It’s) kind of provoking people and inciting them as they think about politics and public affairs.”
The combination has accelerated since the mid-2000s, when the first smartphone came out and helped to contribute to polarizing Americans based on political beliefs, he said.
Local school boards have experienced the polarization in the form of complaints from residents, including fielding book-banning demands and mask mandate complaints during the pandemic.
Paradise claimed that Chaparro, as a board member, should remain nonpartisan in political matters.
“Barring those things, I call on the board to move to censure and consider stripping her of the presidency position,” Paradise said. “Show. Make a statement of regardless of where voting allegiances lie, the board is held to a higher standard than that.”
During the meeting, Chaparro said she ran for school board to help the community and the students who attend Riverview School District. She said she has little interest in advancing her own political career but said, as an elected official, she has every right to have a public political opinion.
“I certainly never took on this work thinking this was a political stepping stone to some other big role,” she said. “Being on this board is an elected position so, unfortunately, it is partisan to get here. I don’t bring my politics to this seat, but, in order to run, it does have to be a political endeavor.”
Antonio Paris, school board vice president, said there is nothing in the district’s code that bars school board members from expressing their political opinion on their personal social media accounts.
“I’ve never been shy about my political affiliation,” Chaparro said, who is in her second term on the school board.
Chaparro has run as a Democrat each election and received the most votes of all the candidates during her most recent run.
“I understand that community members may not like the opinions of board members, but when those opinions are shared personally, especially on social media, it is hard to kind of disassociate us from our roles,” Paris said.
He said any board member’s personal opinions should not be seen as representative of the board.
“As a person and as a school board director and president, this woman goes above and beyond,” Paris said in regard to Chaparro. “It is a really selfless and thankless job, and I do think that I can adamantly say these members here do not bring their political views into this room.
“It’s really about the kids. Our focus here is for the students.”
Another Oakmont resident and former Riverview School Board member, Ernest Tillman, did not call for Chaparro’s resignation but did express his displeasure for the social media post. He said Chaparro’s words come into ethical conflict with her responsibilities as a school board member.
“You represent the school district,” Tillman said. “You represent the parents of this district, and you basically called half the parents in this district racists and misogynists.”
Tillman accused Chaparro of being the first person to ever call him a “racist and misogynist.” He said he doesn’t believe Chaparro is able to separate those feelings from her responsibilities as a board member.
Tillman served on the board for six years and was one of two people selected to fill vacated seats in 2023.
Chaparro maintains her stance that she did not call anyone, including Oakmont or Verona residents, any names.
“I never called residents racists, homophobic or misogynists,” she said. “I said that if you are voting for someone like Donald Trump who — to me — is all of those things, you looked past all of those things to vote for him still, and you looked past another very strong candidate who happened to be a woman of color. Basically (gave) him a pass on all of those very blatant things that occurred over however many years now.”
“I didn’t say anything that everybody doesn’t already know,” Chaparro said.
She said she has no intention of resigning over the post.