(The Lion) — Shannon Braun was fed up and she couldn’t take it anymore.

The Dallas-area stay-at-home mom and sister of home renovation reality show guru Chip Gaines was sick of seeing her local school district teach critical race theory (CRT), embrace transgender policies and watch academic performance slide year after year.

She was so fed up she decided to do something about it.

Braun won a seat on the Grapevine-Colleyville (Texas) school board in 2021 and got right to work banning CRT, boys from girls’ sports and pornography from classrooms. Through her influence, the board also began using business-like measures to determine how money was spent and whether students were learning.

The district made headlines in 2022 when it banned the divisive curriculum, books and gender policies. After Braun helped conservatives take over the school board, the former superintendent resigned about a year later, the district reversed its academic slide and taxes decreased, with spending coming into alignment with actual enrollment, which is now around 13,500 students.

Braun and a then-board member who is an accountant worked to find savings within the budget, realizing that the district kept taxes the same even after paying off bonds. When the levy began to reflect actual bond payments, the tax rate slid.

Braun’s work is a testimony to someone who wants to see common sense restored to education and the belief that Christians, conservatives and those concerned about education can make a difference in their communities. Even if they choose to homeschool or send their children to private school, they are still paying taxes and should care how public schools are spending money and what is being taught.

Some of Braun’s zeal was lit after she decided to place her son in private school for his high school years. She had grown tired of seeing indifference about the problems at the school, such as the lack of merit – everyone got a blue ribbon at field day, not just the winners – and various policies she felt were serving the woke agenda over children’s wellbeing.

She soon saw that her son’s private school was doing more with less because it had the right foundational principles.

“I learned that you don’t have to have the greatest facilities and the biggest bond packages, and you don’t have to have an entire booklet of electives in order to get an objective accomplished,” she told The Lion. “I started realizing you can step things backwards and still succeed and achieve and do all these things.”

After joining the school board in the community where she, her husband, and their oldest daughter were educated, she set about reestablishing the basics and getting rid of excess spending, woke policies and unproven curricula that she says detracted from learning.

She soon discovered when she set out to ban CRT, pornography and transgender ideology that state law already prohibited them but the law wasn’t being enforced. Braun withstood public outcry and accusation and found surprising vindication: once the policy was enacted school boards across the country asked to see it so they could do the same in their districts.

Paying the price

Braun’s seen the dominoes fall but it hasn’t come without a price.

When her brother, who now stars in Fixer Upper: The Lakehouse, donated to her first campaign, he immediately faced pushback and attempts at cancellation because Braun had campaigned on ending CRT.

Both Gaines and Braun declined to address the accusations directly, choosing instead to let the storm “blow over,” but she did ask him not to donate to her second campaign, which was also successful.

She’s now the board president and is firm on enacting changes that will benefit students.

One outcome from the CRT ban is that “anyone with activism on their agenda left or doesn’t want to teach here,” she says. “This allowed us to hire teachers that simply want to teach reading, writing, science, etc.”

Longer term she’s already looking at hard choices the district must make to consolidate buildings in an attempt to control costs. While three years of cost-cutting have ended deficit spending, she knows that financial pressures are still on the horizon from four years of inflation and enrollment declines.

This comes as many other districts are only now grappling with the expiration of COVID-19 funds and the need to close buildings and possibly cut large amounts of staff for the same reasons.

As Texas considers a universal school choice measure, empowering families to choose public, private or home school options that best suit their family, Braun still encourages people to take an interest in their public school districts.

“Even if you don’t have kids in the district, you still pay taxes and how that money is spent needs to be held accountable or you need to know how it’s spent and monitor it,” she says.

Her story points to the power of citizens to effect change in their communities and challenge what had been the status quo – and to the power of simplicity.

“A lot of the problem that we have is we’ve over complicated everything,” she says.

“I can’t imagine the stress level of being a kid these days with social media and TikTok and Snapchat and how many likes you get on a picture. And now kids have to figure out what their pronouns are.

“It’s about getting things to where you can just focus on what you’re there for: making friends and learning the basic foundational principles of academics so you can go on to other things.”