Brent Davis advances in Wichita school board race, and why that’s troubling | Opinion
Wichita is all abuzz about the outcome of Tuesday’s mayoral election, where Lily Wu came out of nowhere and ended up with more votes than incumbent Mayor Brandon Whipple.
But that may not be the most important thing that happened in the primary election.
In the race for the open, at-large seat on the Wichita school board, Brent Davis came in second to former county commissioner and state legislator Melody McCray-Miller.
It wasn’t the most impressive showing. He ended the night with 6,259 votes to her 14,178 votes.
But it was good enough to advance him to the November general election, where it will be a one-on-one rematch against McCray-Miller.
Frankly, I find that worrisome.
Davis, if you’ve forgotten, was the school board candidate who two years ago proposed illegal and unethical experiments on Wichita’s school children.
And when I saw that he’ll be on the November ballot, my immediate reaction was “yikes.”
In 2021, Davis was part of a four-person ticket of school board candidates recruited and promoted by the Sedgwick County Republican Party.
School board elections are supposed to be nonpartisan, but the COVID-19 pandemic was still going pretty strong and the GOP saw a chance to exploit growing and vocal frustration with the district’s mask mandate — and maybe seize majority control of the seven-member board in one coordinated campaign.
Back then, I wasn’t the opinion editor and columnist, but a reporter.
I was working a Saturday shift. It was a slow day.
The League of Women Voters was holding a candidate forum for City Council and school board candidates, so I decided to drop by and see what council candidates Jared Cerullo and Mike Hoheisel had to say about each other.
One of the council candidates, I can’t remember which, was running late, so the school candidates went first.
The school board forum didn’t start out all that interesting — they seldom are, because school candidates seldom stray beyond platitudes like “a great education for all our children” yada yada.
Then Brent Davis got going on the topic of COVID.
And here’s what he said:
There is quite a bit of debate on if kids are actually being helped by being masked or if they’re being hurt, you know, if this raised C02 levels, other bacterial infections, things like that, they can come when, in masking kids. We could try to work a solution where we separate them into groups and then actually study (them).
We also need to think about using all the different medications that we possibly could, trying some of those out. There are drugs that have been used to help millions of people with certain conditions that are very safe and inexpensive, that we just aren’t being able to try right now.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this guy seriously proposing we experiment with our children’s health?
So I approached him after the forum to clarify and he doubled down, saying it might be worth trying: “Vitamin D, and zinc and quercetin and things like that as a prophylactic to see how that works.”
I called Dr. Thomas Moore, one of Kansas’ leading infectious disease specialists who was then treating some of the state’s sickest COVID patients.
He was appalled.
“It is unethical and it is illegal to perform clinical trials on children without their parents’ consent,” he said. “There are all sorts of things that have to be done legally and ethically before pursuing a grand research study like this. No scientific study can be performed on children — who are a very vulnerable population — without express controls.”
Moreover, he said the so-called “study” of supplements and over-the-counter cold medicine that Davis proposed had already been done and they’d all been proven ineffective against COVID.
In the election, the three other Republican slate candidates, Kathy Bond, Diane Albert and Hazel Stabler, all won seats.
Davis lost.
Two years is not that long ago. I’m surprised that Wichita voters forgot about this incident so soon.
You might want to remember in November.
This story was originally published August 2, 2023 at 4:03 PM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the name of a medication. The correct medication is quercetin.
