KASD Children First PAC is a conservative school board political action committee active in Kutztown Area School District elections.
The PAC has helped elect or promote five of the nine current KASD board members, and its messaging reflects the post-2020 parental-rights school-board movement: opposition to COVID mandates, skepticism toward equity-focused education, objections to LGBTQ-related or sexually explicit library materials, and an emphasis on removing “ideology” from classrooms.
Now, “Rural Town in Pennsyltucky, PA Elects Right-Wing School Board Majority” isn’t much of a headline. But Kutztown, in fact, has a rich educational history.
Rewind to 1866, and the Maxatawny Seminary was reorganized into Keystone State Normal School (today Kutztown University). This school was specifically set up to train teachers!
At the non-university level, Pennsylvania passed the Public School Law, requiring free, tax-supported education in the Commonwealth in 1834. Far before this, however, the PA Dutch were already attending one-room schoolhouses, where instruction was often in the dialect.
Though the PA Dutch initially resisted public schools, about 60 years later, the 1892 Public School Building (today the Kutztown Area Historical Society) was built largely by local labor. However, funding wasn’t easy—at times, the town relied on loans from residents to complete construction.
This article delves into seven recurring themes in KASD Children First PAC’s public messaging and explains why I believe they clash with Kutztown’s deeper history.
1. You Must Earn It!
The school board majority disparaging a program as “Didn’t Earn It” should appall every Lutheran Kutztonian.
Martin Luther’s core claim, after all, is that one earns nothing. Salvation is delivered through grace alone, not one’s ability to please God. One can never be worthy enough of God.
Do you think I earned the love of my mother, grandfather, and the rest of my family when I was a depressed and aimless drunk? Of course I didn’t, but they showed me grace and loved me anyway. I’ve since quit drinking, spending most of my time outside walking and working on Kutzeschteddel.
To say every student must “earn it” is to ignore how reality, economics, social mobility, and dozens of other factors create one’s perception of what is possible. Oh, if only these school board members could experience the Otherness of being Black for a day!
2. How to Waste Everyone’s Time
In 2025, the Kutztown Area School Board authorized a ballot question asking residents to approve a 10.63% property tax increase—only for several board members supported by KASD PAC to then campaign against the very referendum they had placed on the ballot. After more than 80% of voters rejected the proposal, the district later passed a separate 4% tax increase anyway.
KASD PAC argues the referendum was a strategic negotiating tactic that pressured the teachers union into accepting a more modest contract. Ultimately, this made the final board-approved tax increase appear conservative by comparison, even though district taxes still increased.
3. KASD Teachers Make a Living Wage and That’s… Bad?
How can one say they care about the environment their child is in when they don’t care about teachers’ well-being? But it gets worse…
I imagine the KASD PAC fantasizes of hiring teachers:
“Why thank you, mighty school board, for allowing me the honor and privilege or working a 40 hour work week like everyone else.”
“They also enjoy 10 sick days and one or two personal days off” is so Orwellian it hurts. Is that really what it says (*reads again*):
“Enjoy 10 sick days and one to two paid personal days off…”
They posted what I consider to be a misleading chart of the teacher salaries. In the chart below, KASD PAC presents the maximum a teacher in each school district can make after 14 years of service and completing additional further education.
The actual average teacher salary at Kutztown Area School District circa 2023-24 was $76,000 before benefits, costing the district a total of $8.12 million for about 107 teachers.
Now, the budget line item for teacher benefits is a whopping $4.80 million. But about $2.7 million (56% of the benefits line item) goes into the Pennsylvania State Pension Program (PSERS), which currently charges the school district a flat 33.59% rate of every teachers’ salary as the pension contribution.
This means the district has to pay about an extra $24,000 to the state each year if a teacher makes $70,000. Now, this isn’t usable compensation for the teachers. The Commonwealth admits the PSERS system is currently only 64.8% funded, with an unfunded liability of $42 billion.
About 82% of the PSERS fees currently go to paying off underfunded liabilities. So, only 18% of that $2.7 million, or $486,000, in PSERS fees are actually realizable benefits for the teachers.
Altogether, this means actual benefits for teachers is closer to $2.59 million. Added to the base salaries total of $8.12 million, that’s total real compensation of $10.71 million. Divide that number by the total number of teachers, 107, and the real average annual salary including benefits for a KASD teacher is about $100,000.
Here is a chart of the KASD teacher salary schedule for the 2025-26 school year. As you’ll see, the teachers’ salaries are tied to both their years of experience and the completion of higher education credits.
This means that if Kutztown is paying larger teacher salaries compared to other Berks County school districts, it’s because we have teachers delivering an advanced education!
Not to mention, $100,000 a year is hardly breaking the bank, and you can only earn that much if you stay in the school district for over a decade and get at least a Master’s degree.
If only they recognized how great the teachers at KASD actually are. I still remember taking an elementary statistics class in college at Arcadia University. While most students struggled, I aced through it in a breeze. One of my Kutztown friends who went to Temple University said the same thing.
Meanwhile, Señora Schunk was teaching us college-level Spanish (I tested out of a language credit requirement); physics students went on to work at places as prestigious as Oxford University; the school produced Olympic and professional athletes, and one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century in Keith Haring.
If you want people from Kutztown to keep doing cool things, we should invest more in teachers, not less!
4. Deflecting Responsibility
Here is an incomplete list of some of my favorite fallacies:
5. One LSW for… HOW MANY STUDENTS?!
My last girlfriend was a Licensed Social Worker, and one social worker cannot look after an entire school district. How can a single social worker manage a caseload of hundreds of students? Once again, the KASD PAC platform shows how little they think of how labor actually functions.
“Hiring our own employee is also more appropriate because that person would be able to exercise candor to the Administration whether our District’s six, full-time guidance counselors were referring out students for matters they could have handled themselves.”
This means the school board intends to find a qualified LSW for $60,000 a year, who wants to manage six guidance counselors, be on call the whole year, and deal with a giant caseload of students? God bless the poor soul who gets that gig!
6. Beating a Dead Horse
What more can really be said? How about a joke? I imagine there’s a plaque in the KASD PAC headquarters that reads:
“When in doubt, blame those greedy teachers and their massive salaries.”
7. Everyone’s Out to Get Me!
I really feel bad for people who view the world like this:
“EVERYONE’S OUT TO GET ME AND THE PEOPLE I LOVE.”
If you actually talk to a transgender person, you may come to find out that not one of them considers themself a “majority” in any sense of the word. Why should we love or accept them any less?
I will never understand the right-wing obsession with other people’s genitals!
In Kutztown, we leave that to Keith Haring’s art! 😉
A Lutheran Note on Ideology
Can you imagine if I wrote this whole article in this style? Why must every problem be preceded by phrases like “liberally-controlled,” “Democratic mouthpieces,” and “Leftists are upset.”
Phrases like“conditioning their wealth“ are so utterly ridiculous they’re barely worth mentioning, if not for how eerily and ironically “Marxist” it sounds, as if high school teachers are the “elite” of society.
If a teacher had actual wealth, do you think they’d spend 10 months of the year waking up at 7am, teaching for 8 hours straight, grading papers, babysitting children, the list goes on…?
Well, maybe some of them would, because I genuinely believe a lot of them are simply good people. You think I coached Middle School soccer for three months for that $2,200 paycheck (that you only get in a lump sum after the season is over)? Not a chance; I just loved doing it!
But the question remains: Why be part of a community at all if your politics ends up undermining the educators, counselors, and workers who help make the community what it is?
If there’s a handful of people I want making good money, it’s me (of course), my family, and the teachers spending time with our beloved young ones each day.
I don’t want to shame or call out any specific board members. I’d rather we all share in prosperity. As Martin Luther wrote in “The Fifth Petition” of A Simple Way to Pray (c. 1535):
Pray: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Then say: “Dear Lord God, Father, do not call us into judgment, for in your presence no one is righteous. Please do not condemn us for being ungrateful for all of your unspeakable goodness—both spiritual and physical—and for our daily blunders and sins—which are more than we know or mark (Psalm 19:12).
Furthermore, do not consider how good or bad we have been, but look upon us with your infinite compassion, bestowed upon us by Christ, your beloved Son. Forgive also all our enemies and all those who have harmed us or done us an injustice, even as we forgive them from the heart. For they do themselves irreparable harm when they vent their anger against us.
We gain nothing by their ruin. Rather, we would rather see them blessed with us. Amen.”
