One candidate formerly served in the Maryland House of Delegates in the Republican party and helped start a Moms for Liberty chapter. The other has a long list of endorsements from Democratic organizations and elected officials.

These two women, former Del. Trent Kittleman, 79, and Andrea Chamblee, 63, are facing off for the District 5 seat on the Howard County’s school board.

On paper, Board of Education candidates are vying for nonpartisan seats. But the culture wars infiltrating public schools all over the country are creeping into Maryland. That’s became especially apparent in this race.

Howard County’s District 5 is filled with farmland and country roads. It covers the western part of the county, from West Friendship to Mt. Airy. As far back as 1986, this district has been represented by a Republican County Council member, according to county election results, though its federal and state representatives are Democrats.

Chamblee doesn’t see the school board race as Democrats versus Republicans, but rather extremists versus everyone else.

“I grew up here. I went to elementary, middle and high school in this district, and I don’t want an extremist on the school board controlling the children of my friends and neighbors,” Chamblee said.

The Maryland Democratic Party has joined Chamblee in calling Kittleman extremist, and earlier this month announced “an unprecedented move” — financially supporting school board candidates across the state for the first time. They say Kittleman is extreme because of her legislative record and her involvement with Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents group working to restrict content in school library books. The national organization has been called far-right by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Kittleman made public appearances with Moms for Liberty as recently as last summer. The group posted photos of her at the 2023 Howard County Fair sitting in the back of a red convertible dressed head-to-toe in red, white and blue. The car features signage for her school board campaign and Moms for Liberty.

Kittleman takes issue with accusations that she’s an extremist. As a state delegate, she said, “Primarily I was looked at as a levelheaded conservative but not as a conservative that upset everybody.”

Democrats in the State House can attest to that, she said.

Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, a Democrat, said Kittleman was always cordial and never rude when they served as delegates together.

“She was pleasant to work with but certainly had values that do not align with Democratic values for sure,” Atterbeary said.

Kittleman said she’s approached the races as a nonpartisan candidate.

“People clearly know I’m a Republican, but I have gone out of my way not to do anything overtly political and not to use the Republican Party other than the friends that I have there who want to help me [with my campaign],” Kittleman said.

Kittleman decided to run for school board because western Howard County elected her as a state delegate three times in a row.

Kittleman lost her reelection bid in November 2022 to Chao Wu, a former school board member and Democrat.

Some of Kittleman’s campaign priorities mirror what Moms For Liberty and some Republicans stand for, including supporting parents’ rights in the classroom, charter schools and removal of sexually explicit material from classrooms.

Kittleman respects a parent’s right to make the request for a book to be removed from a school library.

Chamblee is vehemently against Moms for Liberty’s campaign to restrict school library book content, and says bigotry is the motivation.

Lisa Geraghty, chair of the Moms for Liberty Howard County chapter, said their opponents are being disingenuous when they call the efforts book banning.

“We don’t want to ban any books but we want to obey the law that you cannot provide pornography to minors,” Geraghty said. “I can’t help that its written by a gay author, a trans author or a Black author.”

Kittleman said one of the reasons she left the Moms for Liberty Howard County chapter is because the concept of “book banning is not one of things that I want to concentrate on.”

Chamblee has received an endorsement from a group called “STOP Moms for Liberty.” Other endorsements for Chamblee include the Columbia Democratic Club, the Ellicott City & Western Howard County Democratic Club and the Howard Progressive Project. She is also a Moms Demand Action Gun Sense candidate; she is the widow of John McNamara, an Annapolis Capital Gazette editor who was killed in a 2018 mass shooting at the newspaper office.

Kelly Klinefelter Lee, president of the Howard Progressive Project, said that Chamblee applied for the group’s endorsement. Kittleman did not.

“Andrea had values we admired and skills from her professional life and her advocacy life,” Klinefelter Lee said. “We felt confident she would bring a fresh perspective and a real set of experience that would help the board function better.”

Even if Kittleman had applied for an endorsement, Klinefelter Lee said with certainty that Kittleman would not have been considered because of her “extreme views on taking books out of libraries ... [and] for points of view that a really out of sync with Howard residents, like on LGBTQ issues.”

Klinefelter Lee said that while school board candidates don’t have a political party attached to their name on ballots, “education today and always has been political.”

The District 5 candidates are in agreement that school board elections should remain nonpartisan.

If elected, Chamblee said she’s going to listen to what parents and students have to say regardless of their political party.

“I don’t care if they or their child leans one way or the other, so I don’t think it [the school board] should be partisan,” Chamblee said.

Kittleman said the school board should stay the way it is “because of the nastiness and viciousness of party politics.”

Geraghty said she would rather know if school board candidates are Democrats or Republicans because “it will benefit the voter.”

“I think its more important than ever,” she said, “that we know what side of aisle these candidates are on.”