I’ve seen quite a bit in Lee’s Summit. As a Lee’s Summit North alumnus who still remembers hearing “nigger” casually tossed around in classrooms, on the bus to away trips for basketball games, or directed at me, I’m rarely surprised these days when someone in a position of power decides to wage a personal crusade against me or anyone who dares to hold them accountable.
Yet, even I had to shake my head at the recent unhinged, racially coded and conspiracy-laden diatribe posted by Lee’s Summit School Board Vice President Heather Eslick.
I won’t assume you, reader and friend, keep up with the ins and outs of Lee’s Summit School Board politics. So let me offer a quick primer:
The Board recently met behind closed doors to discuss Superintendent Dr. Buck’s contract; soon after, word got out that they’d chosen not to renew it.
In the education world, not renewing a superintendent’s contract is oftentimes viewed as the equivalent of laying them off. In this case, it also revealed the completion of the Lee’s Summit board’s hijacking towards right-wing extremism—bolstered by individuals who align with white Christian nationalist ideologies.
Take, for example, Lee’s Summit School board member Bill Haley, who owns a gun store, brought a “Redneck Lives Matter” flag draped over gun shells to a Lee’s Summit education event, and readily aligns with extremist rhetoric.
In many ways, Lee’s Summit is a microcosm and experimentation site for the white supremacist, extremist indoctrination policies being injected into the bloodstream of education systems nationwide. That is precisely why I’m speaking up—not simply because of Eslick’s disturbing tirade, but due to the emboldened racism that she represents.
Racist Conspiracies & Anti-Black Tropes
Here is just a glimpse of Heather’s post—though I won’t amplify or give more oxygen to her full polemic for the sake of spreading racist disinformation.
“Last election season, a self-identified LSR7 parent and president of a local PAC published a hit piece on two school board candidates, one of whom is now a board member, through The Kansas City Defender. The individual who contacted me under the handle “Ryan Adams” received Kansas City Defender post likes from a this same individual (screenshot below), who is the President of Strengthening Education Together (SET). SET’s Vice President is a former school board candidate, who ran alongside now-board members Erica Miller and Kamile Johnson in 2023. SET endorsed former board president Rodrick Sparks and candidate Juanice Williams in 2024 and most recently endorsed candidates Nicky Nickens and Michelle Dawson for the 2025 election.”
To be honest, when I first opened my Facebook and saw the post, I thought it read like one of those conspiracy-wall scenes in a detective show—the kind where the character has color-coded strings linking blurry photos and newspaper clippings, convinced they’ve uncovered some grand, nefarious plot. The classic “red yarn pinned to every random person’s face on the corkboard.”
Except in this case, there’s no factual coherence—just a web of insinuations about who endorsed whom, who liked which post, and how they must all be in cahoots. More or less the written version of that detective-in-the-basement cliché, minus any shred of evidence that any of it is actually sinister.
If it weren’t so sad, disappointing, and—most importantly—dangerous for our children, it might almost be laughable.
Eslick proceeds to describe how she believes The Defender operates within some shadowy network of secret “political chess pieces” (in Lee’s Summit of all places, mind you) and must be in cahoots with local parents, activists, and staff to leak news about Superintendent Dr. Buck’s contract not being extended. She conjures up flow charts, cryptic references, and leaps of logic so vast they could only reside in that special dimension reserved for tinfoil hats.
Not that it needs to be said, but since we are here, let me be clear: there is no grand conspiracy. Just reporters doing what reporters do. Of course I have sources, like every journalist: people across racial lines—Black parents outraged at the blatant racism, white parents fed up with conspiracy-fueled extremism—who want their district back from fringe ideologues.
“Racism is a form of imagination, not just of domination. And across our history, whites have imagined blacks conspiring against them.” – Johnathan Zimmerman, White paranoia, from Denmark Vesey to Dylann Roof
I reached out to Eslick for a comment on a legitimate news tip. She opted not to respond but, in the grand tradition of deflectors everywhere, scurried to Facebook and conjured an entire espionage thriller in her head.
I suppose when you’re trying to distract from your real agenda—defunding teachers, endangering Black children, voting down tax measures that benefit students, and undermining public education—it helps to point the finger elsewhere. Let’s parse what’s really happening:
Dr. Buck’s Contract Was Not Extended. That’s the crux of the issue. The Board decided not to renew the superintendent’s contract. Then, lo and behold, some board members realized that public scrutiny wouldn’t be so fun (especially before an imminent election). Instead of addressing the decision openly, they’ve pointed fingers, playing cloak-and-dagger about who “leaked” the news.
SPOILER ALERT: once Dr. Buck shared the decision with his staff the following morning, it was no longer confidential. That’s how news works.
This Isn’t About “Leaks.” And in case it wasn’t immediately apparent, the Lee’s Summit school board is not the CIA or the White House. Information gets out. What this is really about is a school board that doesn’t want to answer for its actions. Meanwhile, the real issues—like the board’s repeated attacks on teachers and public-school funding—slip through the cracks.
I will not pretend otherwise. When Eslick lumps together Black journalists, Black parents, and their allies as part of some radical conspiracy, she taps into the old, tired racist trope of “the Blacks conspiring together.” I’ve experienced that tactic firsthand as a student in Lee’s Summit. I founded The Kansas City Defender precisely to shine light on the horrifying, racial terror that goes unchecked in districts all across the KC metro.
In fact, within months of founding The Defender in 2021, I helped break a national story about over 100 Kansas City students launching a petition to bring back slavery. Just months later, I exposed Lee’s Summit West students attempting to start a group aligned with the same white supremacist terrorist ideology as the Buffalo mass killer.
It is this unwavering focus on youth-driven coverage that has earned The Defender more than five national awards, including recognition from the Institute for Nonprofit News, LION Publishers, American Public Media, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as features in Harvard’s esteemed Nieman Labs Journal, the Washington Post, and NPR.
Indeed this is also how I met Davoya Marshall, the Black Lee’s Summit parent who Eslick targets with her hateful and racially-motivated attack. Davoya was one of the few brave parents to speak out after Turning Point USA, a group associated with white supremacist extremist ideologies, attempted to found a chapter at Lee’s Summit West in 2022.
And that’s exactly why Eslick and people like her lash out. The mere act of Black people organizing, speaking out, or simply existing in spaces of power has long been twisted into a so-called “conspiracy.”
Again, this isn’t at all new—it’s a deeply embedded white supremacist fear, stretching back to the days of slavery, when even the whisper of Black rebellion sent plantation owners into a frenzy of paranoia. They criminalized Black literacy, punished Black gatherings, and spread propaganda that painted enslaved people as dangerous plotters.
The same racist framework has evolved over time—from Reconstruction-era myths of “Black mobs,” to the FBI’s COINTELPRO targeting of civil rights leaders, to the way Black parents like Davoya are attacked with racially coded language today for simply advocating for their children. Eslick’s Facebook post is just the latest iteration of this old, tired playbook—repackaged for a school board, but with the same underlying goal: to silence, to control, to punish Black voices that refuse to submit.
The real question is this: Why is a sitting board member so threatened by legitimate public inquiry that she finds it necessary to conjure conspiracies and smear longtime Lee’s Summit Black parents and journalists?
I’m writing this not because I need validation—I and many others have far surpassed the intellectual energy it takes to dignify these paranoid fantasies—but because, frankly, the students of Lee’s Summit deserve better.
So let me be absolutely clear: from Lee’s Summit to every district in Missouri and beyond, we are not backing down.
The families demanding justice, the educators fighting for every child, the journalists exposing corruption—we are in this for the long haul. We will hold every bigot, every extremist, and every enabler accountable. We will protect all children, amplify their voices, and confront every attempt to erase their dignity, silence their power, or strip them of their future.
They may try to distract us with scare tactics or hide behind closed doors, but their racism and fear mongering will never outweigh our power. We will speak, we will mobilize, and we will win.
Most importantly, we will not stop until the racist, extremist stranglehold on our schools is shattered—permanently.
