White separatist Kevin McGuire has qualified to run as a candidate for the nine-member Bozeman School Board.
Four candidates filed papers as of Thursday’s deadline to run for three open seats in the May 3 election, according to Lori King, assistant to the assistant superintendent for business.
McGuire, an activist with the National Alliance, which advocates creating a whites-only, non-Jewish society, responded to the Chronicle by e-mail, saying he was running to encourage school programs that “foster a sense of racial identity, pride and belonging.”
“Our children are taught about the histories and cultures of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews and Native Americans but any sense of White racial solidarity or White racial pride is condemned as White racism; and that is not right,” McGuire wrote.
“I stand against the homosexual agenda currently in our school system which not only preaches acceptance of homosexuality but actively encourages it.”
Thirty-nine people, including a Bozeman teacher, signed McGuire’s petition to be a candidate as he walked up and down South Third Avenue and nearby streets.
He is one of three candidates running for two seats representing the Bozeman elementary district.
Also running in that race are incumbent Sara Garcia, 45, a stay-at-home mother of three who is seeking a third three-year term; and newcomer Gary Lusin, 56, a physical therapist who has been a leader on two committees planning renovations of Bozeman High School.
Garcia said she is running because she’s still very interested in the schools and has been working hard on plans to fix up the high school.
“I strongly support the schools,” Garcia said. She voted with the School Board majority in January for a community-wide resolution supporting human rights and racial diversity.
“We’re a public school system and we should be welcoming everybody,” she said. She added that her own father was Jewish and her mother was Lutheran.
Asked about McGuire’s candidacy, she said, “Anybody can run.”
Martha Collins, a Cobb Hill Road resident and former chair of the Gallatin County Planning Board, is the only candidate who has filed to run for the single School Board seat representing rural communities that send their teenagers to Bozeman High.
Collins is seeking the seat now held by attorney John Kauffman, whose term is ending. Collins is a founder of the Montana Outdoor Science School.
The National Alliance first came to Bozeman’s attention last summer, when fliers were dropped anonymously at night in several neighborhoods arguing that the future of the white race was in peril. McGuire later came forward as the group’s spokesman.
In the wake of that, more than 1,000 people joined a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march through downtown Bozeman to demonstrate opposition to the ideas espoused by the National Alliance.
In an interview with the Chronicle in January, McGuire, 22, objected to being called a Nazi or white supremacist.
According to the National Alliance’s Web site, the goals of education are to teach ideas, useful skills and “those traits of character valued by a healthy Aryan society.”
It advocates a new educational system, like one that “enjoyed an all-too-brief revival earlier this century in National Socialist Germany, before being outlawed by the advocates of permissiveness.”