“Parents’ rights groups, backed by conservative funders, bring the fight to Maine school boards.”

The headline says it all. And the bottom line, for us, is that outsize vigilance needs to be brought to local school boards around Maine, right now and as long as the local school board is seen as an easy target by national political movements and other conspiratorial forces.

Getting involved is important. Keeping an eye on who’s doing what — and why, and on whose behalf — is now the responsibility of anybody who professes to care about the state of public education where they live.

The eye-opening Kennebec Journal investigation published this week features several big, familiar “megadonor” names alongside smaller and, until now, mostly unknown activists. It charts the performances of those players on a small stage — the average local school board meeting — to tell a sprawling, anxiety-ridden national story.

Many people even loosely involved in the work of the school board of Maine School Administrative District 11 (Gardiner, Pittston, Randolph and West Gardiner), which provided the colorful and deeply fraught basis for reporter Emily Duggan’s journalism, may have had a hunch that everything was not as it seemed.

Board meetings became increasingly unruly and unproductive. The most vexatious attendees were often from towns over, new to town or did not themselves have children in the district’s schools at all. The reporting, which traces robust national conservative support to relevant political nonprofits and political action committees, clears up some of those peculiarities.

“Because Maine law does not require financial disclosures in most school board elections [only 15 of about 250 in the state are large enough to pass the threshold], it’s impossible to trace exactly how much money is flowing directly to these candidates and from where. But experts say even small amounts can have major impacts in these races,” Duggan wrote.

Once fear takes over — fear of liberal ideas about gender identity, of certain books and teachings, of teachers’ personalities, of ancillary services a school district might seek to provide (as, in the case of MSAD 11, a proposal for a grant-funded school clinic that would cater to the needs of economically disadvantaged students) — those school board races become about gumming up the works, and reward the candidates who pledge to do that with the greatest devotion.

The outcome in Gardiner, under the magnifying glass here, is as instructive as it is troubling. Under extraordinary pressure by activists for records and other evidence, school districts in its position hemorrhage tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees. Depressingly, they also have to pony up for adequate security at meetings.

On top of that, there’s an insidious inhibitory effect to all of this, a vandalism that does damage to the good-faith civic engagement and commitment upon which our public schools rely.

If your school board meeting was routinely disrupted and derailed due to allegations of some dark plot against conservative values, would you take an interest in the work and workings of that board, never mind running for election to serve on it — a position that is not paid? Would you take a job in that district, send your kid to a school in that district?

Might you, instead, keep your distance? Might you just assume that extremists were being tackled in extreme ways?

We were struck by a quote from a Scott Hottenstein, who helped run several school board campaigns in Florida against parents’ rights candidates. “If you attack the public schools, disrupt the board meetings and cause chaos and badmouth the district and teachers, low-information parents, or parents working multiple jobs start to fear what is going on in schools,” he said.

All parents should be able to be “low-information parents.” No parent should have to read up about the Claremont Institute, or the Federalist Society, or work to understand who is attempting to hijack decisions about the running of their local school.

But as today’s report grimly shows, we’re in an incoherent reality that calls for the utmost diligence and a state of high alert.

“This is a school board in Maine, but ANY American across the country can help stop them. It’ll take 30 seconds,” an Indiana-based “strategist” and “creator” posted to his internet followers earlier this year, siccing them on the efforts of MSAD 11, which he said was run by “transgender cultists.”

We can take others’ word for what’s happening. Or we can see and decide for ourselves.