Inside the Maine Trust’s collaborative investigation of Christian nationalist influences on school boards

Over the past two years, Central Maine reporter Emily Duggan started noticing routine school board meetings weren’t so routine.

Parents who organized against the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric from growing conservative parents’ organizations stand outside school administration offices in Gardiner, Maine.

Candidates with Christian nationalist agendas were elected to the boards, and the rhetoric changed from budgets and field trips to cultural issues such as LGBTQ+ youth and putting Bibles back in school. Meetings erupted into chaos as board presidents tried to maintain order.

Duggan, who has covered schools in Central Maine for five years, realized the same things were happening in several other districts around the state. Organizations and grass roots groups emerged, seemingly out of nowhere.

“The thing that stood out to me was how organized it all was,” Duggan said. “What was happening in one school district was happening in the others.”

Duggan is a staff writer for the Kennebec Journal, which, with the Morning Sentinel, comprises the Central Maine hub, one of three newsrooms of the Maine Trust for Local News. The Maine Trust is the state’s largest network of independent news and media outlets with more than 120 journalists. It is a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News.

An education reporter at a small daily in Maine typically would not produce a six-month investigative piece, but Duggan did – helped, encouraged and supported by the Maine Trust and an outside grant to underwrite the reporting.

Allen Sarvinas, leader of the Maine chapter of Parents Rights in Education speaks during a school board meeting in Gardiner, Maine.

Duggan’s editor, Jessica Lowell, the managing editor in Central Maine, oversees a “small but scrappy” staff. A veteran of nearly 40 years in journalism, she watched one of the chaotic live-streamed school board meetings.

“I have never seen a meeting transpire like this,” she said.

Several others, including Julia Arenstam, managing editor of the Portland Press Herald and Southern Maine group, also pitched in to help with the story, showing the coordination among Maine Trust publications.

“We really wanted to bring in critical eyes who were not involved in the day to day,” Lowell said.

“There is a lot of crossover,” Arenstam said of the staff of Maine Trust, adding the project is a good example of the journalists at the different publications working as a team.

Duggan attended a Poynter Institute webinar on how to cover polarizing subjects and Christian nationalism. The Maine Trust also sent Duggan and two other reporters to a more intensive Poynter Institute in-person training on the same subject in Chicago.

Armed with new skills in executing long-term investigations, Duggan started digging into the parent groups and the support and coordination they were getting from conservatives linked to national groups.

It became obvious that this would be a long-term project. She applied for and won a $5,000 grant from The Joyce Foundation, administered through the Poynter Institute, to cover costs associated with researching and writing. A condition of the grant was that the paywall be taken down for the online version of the story.

“Parents’ rights groups, backed by conservative funders, bring fight to Maine school boards,” was published in November 2025.

A follow-up story, “How some Maine parents are fighting back against conservative education groups,” appeared in late December. 

Duggan’s investigation found that national groups helped a coordinated effort to elect conservative members to school boards in Maine. Once on the boards, conservative members were instructed how to cause disruption and draw attention to their chosen issues.

Duggan also found links from local Maine parent groups and candidates to national groups, including the architects of Project 2025, and others who espouse Christian nationalist views.

In looking for ways to engage readers and expand the story’s reach, Duggan also put the story on a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread, receiving 1,500 “up” votes and 239 comments. It helped, she said, that the paywall was down and readers could look at the story before commenting.

"People are paying attention. People are curious. People are needing this type of news,” she said.

It was an engaging and affirming experience for a native of Portland, Maine, and it’s why Duggan found the right calling in journalism.

“I like that every day is different,” she said. “I love talking to people and hearing what they have to say. It feels really good that people trust you to tell their story.”