In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?

> I think you're actually just complaining about democracy

Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.