April 09 2025
One expects Iranians to hold political offices in places like California, but in the Ozarks? The Ozarks have an unfair reputation for being home to unsophisticated and bigoted hillbillies. But the largest city in the Ozarks now has elected an Iranian-American to the eight-member City Council and elected another to the eight-member School Board.
And they didn’t get elected because of any huge local Iranian-American community! Both are non-partisan races.
Bruce Adib-Yazdi was born in born in Chicago and spent his early childhood in Wichita, Kansas, where his Iranian father met his American mother. The family then moved to Tehran — prior to the 1979 revolution — when Bruce was in the second grade. In Tehran, he attended an international school.
“It was a great place to live,” Adib-Yazdi said of Iran. “I learned a lot, got a lot of interesting interactions with different people.”
Upon his family returning to the US, Adib-Yazdi lived in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, before going to college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture. He has been an architect ever since.
In the wake of the late 1980s oil bust, which hit the Southern US particularly hard, Adib-Yazdi decided to move to the Ozarks, where his mother’s side of the family is from, as well as his wife, Joyce Eiken, who is a Springfield native.
They have lived in Springfield for 35 years now. Bruce ran for the City Council last year and lost. On April 8, however, he not only won, he won big and he defeated an incumbent. Bruce got 57.2 percent of the vote in a two-man race.
Springfield, with a population of 170,000, is the third largest city in the Ozarks. There is no fixed definition of where the Ozarks lie, but it’s basically southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and based on the Ozark Mountains.
Adib-Yazdi, who has experience working on low-income housing projects across the country, said there wasn’t enough affordable housing being built in Springfield, and suggested the city could change that by actively advocating for projects at the state level.
“We have, as a city institution, been agnostic when it comes to state tax credit projects,” Adib-Yazdi said. “We let the developers go vie for them and compete for them at the state level with some levels of intermittent success, whereas other cities — and we need to think of ourselves as another city, as opposed to a big town — advocate for specific projects or timing of projects or groupings.”
Adib-Yazdi would also like to advocate for more funding to tackle homelessness, which he said is best addressed through “housing first,” a concept that prioritizes permanent housing, accompanied by supportive services, though he acknowledged uncertainty as to what the city’s role is in addressing homelessness, and that some individuals “are never going to accept something other than the way they live now.”
“However, there are some who, either through mental illness or substance abuse or other unfortunate situations, have found themselves in a position where they could use the help, and what we have found is that permanent, supportive housing is the first solution to some of that situation,” Adib-Yazdi said, noting that a housing first approach will significantly reduce the possibility of “relapsing” back into homelessness.
Adib-Yazdi is also interested in exploring potential grant-funding opportunities to provide gun locks to gun owners in an effort to keep stolen guns from being used in violent crimes.
“We know people aren’t going to stop owning guns, but if we can find a way to get them to the point where they’re not functional if stolen, that would be a first step in the process of keeping them out of violence,” Adib-Yazdi said.
Meanwhile, there is also an Iranian-American on the Springfield School Board. Maryam Mohammadkhani was elected last year to a four-year term. She started something of a kerfuffle just before this year’s School Board election, although she was not up this year.
A day before the April 8 election, Mohammadkhani questioned why an Iranian flag was among the many flags displayed at a local school.
“The flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran hangs in the cafeteria of Rountree Elementary,” she wrote April 7 on the Facebook page for her campaign committee, Parents for Mohammadkhani. “Under the guise of inclusivity, well-meaning staff accepted this gift from a [Missouri State University] professor.”
Officials with the district and board said Mohammadkhani did not raise concerns about the flag with the school, district officials or the board prior to the post on the eve of the election.
Mohammadkhani pinned the responsibility for the displayed flag in the school on the elected governing body that she has been part of since 2021.
In the post, she wrote: “Question: Who is responsible? Answer: The Board of Education.”
She added: “Your vote has consequences.”
Rountree is one of three Springfield elementary schools that offer the International Baccalaureate’s Primary Years Programme. It features an interdisciplinary academic approach that aims to teach students effective communication, critical thinking, problem-solving and belonging, locally and globally.
“There are IB schools in almost 160 countries,” Mohammadkhani wrote. “Why display this flag?”
Mohammadkhani, a retired pathologist, was born in Iran and has lived in Springfield for more than 20 years.
Her post about the flag displayed at Rountree generated more than 90 comments and shares on her campaign page on Facebook. Some of the commenters called for the flag to be removed or argued only the American flag should be displayed. Others questioned the timing and appropriateness of the post, just before the election.
“As a teacher at Rountree who teaches multiple students who speak languages from the areas in and around Iran, when I see the flags, I see the people, their culture, their humanity,” wrote Rountree teacher Michelle Garrison, in a comment on the post.
“We can celebrate a variety of cultures without being swallowed up by politics affronted by the false efforts at ‘diversity’ and the like. And we can still encourage a sense of American pride while teaching about a variety of cultures. You don’t have to agree with the politics or religion in order to care for the people, especially the students, whose heritage for which the flag might be the closest representation.”
In the comment, Garrison wrote that of all the issues teachers and students face, flags take up “very little” attention. “We hope the school board focuses on what is most important, caring for kids, and the real problems teachers face in the trenches every day.”
Mohammadkhani, elected to a second term in 2024, has been vocal in the school board election, publicly supporting incumbent Kelly Byrne and first-time candidate David Myers. They both lost, however, getting 46 percent and 40 percent of the vote, respectively.
Asked about the post, board president Danielle Kincaid said there is an “appropriate process for sharing concerns with fellow board members, the superintendent and the district we’re elected to represent.”
“That process provides board members with an opportunity to seek clarity on issues and resolve potential misunderstandings. In this circumstance, Dr. Mohammadkhani chose not to follow that process. She did not engage with the board, administration, or other district representative before posting her comments directly to a campaign page on the eve of an election,” Kincaid wrote.
