Most local politicians I know don’t get paid (school board, commissioners, etc) or they get paid very little for the time they put in.
If you count up all the elected folks in the USA, less than 1% are what you think of as “politicians.” They are mostly just people you see at the grocery store
In the US, school boards and superintendents are a common source of political corruption. Many states allow for local control of districts, so these boards oversee the spending of tens or even hundreds of millions of local tax dollars and government grants.