Virginia school boards are issuing cellphone free mandates in their local communities, after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin ordered schools to draft plans for cell phone-free education in K-12 public schools.
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In a chilling reminder that the integrity of our voting process is under constant attack, there is a serious violation of electoral law under way right now in the Elections Office of Fairfax County, Virginia. The Fairfax County Registrar, Eric Spicer, has allowed a candidate for school board to appear on the ballot although she failed to submit proper petitions with sufficient signatures. Immediate action is required by the county Electoral Board to disqualify her.
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The field of candidates is now set for the 28 school districts across Minnesota that will hold “off-year” elections this November, where there are no legislative seats or congressional or statewide offices on the ballot.
While most of the nearly 300 other school districts across the state hold their elections during more visible campaign cycles (such as 2024), the school district communities with races this fall represent about 1.7 million residents across the state. Combined, those districts with seats up for election steward well over $4 billion in tax dollars.
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A 12-year-old Middleborough, Massachusetts school boy recently defended his First Amendment rights to his school committee after allegedly being sent home from school for making others feel unsafe by wearing a shirt that says, “There are only two genders.”
A video of Liam Morrison’s confrontation of his school committee was reported Sunday at the Libs of TikTok Twitter account.
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Over 100 concerned parents, educators, and others showed up at a school board meeting of Washington Elementary School District No. 6 (WESD) in Glendale to speak Thursday night, most of them upset that the school board unanimously decided that the district would no longer hire student teachers from Arizona Christian University (ACU). Newly elected School Board Member Tamillia Valenzuela, who describes herself as “witchy AF” and “queer AF,” led the effort, stating the university’s “biblically-informed” values made her feel unsafe.
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Carrie Schween, a candidate for the Germantown Municipal School District (GMSD) School Board, criticized the board for “attempting to silence parents’ voices.”
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The American Principles Project (APP), a national pro-parents rights organization that directly engages in campaigns and elections, has entered the Polk County, Florida school board election by providing four local candidates with $40,000 for ad campaigns.
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Mentor Schools is withholding mental health information about transgender or transitioning students from parents.
An Ohio school board meeting on Tuesday, September 13th raised concern in parents over an e-mail which went out to teachers in the district informing them that they are not required to inform parents if a student, 11 years old or older, who is transgender or transitioning asks to use a different name or pronoun.
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A Southington High School English teacher’s student worksheet that defined terms often associated with the concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender theory drew anger from parents, students, board of education officials, and members of the community.
School board members said they were unaware of the three-page worksheet packet until they read about it on social media.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Professional Educators of Tennessee Executive Director and CEO JC Bowman to the newsmaker line to discuss the recent firing of Shelby County Schools Superintendent Dr. Joris Ray and the pitfalls of jamming through Educational Savings Accounts to parents and their students.
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While every office in Sumner County in which a partisan election has been held is currently controlled by Republicans, Democrats are making a run at several seats during the 2022 election cycle.
On the August 4 combination ballot that includes the general election for county offices and a primary for state and federal offices, Democrats are vying for eight of the four dozen total seats electors will be voting on.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Robin Steenman of Williamson Families PAC in studio to give her candidate recommendations.
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A lot of Wisconsin parents are not happy with their local school boards. Conservative and Republicans candidates for school boards did well in their races Tuesday, many of them new challengers who unseated longtime incumbents.
“Last night was a great night for parents looking to take back control of their children’s education and for liberty-oriented candidates generally,” Eric Bott with Americans for Prosperity in Wisconsin told the Center Square.
The Wisconsin Republican Party said party-backed and conservative candidates won two-thirds of the races where they were active.
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A Pennsylvania judge ruled to kick five Democratic members off the school board for the West Chester Area School District over a mask mandate.
Judge William Mahon of the Chester County Court of Common Pleas ruled to immediately remove the officials from their position due to “no response” from the members to a petition to end the mandate.
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A group of parents in Rochester, Mich., are demanding a dramatic change in school leadership.
Parents expressed their anger at Rochester Community Public Schools administrators and school board members during a Monday meeting. Parents are demanding the school board fire Superintendent Robert Shaner, then tender their resignations.
The parents’ pique was prompted by revelations school employees were monitoring parents’ social media accounts, compiling dossiers of publicly disgruntled mothers and fathers, and phoning parents’ employers, which, in the case of Elena Dinverno, resulted in her firing.
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Metro Nashville public school students and staff are no longer required to wear masks following a February school board vote that took effect Monday.
Students and staff have the option to continue wearing masks as they please, however, face coverings will not be mandated for the first time this school year.
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A mother who was told to “zip it” and then thrown out of a school board meeting while addressing the board’s members has filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming that the board’s rules for public speakers are unconstitutional.
Plaintiff Ashley Ryder is seeking injunctive relief to stop the Big Walnut Local Schools (BWLS) from enforcing its rules at school board meetings.
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Fourteen Republican attorneys general, led by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, have sued the Biden administration for not responding to a Freedom of Information request related to the Department of Justice calling for surveillance of parents expressing opinions at school board meetings and other forums.
The lawsuit follows a chain of events that began last October.
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Des Moines this week suffered its first fatal school shooting – reigniting a controversy in the city after the district removed police officers from its schools last year.
Police say a group of teenagers in vehicles outside Des Moines’ East High School fired multiple rounds onto school property on Monday, killing a 15-year-old boy and critically wounding two female students who were bystanders. Six teenagers, some of them current Des Moines students, have been charged with first-degree murder.
The deadly drive-by shooting now hovers over the decision by Des Moines officials, along with about 30 districts across the country, to exile cops from schools. These moves were part of the “defund the police” movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It’s a movement now reeling in the face of violent crime surging nationwide, punctuated by President Biden’s State of the Union vow last week to “fund the police.”
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As school districts start dropping the mask mandates, removing pornographic books from their libraries, and explicitly prohibiting critical race theory, it’s clear that the parent protests are working. School boards, even in progressive bastions like San Francisco, are currently being cleaned out and replaced by more pro-parent members. Moreover, politicians like the governor of Oklahoma are openly instituting a school choice model that would allow for different schooling models and have education dollars follow the student, not automatically go to the school.
Naturally, these developments invite more pushback (sometimes literally so) from those who believe they’re supporting public education. It was fine in the past to let various kooky parents carry on about the evils of teaching Harry Potter or sex ed; school boards and district leaders could simply yawn and carry on as before. However, now that it actually threatens their authority and influence, they can no longer ignore parents’ concerns..
In general, opponents of protesting parents make the same points over and over. They deny that public schools have problems, play semantic games with critical race theory (“it’s just an abstract legal theory taught in law school,” etc.), and accuse angry parents of being misguided racists. In their view, parents who demand a more wholesome and academic experience for their children are actually demanding an exclusively white and privileged experience. And for good measure, they will add an anecdote about a heroic public school teacher changing lives, proving beyond any doubt that public schools are still doing noble work and are essential for a healthy, diverse society.
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Parents and residents of San Francisco overwhelmingly voted to recall three school board members in the city’s first recall election since 1983.
Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga and Gabriella Lopez all lost their positions on the governing body, as the “Yes” option to the recall question gained more than 70 percent in all three cases.
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Since the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the White House equating the acts of concerned parents at local school board meetings to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and requesting federal intervention, the majority of state chapters of the organization have either left or distanced themselves from the NSBA.
There are 49 state chapters that paid dues to the NSBA before the Sept. 29 letter, which sparked backlash from parents, lawmakers and education leaders. Since then, 27 state school board associations have distanced themselves from the NSBA, while 17 state associations have taken further action, according to data compiled by Parents Defending Education (PDE).
The NSBA apologized for the letter and removed it from its website.
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Scottsdale police have closed their inquiry into a former head of a school district there facing accusations that he kept and shared an online repository of sensitive data belonging to parent protesters who attended board meetings.
SPD announced Thursday afternoon that their investigation into Scottsdale Unified School District board member Jann-Michael Greenburg has reached a conclusion without referring any charges.
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On Tuesday, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, requesting that he return to the committee to provide additional testimony regarding his school board memo, according to a press release.
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Public education has been under the microscope lately, especially since many states shut down in-person learning last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning from home via technology, many parents had the chance to hear what their children’s teachers were saying—and they didn’t always like it. In fact, many were downright disturbed by what public schools were teaching their children.
Parents should not be forced to sit by and watch as their children get indoctrinated with progressive ideas they don’t agree with. Assuming it is legitimate for the government—that is, the taxpayers—to fund education, the government should distribute those funds directly to parents in the form of vouchers and allow them to choose where to educate their children. Not only would this allow for more choice in schools, but it would also reduce much of the conflict we are seeing today between parents and school boards across the country.
A common response to voucher proposals is that they would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private religious schools, thus violating separation of church and state. In other words, atheists and progressives argue that they should not have to financially support schools that teach students religious worldviews.
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More than half of state school board associations have distanced themselves from the national association after it sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking for federal intervention to investigate parents who protest at local meetings.
Of the 26 that have repudiated the letter, 11 have discontinued their membership with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) after Kentucky did so Wednesday.
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On the heels of the exposure of an extensive database of personal and derogatory information local parents say was collected by Scottsdale School Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg, Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) told The Arizona Sun-Times that Greenburg needs to resign.
“Parents in Scottsdale and across the state are mad as hell over this situation, and rightfully so,” he said. “These allegations are gravely concerning and should be investigated to the fullest extent. If true, Scottsdale Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg should resign in disgrace and be prosecuted for abuse of power. It is unacceptable and anti-American to compile dossiers on your political enemies, especially when those so-called enemies are the very people you were elected to serve.”
Parents of children in the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) discovered that the president of the school district’s school board, Jann-Michael Greenburg, has a Google Drive database containing personal information about some of the parents he’d had conflicts with. Greenburg (who is shown to have edit permissions for the Drive) and his father, Mark (who is listed as the owner of the Drive) told The Scottsdale Independent they had no involvement or knowledge of the database.
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The Sumner County Board of Commissioners is using redistricting required every 10 years following completion of the U.S. census in 2020 to potentially make significant and unprecedented changes to the county commission districts.
Sumner County currently has 12 county commission districts with two commissioners per district, but redistricting has opened the door to making 24 districts with one commissioner per district.
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Early returns Tuesday night showed that critics of COVID-19 reopening policies and critical race theory made headway in school board elections nationwide.
Conservatives now have a majority of the Carroll Independent School District in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Southlake, where parents previously led an electoral revolt against a proposed racial equity curriculum this spring.
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On Monday, a bill that would allow Tennessee counties to decide if school board elections can be partisan passed both chambers and now heads to the Governor’s desk.
The bill, HB 9072 – SB 9009, “requires elections of school board members to be conducted on a partisan basis.” The legislation also “removes prohibition for a person seeking a position on a school board to campaign as the nominee of a political party and authorizes political parties to nominate candidates for school board membership by any method authorized under the rules of the party or by primary election.”
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Recently-unearthed documents revealed a disagreement between the superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) and the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO), after the former requested increased security measures from the latter in order to combat protesting parents at school board meetings, the Daily Caller reports.
The correspondence was revealed by a public records request from the Fight for School PAC. Documents show that superintendent Scott Ziegler’s requests included an increased presence of officers, a K-9 sweep of the meeting venue, and undercover officers in the crowd, among other measures, all of which were rejected by LCSO as excessive.
The LCSO even went so far as to disagree with Ziegler changing the rules for the school board meeting, including the decision to shut down the public comment section of a meeting that took place on June 22nd; LCSO told Ziegler that measures such as this amounted to silencing political opposition.
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The backlash from the incendiary language in a recent letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking for federal law enforcement to intervene on outspoken parents at school board meetings escalated this week when the group’s Ohio and Missouri chapters withdrew their respective memberships.
The Missouri School Boards Association in announcing its departure said the national group “demonstrated it does not currently align with MSBA’s guiding principles of local governance.”
The Ohio chapter was more direct, saying in its letter Monday that its departure was a “direct result” of the Sept. 29 letter to Biden.
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by Abbey Smith One Kansas school board member and four Wisconsin school board members are facing recall elections on Nov. 2. Supporters of both efforts listed the school board’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the reasons for recall. In the Nemaha USD 115 in Kansas, District 1 representative Amy Sudbeck is facing a yes/no recall question. If a majority of voters cast ballots in favor of the recall, Sudbeck will be removed from office. If a majority of voters cast ballots against the recall, Sudbeck will retain her office. The recall petition said that Sudbeck had failed to perform her duties and alleged that she had violated state statutes by voting to require masks in schools rather than allowing them to be optional. In response to the recall, Sudbeck said, “It’s unfortunate that this issue has caused division in our community. I voted with the majority to allow our kids freedom to participate in activities, stay in school and keep them out of a quarantine invoked by the health department.” Sudbeck was appointed to her position on the seven-member board in 2020. She is seeking re-election in 2021. She advanced from the primary on Aug. 3…
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The school board in Mankato, Minnesota, announced strict new rules that effectively prevent parents from criticizing board members.
The new restrictions were announced at a meeting held Oct. 18. “Effective tonight, open forum participants are prohibited from calling out or addressing any individual school board or school district staff member. If this occurs, open forum will be closed,” said School Board Chair Jodi Sapp. “Beginning at the Nov. 1 school board meeting, open forum will be limited to those individuals who wish to speak to an item on the board agenda.”
The effect of these two rules is that parents are not able to discuss anything but topics approved by the board in its agenda and all board members and schools administrators are protected from direct criticism.
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The efforts from concerned parents are growing in an attempt to recall four Mequon-Thiensville School District (MTSD) board members.
The recall election, which will take place of November 2nd, has drawn the attention of many individuals who often do not pay attention to politics, as the recall petition gained more than 17,000 signatures.
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Frustration at school boards boiled over for some parents and activists who protested outside of the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C. Sunday.
A small crowd gathered for the “Parents Are Not ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Rally,” a reference to Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum that called on the FBI to “use its authority” in response to the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
Garland’s statement followed a letter from the National School Board Association (NSBA) that asked the federal government to get involved in the alleged “immediate threat” of violence from parents against American public schools and education officials. The letter encouraged President Joe Biden’s administration to use statutes such as the USA PATRIOT Act to address actions that could be “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
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Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s order to have the FBI investigate parent protests of school policies is “outrageous” and a “method of intimidation.”
“He is saying they are intimidating school board members. No, it is the attorney general of the United States that is intimidating people exercising their rights to free speech and the right to petition their government,” Johnson said in an interview aired Sunday on the Cats Roundtable with John Catsimatidis show on WABC radio in New York.
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Northern Virginia parents plan to protest in front of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Sunday, according to a flyer posted online.
A flyer reveals plans for a “Parents Are Not ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Rally Oct. 17. “Stand up, speak up, fight back!” the memo reads. “Bring friends, be heard … you can make a difference!”
News broke Wednesday that a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) student was allegedly raped in a school bathroom in May by a male student who wore a skirt. The victim’s father, Scott Smith, was arrested at a LCPS school board meeting weeks later for resisting arrest, and the perpetrator – who was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy – allegedly assaulted another girl at the school he transferred to following the initial incident, Daily Wire reported.
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It is probably an understatement to say that when one group designates another as a terrorist organization, diplomatic relations between the two become strained.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.”
Truths. Equal. Creator. Rights. Concerned parents want schools to teach truths, not ideologies; operate under equality, not equity; and respect faith in our Creator and our parental rights. These are the fundamental principles from our Declaration that are at stake in American education today.
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In September, the Wilson County School Board approved a temporary mask mandate for students, teachers, and staff in the entire school system. The mandate expired on October 4th which led the school board to vote on whether to extend it or not during their meeting Monday night.
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On Monday, during a routine school board meeting, the Williamson County Board of Education voted to extend the temporary mask requirement for students, staff and visitors at all grade levels, inside all buildings and on buses, through January 19, 2022.
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The back-to-school mask wars have been heating up for weeks, but the Biden administration just took them to a whole new level. On Wednesday, the president ordered the US Department of Education to use all available measures to prohibit states from banning school mask mandates.
In his remarks, Biden decried the contentious school board meetings that have occurred in districts across the country as parents argue for and against school mask mandates. He indicated that the “intimidation and the threats we’re seeing across the country,” from concerned citizens who oppose mask mandates “are wrong. They’re unacceptable.”
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School board recall efforts are sweeping the country, with many driven by parents claiming Critical Race Theory (CRT) is infecting schools, demanding schools reopen in person, and arguing that boards are consumed by virtue signaling.
According to Ballotpedia, 58 such efforts against 144 board members have taken place in 2021. Those are both all-time highs since it started tracking school board recall efforts in 2006, and far above the next highest year, 2010.
Only one school board member has been removed in 2021, however, while three resigned and seven were retained in elections. One is scheduled for a November recall vote in Kansas for upholding a mask mandate.
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Michigan voters upset with mask mandates and other school-board actions can organize recall efforts, as Mount Pleasant Public Schools parents are now doing.
Three directors of that central-Michigan school district could be electorally removed owing to public backlash over a requirement that all students up to the age of 12 wear masks in school.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed MNPS School Board Member for District Six, Fran Bush in studio to discuss Tuesday evening’s school board-parent debate on mask mandates for students.
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Over the last few months, the U.S. has engaged in intense discussion over “critical race theory.” As Americans have debated the impact of CRT, several states have banned CRT from the public school curriculum, while other states are using it as part of that curriculum. The debate over CRT’s merits or dangers has prompted ideological battles in school board elections. This article looks at the increased activism around school board elections and its broader ramifications.
Past politicization of school board elections
Though school board elections may not seem as exciting as a presidential or even congressional race, they have taken on greater importance in recent years. In 2005, the city of Dover, Pennsylvania faced a contentious court case known as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which ruled that the school district’s teaching of intelligent design violated the separation of church and state. Shortly after the trial concluded, the district held its school board elections, and all the school board members who favored the teaching of intelligent design lost their reelection bids, at least in part due to their position on the issue. The election generated much discussion.
In the early 2010s, school board races saw partisan involvement through the Tea Party movement. Generally, candidates affiliated with the Tea Party ran on platforms of greater political accountability and lower property taxes. Carl Paladino, a former Republican nominee for governor in New York, won a race for the Buffalo school board on a Tea Party-type platform. The school board later ousted Paladino for making offensive comments about former First Lady Michelle Obama.
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If you want to know, up close and personal, the banality of evil, attend a school board meeting. With critical race theory and forced vaccination and masking all the rage, I did just that last night.
This board meeting wasn’t my first. When I was a kid, my dad ran for school board and won after a terrible teacher (a feel-good hippie) allowed one of my classmates to steal my work all year and put his name on it. Said teacher taught us second-graders macramé and little else. My family had moved from a high-performing school district to this less-than-stellar place. For about three years, I learned nothing new. My parents were incensed. So my dad ran for board treasurer, got elected, and promptly pissed everyone off.
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A highschool in Owatonna has introduced an elective class about critical race theory. The course is applicable for college credit. The course description says that taking Introduction to Education is strongly encouraged as a prerequisite. The description says that students will be taught the five tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and will be shown how to “isolate race.”
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Critical Race Theory and its potential impact on students, and the broader community, has many parents worried in Williamson County. These worries have grown ever since Fostering Healthy Solutions (FHS) was hired – by unanimous vote by the WCS school board – to do an audit of the WCS system. FHS is Shan Foster’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultancy, which he co-founded with his mother, Anita Foster, in 2017. FHS was brought in to address charges of bullying and claims of incidents of racism in the WCS. The WCS School Board has paid FHS $55,000 over 4 months to help the district “provide a safe learning environment for all students by creating a cultural strategy plan”, according to an April 28 article in the Brentwood HomePage.
Fueling WCS parents’ concerns about FHS, are controversies regarding Critical Race Theory that are erupting in other school districts nationwide. The concern being, that firms like FHS are enacting programs in the name of “Diversity”, “Equity” and “Inclusion”, but hiding behind those nice-sounding terms is a bevy of lesser known CRT-based ideas. For example, concepts such as “white privilege”, “anti-racism” and “systemic racism”, as well as a “oppressor/oppressed” framework for understanding America. Oppressor/Oppressed narratives are rooted in Neo-Marxist philosophies and are usually presented as fact to faculty and students via DEI programs, rather than academic theory.
The Tennessee Legislature just banned the teaching of CRT in schools – with Governor Bill Lee signing HB 0580/SB 0623 – which penalizes funding to any school system that teaches CRT concepts. Still, the question many Williamson County parents have is, does CRT inform the worldview of the FHS’s founders? And does FHS intend to use CRT concepts and ideas to guide discussions about DEI should their contract be renewed in July?
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100 parents were reportedly in attendance at a school board meeting in Lakeville, Minnesota on Tuesday to speak out against Critical Race Theory being implemented.
Two concerned parents spoke at the meeting and protested the “indoctrination” of Critical Race Theory and said that Critical Race Theory is opposed to their Christian faith. The couple, Jim and Keisha, said that they were there to speak for the “millions of black Americans who disagree with the Black Lives Matter movement.”
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