A group of parents who ousted their school board members in South Carolina wasted no time putting their new powers to use by immediately firing their district superintendent and eliminating any vestige of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their schools, among other moves.
A group of parents who ran for a school board acted at once to fulfill their campaign promises. As soon as the new majority was sworn in to take their place on the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina, they moved.
Within the first two hours of their first meeting upon being sworn in, the board fired school superintendent Deon Jackson, dumped district in-house counsel Tiffany Richardson, banned any part of the CRT curriculum they could find, and launched a committee to evaluate whether certain books in district libraries were age-appropriate, NBC News reported.
The new majority of conservative parents who took over the school board took their seats after a campaign by a group called Moms for Liberty, a group that rose to oppose the left-wing agenda in races across the country ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, joining many outraged parents.
NBC noted that Moms for Liberty endorsed more than 500 school board members across the county, and they achieved an astounding 49 percent success rate.
In South Carolina’s Berkeley County, for instance, Moms for Liberty flipped six board seats and took control of the board’s majority. That allowed them to move quickly to implement their agenda.
Moms for Liberty celebrated the board’s quick action, saying, “six new board members clean house first night on the job.”
The liberal media, such as NBC, were shocked that the district’s “first black superintendent” Jackson was immediately fired. But the board replaced Jackson with Anthony Dixon, who is also black.
Indeed, the new chairman, Mac McQuillin, warned the audience to settle down when they announced the end of Jackson’s job.
“All right, listen up,” McQuillin said during the meeting. “We’re going to be respectful in this meeting. You may not agree with our votes, but I ask that you please be respectful and calm. What kind of example are you setting for our kids, disrupting a meeting like this?”
The previous, more liberal board members also fretted over the firing of Jackson and Richardson.
David Barrow, the ousted board chairman, called the firings a “travesty” and a “political witch hunt,” NBC added.
Another member who stayed over from the previous board, Yvonne Bradley, attacked the new majority, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are being fooled by these six. Unbelievable — what the chairman would do. It is so unbelievable how this is going.”
Bradley also blasted the audience for voting for the new majority.
Local liberals also excoriated the new majority for banning CRT, a move that the left-wingers claimed was a sham because there is no CRT curriculum in the school in the first place. They also claimed that a committee to review library books is unnecessary because there are already rules to guide the purchase of books for the schools.
Still, the board united 8-0 to set up a committee to craft guidelines to remove “inappropriate sexual/pornographic content” from the schools after it was determined that teachers, mental health professionals, and librarians would also be part of the committee.
The board in South Carolina’s Berkeley school district, while shocking for how quickly it moved to implement a parent-friendly agenda, is not the only school board to be impacted by Moms for Liberty and other parent groups looking to oust left-wings from positions affecting schools.
In another report, NBC noted that parents in Florida sent at least 25 new school board members to work, along with the support of powerhouse Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And the governor had great success in his school endorsements.
Lindsey Curnutt, a member of DeSantis’ communications department, said in a statement that the governor “led a coalition of parents to establish students-first, parents’ rights school board governance across the state. The DeSantis Education Agenda was on the ballot, and the voters made their voice clear: We want education, not indoctrination.”
Moms for Liberty also waded into Florida’s school board races by endorsing 51 candidates. Twenty-eight of those candidates won, NBC noted. In contrast, the state’s Democratic Party endorsed 30 candidates, but only nine won. And the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist, endorsed seven school board candidates and only three won. Crist also handily lost his race to DeSantis.
Time will tell how effective these new conservative, parent-friendly school board members will be, but whatever the case, it is about time that parents start to pay more attention to the extreme leftism being foisted on our schools in the guise of “education” by these school boards and to begin making inroads to stop it.
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