Conservatives saw the top school board win this election, proving that parents across the country are still actively working to get rid of gender ideology in the classroom, explain winners who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The parent watchdog organization Moms for Liberty saw more than half of its school board candidates win on Nov. 4, with several winners attributing the win to concerns about improper classroom maintenance and issues surrounding gender identity politics. Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Deskovic told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the problem that motivates parents to run for school board elections is a lack of transparency about what happens in the classroom.
“Parents feel like they don’t have access to schools like they used to or information about their children,” Deskovic said. “And I would say parents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about transparency in education.”
The two student council winners who spoke to DCNF strongly agreed with this sentiment, having both experienced first-hand indoctrination attempts in the classroom.
“In fact, the reason I originally ran for office four years ago was because there were inappropriate materials in our daughter's classroom,” Danielle Lindemuth, who was re-elected to the Elizabethtown District School Board in Pennsylvania, told DCNF. “There is explicit sexual content in the books. There is an underlying theme of rape and incest in various books.”
Brooke Richards-Patterson, who was elected to the Old Bridge Township Board of Education in New Jersey, told DCNF that she became aware of the school's program to teach inappropriate content to children three years ago when a school board member began recruiting parents to speak out on the issue.
“The curriculum proposed by the state includes words like anal, oral sex, masturbation starting in second, third and fourth grade,” Richards-Patterson said. “My child at this age still believes in Santa Claus, my child is waiting for the tooth fairy. Why is that appropriate?”
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Deskovic speaks during the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors National Summit at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown on June 30, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“I’m not trying to be a mother to your children,” Richards-Patterson continued. “If you want your kids to know all this, go for it. I don't know it, and a lot of us don't know it. And the whole point is that I, as a parent, should have the most say. That's the point. I want you to have it, too.”
Lindemuth and Richards-Patterson counties have already made some progress in eliminating gender identity-based politics.
“We recognize that this is the parent's choice. It is not the school district's choice,” Lindemuth said. “And so if a student chooses to identify with someone other than their biological gender, then we have established the data that parents need to be involved in the conversation, and so if they want to change their name or pronoun, then the parents need to be the ones to sign off on that.”
“We also want to make sure that we protect the rights of all of our students, faculty and staff. And so we made sure that if someone has a strong belief that they cannot refer to someone other than their biological sex, they have alternatives to what they can do,” she explained. “They shouldn’t be rude or disrespectful, and they shouldn’t use a name that the person doesn’t want to be called.”
Under the new policy, teachers are allowed to address students with “something more general,” such as addressing students by their last name rather than their first name, as long as they address all students the same way. Thus, “they don't use pronouns at all” but are “very careful to respect students' choices without infringing on their own rights.”
Richards-Patterson said her district was able to reverse a policy that allowed children to change their gender identity in the school system without parents' knowledge after enough people spoke out about it.
“I wish I could open every door and talk to every resident because there are a lot of things that people don’t realize,” she told DCNF. “No one knew there was a policy that if your child identifies as the opposite gender, they can change their name in the student portal. And you won't even know it.”
Richards-Patterson believes it was her efforts to educate parents about these issues that got her elected.
“That’s what motivates people: when they feel like they’re learning more and that I want to teach them, they want to work with me,” she said.
Even if counties don't face these issues directly, stories from other counties that make national news, such as sexual violence, concealment in Loudoun County and registered sex offender Visiting schools and public locker rooms in Arlington, Virginia has parents taking a closer look at their children's schools. (RELATED: 'No One Will Know': Red State Schools 'Openly' Violate Law on Male Students in Women's Facilities, Complaint Alleges)
“We can see that absolutely clearly,” Lindemuth said. “There are times when parents come to school board meetings or contact us and say, ‘Hey, is this happening at our school? Should we worry about this?
“It forces parents to look under the covers a little bit,” Deskovic said. “Look, parents. Wake up. Is this happening in your area?”
While Richards-Patterson's victory gave her district a conservative majority, most school districts were not so lucky. Despite Loudoun November 4 election its second member who is willing to protect girls' space from biological men, the rest of the council as a whole remains unfriendly this idea.
However, Deskovic advises parents and school boards not to lose hope in situations like this.
“One school board member can make a huge difference if they at least speak up about what's going on in the district because they have access, they have much more access than the average parent in the community. If they're just sharing information and revealing what's going on, then it's worth having at least one school board member, even if they're outvoted,” Deskovic said. “This is not a quick fix. We didn't get into this education mess in one election cycle, and we're not going to get out of it in one election cycle. It's been decades since unions dominated school boards and education in America, and it's going to take decades to fix it.”
Seventeen candidates endorsed by Moms for Freedom won school board seats in this election, a fraction of the total 500 races the organization has influenced over the past three years.
“We are at the cusp of education reform in this country,” Deskovic said. “All of this will truly lead to that golden age in America that we look forward to, when we move from where only a third of the children in America read, and only 22% of high school students can pass a civics test, to a place where our children can be enriched and become bold advocates of goodness, beauty and truth, and they can once again become educated citizens and have the capacity for self-government.”
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