Conservatives saw the big school board win this election, proving that parents across the country are still actively working to take gender ideology out of the classroom, explained the winners who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Parental rights watchdog Mothers for Freedom saw more than half of its school board candidates win on Nov. 4, with many winners attributing the win to concerns about inappropriate classroom content and issues surrounding gender identity politics. The problem that drives parents to the polls for school board elections is a lack of transparency regarding what happens in the classroom, Tina Deskovic, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Parents feel like they don’t have access to schools the way they used to, or information about their children,” Deskovic said. “I would say that parents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about transparency in education.”
Two school board winners who spoke to DCNF strongly agreed with this idea, having experienced attempted indoctrination in the classroom firsthand.
“That’s actually the reason I ran for office four years ago, it was because of the inappropriate materials that were 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 a major theme of rape and incest in various books.”
Brooke Richards Patterson, who was elected to the Board of Education in Old Bridge Township in New Jersey, told DCNF that she became aware of the school’s agenda of teaching inappropriate content to children three years ago when a school board member began recruiting parents to speak out about the issue.
“The state’s proposed curriculum includes verbiage such as anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation, in second, third and fourth grade,” Richards-Patterson said. “My child still believes in Santa Claus at this age, and my child is waiting for the Tooth Fairy. Why is this appropriate?”
Tina Deskovic, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, 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 raise your kids,” Richards-Patterson continued. “If you want your kids to know all these things, go for it. I don’t, and a lot of us don’t. The point is that I should have the biggest say as a parent. That’s the point. I want you to have that, too.”
Lindemuth and Richards-Patterson counties have already seen some success in rooting out gender identity policies.
“We realize that this is a parent’s choice. It’s not a district choice,” Lindemuth said. “So, if a student chooses to identify as something other than their biological sex, we have set the data for the parents to be involved in the conversation, so if they want to change their name or pronoun, the parents should be the ones to sign off on that.”
“We also want to make sure that we’re protecting the rights of all of our students, faculty and staff. Within that, what we’ve done is make sure that if someone has a firm belief that they can’t call someone something other than their biological sex, that they have alternatives to what they can do,” she explained. “They are not allowed to be rude and disrespectful to them, and they should not use a name that the person does not want to be called.”
Under the new policy, teachers are allowed to address students by “something more general,” such as addressing students by their last names instead of their first names, as long as they address all students the same way. This way, they “don’t use pronouns at all” while still being “very careful to make sure they respect students’ choice while not violating their rights.”
Richards-Patterson said her district was able to rescind a policy that allowed children to change their gender identity within the school system without their parents knowing after enough people spoke out about it.
“I wish I could knock on every door and talk to every resident, because there are a lot of things that people don’t know,” she told DCNF. “No one knew there was a policy that said if your child identified as the opposite gender, they could change their name on the student portal. You would have no idea.”
Richards-Patterson believes her efforts to inform parents about these issues are what led to her election.
“That’s what motivates people, when they feel like they’re learning more and that I want to educate them, they want to work with me,” she said.
Even when districts don’t face these issues directly, stories from other districts that make national news, such as a sexual assault cover-up in Loudoun County and registered sex offenders frequenting schools and public locker rooms in Arlington, Va., are making parents take a closer look at their children’s schools. (RELATED: ‘Nobody will know’: Red state schools ‘openly’ violate male student code in female-designated spaces, complaint alleges)
“We definitely see that,” Lindemuth said. “Sometimes parents come to school board meetings, or they call us and say, ‘Hey, is this happening at our school? Is this something we should be worried about?”
“It makes parents look under the covers a little bit,” Deskovic said. “Parents, take a look. Wake up. Is this happening in your neighborhood?”
While Richards-Patterson’s win transformed her district into a conservative-majority board, most school districts are not as lucky. Although Loudoun on November 4 elected a second member willing to defend spaces for girls from biological males, the rest of the board members are generally It remains unfriendly for this idea.
However, Deskovic advises parents and school boards in similar situations not to lose hope.
“One school board member can make a big difference if they, at the very least, expose what’s going on in the district, because they have access, they have a lot more access than the average parent in the community, and if they’re just sharing information and revealing what’s going on, it’s helpful to have just one school board member, even if they’re excluded from voting,” Deskovic said. “This is not a quick fix. We didn’t get into this education mess in one election cycle, and we won’t get out of it in one election cycle. Unions have only been in control of America’s school boards and education for decades, and it will take decades to fix.”
Seventeen candidates endorsed by Mothers for Freedom won school board elections in this election, making up a small portion of the total of 500 races the organization has influenced over the past three years.
“We are at the peak of education reform in this country,” Deskovic said. “All of this will really lead to this golden age in America that we look forward to, where we will go from only a third of children reading in America, and only 22% of high school graduates being able to pass a civics test, to a place where our children can be enriched and can be bold advocates of the good and the beautiful and the true, and they can become educated citizens again with the capacity for self-government.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan news service, is available free to any legitimate news publisher who can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline, and their affiliation with DCNF. If you have any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.