These are the nice parents that everyone in Washington insists the Democrats have offended with their “woke” ways and need to be wooed back:
It was when the police car pulled away from her house, some time after midnight on a Thursday in late October, that Beth Barts hit her breaking point.
The school board member in Loudoun County, Va., had been fielding abusive, profane and threatening emails, Facebook messages and phone calls for eight months. She was also facing a recall campaign from mostly conservative parents irate over her support for pandemic safety measures, as well as her membership in a pro-equity parent group on Facebook. And she had been censured by other members of the school board in part for her outspokenness, which they said veered into rudeness, on social media.
The harassment of Barts, a 50-year-old stay-at-home mother and former librarian who used to lead a Girl Scouts troop, is part of a wave of anger against elected and appointed school officials, including superintendents, that is cresting nationwide. Parents upset over things including mask mandates in schools, as well as officials’ efforts to introduce more diverse curriculums and bias trainings for teachers, have taken over school board meetings, shouting abuse, making threats and demanding resignations
In early October, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed federal authorities to collaborate with state and local law enforcement to combat “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators.” He was responding to a request from the National School Boards Association, which represents school board members across the country and which in late September sent a letter to President Biden asking for assistance handling what the association called “a form of domestic terrorism.”
Republican lawmakers — and many parents — took offense to Garland’s directive, complaining that the federal government and the National School Boards Association are demonizing well-meaning mothers and fathers who just want what’s best for their children.
Hey, these people making violent threats are just well-meaning mons and dads. Everyone must be very polite and conciliatory toward them.
The ongoing harassment of school board members runs the gamut: In Illinois, a man was arrested for striking a school official at a September board meeting. In Hilton, N.Y., three people were arrested at a school board meeting last month — one for allegedly refusing to put on a mask, two for allegedly refusing to leave after the school board president suspended the meeting because of attendees’ unruly behavior.
And in Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for Northampton County executive said at an August rally that he would bring “20 strong men” to the next school board meeting so they could “replace [board members] with nine parents and we’re going to vote down the mask mandates . . . this is how you get stuff done.” Steve Lynch, who was in D.C. at the time of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, denied he meant to threaten board members. He ultimately lost his election.
The hottest conflict over education has arguably come in Loudoun, a majority White, politically divided and wealthy suburb just outside D.C. Intense coverage from conservative media has converted Loudoun into the face of the nation’s culture wars. Board meetings in the district of roughly 81,000 students regularly stretch late into the night because more than 100 parents show up, some eager to scream insults at the board, some to pray for their salvation.
Despite the threats and anger, Barts said, she never felt unsafe in her own home. Not after a quarter-century of living in Leesburg, the quiet town she knows so well, the place where she has already raised one child and is midway through raising the second, a girl.
But it was thoughts of her youngest daughter that gripped Barts on a Thursday last month, as she sat on the couch trying to distract herself with an episode of “Ted Lasso.” The police were outside her house, she said, because the Loudoun County Public Schools safety and security team had asked the county sheriff’s office to send patrols to the homes of every school board member.
The embattled board was confronting yet another firestorm of controversy after revelations that the school district had transferred a teenager accused of sexual assault to a second high school within the system, where the teen allegedly committed a second assault. Some conservative parents and pundits were tying the sexual assault allegations to the district’s recent adoption of a policy that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identities — a policy Barts had supported.
Earlier that evening, Barts’s daughter had complained that the police officer’s flashing blue lights were making it impossible to sleep. Barts’s husband walked outside and asked the officer if he could turn off his lights. The policeman replied that he couldn’t: “That way,” Barts’s husband remembered him saying, “people are aware we’re here.”
Eventually, Barts’s husband and daughter fell asleep. But she stayed up, unable to relax. Her mind strayed to snatches of the messages she’d been receiving for months: “You f—ing disgusting piece of s—.” “YOU ARE A TRAITOR TO THE USA!” “A public hanging is in order . . . Should only take a few seconds.”
After the cop left that night, she had a panic attack thinking about her kid being in danger from these loons and she quit.
I’m sure there are real concerns about curriculum and mandates and all the rest. Parents got a close look at the school systems during the pandemic and didn’t like everything they saw. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is mostly political and it’s driven by the arrogant, violent right.
On a balmy evening in early October, about a dozen people gathered before a red-roofed house in a sleepy Sarasota County, Fla., neighborhood.
A girl in a red dress waved an American flag. A man paced back and forth with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag hoisted over one shoulder, shouting, “No vaccines! No masks!” Other adults pulled out megaphones.
“We see you in there, Shirley,” called a man in a black baseball cap, according to a video shared on Twitter. “We know the next step is from masks to vaccines. This will not happen. This is the line we will die on.”
They were standing outside the home of Shirley Brown, the 69-year-old chair of the Sarasota County Schools board. Midway through cooking dinner when the protesters arrived, Brown within minutes phoned the police for help. By that point, she had already received a slew of emails labeling her a tyrant and a child abuser for her support of mask-wearing in schools. A parent group had shared her home address and phone number online.
“I mean,” said Brown, who plans to retire when her term expires next year, “when did asking kids to wear a mask become child abuse?”
In most places, the path to parental outrage has been the same. Mothers and fathers began showing up to board meetings in spring and summer of 2020, upset over school closures because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Beverly Anderson, a long-serving board member for Virginia Beach City Public Schools, said she first noticed an uptick in discontent when she began receiving 50 to 60 emails a day following her school system’s decision to close because of the pandemic in March 2020. Parents started showing up to complain at board meetings soon afterward, and the tone quickly turned far nastier than anything Anderson had seen in almost a decade serving on the school board.
“Covid changed things,” Anderson said, “because people didn’t understand why we had to close schools.”
Even after many schools reopened last fall, parents across the United States kept attending board meetings to share their concerns over safety measures, including social distancing, and to push for more days of in-person teaching. Some were upset that teachers were among the first in line for vaccines, given a portion of educators were continuing to teach remotely. And, taking the opposite view, some speakers came to demand more safety precautions.
By the fall of the 2021-2022 academic year, with the vast majority of school districts reopened for five days a week of almost-normal in-person learning, the arguments shifted to center on curricular and cultural issues. Some parents nationwide — usually White, conservative parents — have become alarmed over what they argue is the indoctrination of their children with critical race theory, a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism in America.
If these parents were sincerely “well-meaning” they would condemn harassment and violent threats. They would not behave like animals at school board meetings. This is culture war, emphasis on the war. Just look at the threats. They are one size fits all wingnuttia. If it wasn’t this issue it would be something else.
Glenn Younkin, the great white hope for political journalists everywhere, knew exactly what he was exploiting. And Democrats are supposed to find a way to appease them? Yeah, that’ll work.