How This District Took Its School Board Back From Right-Wing Reactionaries

Here is a sample of what a typical board of education meeting in Wake County, North Carolina, sounds like ever since the extreme rightwing group Moms for Liberty began showing up:

"My name is Cheryl Caulfield, and I'm running for District One because I have watched decisions made over and over by this board that have harmed our children."

Rather than growing from a genuinely grassroots campaign around local issues, Moms for Liberty is a heavily funded, strategically targeted weapon against public schools.

"My name is Monica Ruiz and I am a Wake County Board of Education candidate for District Two . . . . The system used by teachers to take attendance, store health records, and store grades has the sex of your child, my student, hidden . . . . This means we don't have the ability to determine if the child is a boy or a girl."

"I'm Katie Long and I am running in District Seven . . . . There's a lack of transparency around the curriculum, and parents' rights have been stripped."

Every two weeks, candidates for the board use three-minute speaking slots during a public comment period to rail against the current board members, who are not permitted to respond. In the audience, rows of people wear T-shirts from Moms for Liberty, with slogans like, "We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government" and "Liberty, Once Lost, Is Lost Forever."

It was a year ago that Susan Book, a public schools advocate with Save Our Schools NC and Communities for the Education of Every Child, realized that the only people showing up to board of education meetings typically were members of Moms for Liberty or their allies.

"Once I started to see the [school board meetings] overrun by Moms for Liberty people talking about masks, critical race theory, and other dog whistles, I knew I had to brave the meetings. And I had to bring people with me."

"I had been submitting public comments online because I was cautious about COVID-19," Book says. "But once I started to see the meetings overrun by Moms for Liberty people talking about masks, critical race theory, and other dog whistles, I knew I had to brave the meetings. And I had to bring people with me."

Wake County is the largest school district in the state, serving about 160,000 students in 198 schools. Approximately 56 percent of its students are from a minority background, and 25 percent of them are economically disadvantaged. Raleigh, the state capital, is in Wake County, as are the suburbs of Cary and Wake Forest and rural towns like Wendell and Fuquay-Varina.

The district made national headlines in the 2000s by having one of the most successfully integrated systems in the country, having introduced changes such as limiting every school to no more than 40 percent free or reduced lunch students. Then there was a Tea Party takeover of the officially nonpartisan board of education in 2009. Funded by conservative multimillionaire Art Pope, ultra-right candidates took the majority of seats on the school board, and their first action was to scrap the integration policy and defund equity initiatives.

The Tea Party leadership threw Wake County schools into chaos, and a complaint from the NAACP nearly lost the district its accreditation. Integration wasn't the only issue--curriculum standards were inconsistently implemented, and underfunding has plagued the schools in nearly every area. But by 2016, progressives had begun to take back the Wake County Board of Education, and in 2020, the extremist rightwing fringe had been nearly completely rooted out, with only two of the Republican-endorsed candidates winning seats.

But then, those gains started to be reversed once again. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moms for Liberty began to make noise in Wake County. Moms for Liberty was founded in December 2020, with Bridget Ziegler, the wife of the vice chair of the Florida Republican Party, as a co-founder and its co-director at the time. The group, amply supported by groups such as the Heritage Foundation, is the definition of an astroturfed organization.

Rather than growing from a genuinely grassroots campaign around local issues, Moms for Liberty is a heavily funded, strategically targeted weapon against public schools. Using "parental rights" as a rallying cry, the group pulls parents in with fearmongering about critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights, and COVID-19 precautions.

No matter which county chapter's website one visits, from Morris, New Jersey, to El Paso, Colorado, to Santa Clara, California, the mission and issues listed are the same. The county chapters are handed the same talking points from the national office to spread within their communities. This was no different for the Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates in Wake County.

They speak against vaccine mandates, even though there has not been one suggested for the district, or masking policies, even though the mask mandate in Wake County schools ended almost a year ago. They harangue the board about books they want banned from the library that have not been checked out in years. They accuse teachers of "grooming" students. And their supporters in the audience cheer them on.

They were using the public comment periods as defacto campaign stump speeches, broadcast on a local news station, covered in the state's largest newspaper, and live-tweeted by a reporter with nearly 20,000 followers.

The rightwing 2022 candidates for board of education (all nine seats were up for election) carefully incorporated Moms for Liberty language into their campaigns, as with Katie Long's "transparency curriculum" and "parents' rights" in District Seven, as mentioned above, or in District Eight, where Steve Bergstrom's signs touted "Give Schools Back to Parents."

But their complaints don't hold up. "The candidates don't sit through the entire meeting, and neither do the Moms for Liberty crowds," Book tells The Progressive. "In the spring [of 2022], the school board produced the draft budget. And here is this group complaining about lack of transparency, but they were totally uninterested and refused to listen to the meeting. They left early. They just aren't about providing a sound basic education for every child."

Instead, their aims are clear: Remove protections for LGBTQ+ students, defund the new Office of Equity Affairs, and rid the curriculum of anything that makes white, middle-class parents uncomfortable.

Progressive advocates like Book realized that as specious and unfounded as the Moms for Liberty and their candidates' vitriol is, it was gaining traction. They were using the public comment periods as defacto campaign stump speeches that were broadcast on a local news station, covered in Raleigh's The News & Observer (the largest newspaper in the state), and live-tweeted by a reporter with nearly 20,000 followers. While the candidates earned thousands of dollars in free media, the board members had to sit silent, unable to respond to the attacks.

Many school districts across the country have banned using the public comment period in this way, but Wake County, with its population evenly split among Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters, would never allow that to happen. When then-board member Jim Martin brought up the idea of ending campaign speeches during the comment period in late August, the next board meeting was filled with members of Moms for Liberty attacking him for threatening the First Amendment.

So groups of progressives decided to step up. There are only twenty speaking slots at every meeting, and the speakers are chosen at random from those who sign up. These groups realized that if enough of their members applied for speaking slots, it would edge out the Moms for Liberty candidates.

One group, of which Book is a member, is the Holly Springs/Fuquay-Varina and Apex Liberal Ladies, an informal Facebook group of 1,200 people who organize for progressive causes. They already were working to re-elect Wake County Board Chair Lindsay Mahaffey, writing thousands of postcards to constituents. They also took on the board meetings.

One of the administrators of the Facebook group regularly signed up around a dozen members to attend and speak at every meeting, and provided training on how to speak positively about board initiatives.

Every Sunday before a school board meeting, a call to action appeared in the Facebook group, linking members to a sign-up form. The members shared what they would be speaking about--from praising the districts' enhanced security efforts to protecting the LGBTQ+ student population, to providing excellent education with magnet programs--to drown out the complaints of the school board candidates.

And they encouraged students to speak as well. "Students do the best job at combating the hate," Book says. "Once some high school students came to talk about the importance of books in their lives and speak out against book bans." The nine-year-old granddaughter of the head of the Liberal Ladies spoke at a meeting as well, sharing how thankful she is that her teachers promote diversity in her school.

Book doubles down on the importance of bringing allies to the meetings: "We need public schools that educate every child. I want to be there as a friend and an advocate, and I want to bring as many people as possible with me. I help them understand the protocol and what to expect, and they realize it's not too scary. And it works."

In the end, the efforts did work, as seven of the nine Wake County School Board members elected on November 8 are Democrats.