‘That’s What Motivates People’: School Board Winners Say Gender Policies Drove Big Election Gains
Conservatives saw major school board wins this election, proving that parents across the country are still actively working to get gender ideology out of the classroom, victors who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation explain.
Parental rights watchdog Moms for Liberty saw more than half of its school board candidates prevail on Nov. 4, with several winners attributing victory to concerns about inappropriate classroom content and issues related to gender identity policies. Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the issue driving parents to the polls for school board elections is a lack of transparency with what is happening in the classroom.
“Parents feel like they don’t have access to schools the way they used to, or information about their children,” Descovich said. “And I would say parents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about transparency in education.”
Two school board winners who spoke to the DCNF strongly agreed with this notion, having both experienced attempted classroom indoctrination firsthand.
“That’s actually the reason that I originally ran for office four years ago, was because of the inappropriate material that was in our daughter’s classroom,” Danielle Lindemuth, who was reelected to the Elizabethtown Area school board in Pennsylvania, told the DCNF. “There is sexually explicit content in the books. There is a major theme of rape and incest in different ones.”
Brooke Richards-Patterson, elected to the Old Bridge Township Board of Education in New Jersey, told the DCNF she became aware of the school’s agenda to teach inappropriate content to children three years ago when a school board member began recruiting parents to speak out about the issue.
“The curriculum proposed by the state includes verbiage such as anal, oral sex, masturbation, as young as the second, third, fourth grade,” Richards-Patterson said. “My kid still believes in Santa Claus at that age, my kid’s waiting for the tooth fairy. Why is that appropriate?”
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich 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 mother your kids,” Richards-Patterson continued. “If you want your kids to know all that stuff, have at it. I don’t, and a lot of us don’t. And the whole point is I should have the most say as the parent. That’s the bottom line. I want you to have that too.”
Lindemuth’s and Richards-Patterson’s districts have already seen some success with rooting out gender identity-based policies.
“We do recognize that it is something that is a parental choice. It is not a school district choice,” Lindemuth stated. “And so if a student chooses to identify as something other than their biological gender, then we have set data that the parents must be involved in the conversation, and so if they would like to change their name or their pronoun, then the parents must be the ones who sign off on that.”
“We also want to make sure that we are protecting all of our students, faculty and staff’s rights. And so within that, what we did was we made sure that if somebody has a strongly held belief that they cannot call somebody by something other than their biological gender, that they have alternatives to what they can do,” she explained. “They are not allowed to be rude and disrespectful to them, they must not use a name that the person doesn’t want to be called.”
Under the new policy, teachers are allowed to address students by “something a little more generic,” such as addressing students by their last names instead of their first names, as long as they address all students the same way. That way, “they are not using pronouns at all” while still being “very careful to make sure that they are respecting the students choice while so not infringing on their own rights.”
Richards-Patterson said her district was able to abolish a policy that allowed children to change their gender identity within the school system without their parent knowing after enough people spoke out about it.
“I wish I could hit every single door and speak to every single resident, because there are a lot of things that people are unaware of,” she told the DCNF. “Nobody knew that there was a policy that said if your child identifies as the opposite sex, they can change their name on the student portal. And you’d have no idea.”
Richards-Patterson believes her effort to inform parents of these issues is what got her elected.
“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 do not experience these issues directly, stories from other districts that make national news like the sexual assault cover-ups in Loudoun County and the registered sex offender frequenting school and public changing rooms in Arlington, Virginia make parents take a closer look at their children’s schools. (RELATED: ‘No One Will Know’: Red State Schools ‘Openly’ Violate Law On Male Students In Female Spaces, Complaint Alleges)
“We do absolutely see that,” Lindemuth said. “There are times where the parents do come to the school board meetings, or do contact us and say, ‘Hey, is this happening in our school? Is this something we need to worry about?'”
“It makes parents look under the covers a little bit,” Descovich said. “Take a look, parents. Wake up. Is this happening in your district?”
While Richards-Patterson’s victory shifted her district to a majority conservative board, most school districts aren’t as lucky. Despite Loudoun on Nov. 4 electing its second member who is willing to defend girls’ spaces from biological males, the rest of the board generally remains unfriendly to this idea.
Descovich, however, advises parents and school boards in similar situations not to lose hope.
“One school board member can make a huge difference if, at a very least, they are exposing what’s going on in the district, because they have access, they have a lot more access than the average parent in the community, if they are just sharing the information out and exposing what’s going on, it is so worth having just even one school board member, even if they’re getting outvoted,” Descovich said. “This isn’t a quick fix. We did not get into this mess in education in one election cycle, and we’re not going to get out of it and one election cycle. It’s just been decades of unions dominating school boards and education in America, and it’s going to take decades to fix it.”
Seventeen candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their school board races this election, making up a fraction of the 500 total races the organization has influenced over the last three years.