Candidates focused on progressive school board members’ efforts to smuggle their DEI agenda into curricula, an organizer told NR.
Multiple school boards across the state of Florida flipped conservative on Tuesday thanks to a groundswell of parental rights activism and GOP turnout.
Five school boards in Clay, Miami Dade, Duval, Sarasota, and Martin counties are now Republican-dominated. Miami’s takeover is especially notable as it became the largest county in America with a conservative school-board majority.
These races had the backing of 1776 Project Pac, a super pac that says it is “dedicated to electing school board members committed to abolishing CRT from the public school curriculum.”
Out of the 49 candidates that the organization endorsed in Florida school-board contests, 35 won their elections, founder Ryan Girdusky told National Review.
His super pac applied slightly different strategies for each race, using targeted marketing to motivate more Republican voters to go to the polls, specifically those who have a tendency to vote in general but not off-cycle elections, he said.
1776 Project Pac spent $400,000 on direct mail, digital ads on social media, and streaming platforms, and text messaging to galvanize residents. In other states too, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey, the super pac has an impressive return-on-investment, with its endorsed candidates winning 95 out of 129 races between November 2021 and Tuesday.
Harnessing the unique stories of each county, the super pac publicized the efforts of the existing progressive school boards to smuggle diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and other radical ideologies into local curricula.
For example, in Indian River County, where one 1776 Project Pac-endorsed candidate won and another made it to a run-0ff, the group drew attention to a district policy that eliminated out-of-school suspensions for student misbehavior as a means to rectify an alleged racial-equity gap. Too many Hispanic and black children were being suspended, vs. white and Asian children, Girdusky claims, so the county created the Alternative To Out Of School Suspension program.
Instead of removing students from school for serious misconduct, the school board in 2020 approved a black achievement plan, which would provide mentoring to African-American students to help prepare them for advanced classes. Under the plan, principals were required to document when and why students are penalized to ensure black kids are not being discriminated against, Vero News reported.
In Clay County, father Wendell Perez gave an emotional testimony to the state surgeon general, alleging that the district socially “transitioned” his 12-year-old daughter without his knowledge or consent, which he said may have driven her to attempt to kill herself in the elementary school bathroom. In January 2022, the Perez family filed a lawsuit against the school district, which denied wrongdoing.
“We were in shock because our daughter never showed any signs of questioning her biological sex. We were told they knew about the gender issue due to meetings they were having with our daughter behind our backs,” Perez said. “We learned during these meetings that our daughter’s confusion was affirmed and validated through the use of fictitious male names and male pronouns. Our daughter was living a double life without our consent or knowledge.”
Perez’s daughter was taken from her parents for a week with minimal contact until she was released and returned to their care, he said.
Conservative candidates Erin Skipper, Michele Hanson, and Ashley Gilhousen won their elections in the Clay County race, turning the school board majority-Republican.
In Sarasota County, there was a higher GOP turnout percentage than the statewide average, Girdusky says, suggesting that education is only increasing in priority for the party.
“Yesterday was about a huge reset in Sarasota County schools, focused on serving the children and supporting our taxpayers,” says Bridget Ziegler, the incumbent Republican candidate for Sarasota County, District 1, who won re-election and was joined by newly elected conservatives Robyn Marinelli and Timothy Enos Tuesday. Marinelli is a 30-year educator with a background in mental health and Enos is a nationally recognized school security and crisis management officer as well as former chief of police for the school district, Ziegler notes.
She told a familiar tale of a progressive-controlled school board showing disdain for parents, kicking people out of meetings, shutting off microphones, and generally ignoring concerns about gender ideology and critical race theory. Despite being a predominantly red area on Florida’s West coast, Sarasota’s school board didn’t exactly represent the political makeup of the community for years, she said.
“We had a liberal majority school board for decades because of the non-partisan citizens who didn’t know where they stood politically,” Ziegler said.
During the pandemic, the school board caused trouble with the DeSantis administration, becoming the first county to defy the state legislature’s K-12 mask mandate ban last August, even as parents and local residents showed up in droves to protest the illegal vote during a tense multi-hour marathon meeting.
Governor DeSantis has made education integrity a cornerstone of his vision for the state, endorsing 30 candidates in school board races across the state and holding rallies in key counties, such as Duval and Volusia on Sunday, to stir support for them.
“Florida has led with purpose and conviction that our school system is about education, not indoctrination,” he tweeted Tuesday.