Progressives are organizing to monitor Pa. school boards in pushback to book bans, ‘harmful’ actions

Parent Stephanie Jamison feels as if she’s playing defense, anticipating the next accusations that will confront the Souderton Area School District:

Suggestions of pornography harbored in school libraries. Claims of “political and sexual indoctrination” in classrooms. A mother’s allegation, spread widely on social media, that teachers encouraged and concealed her child’s gender transition.

Similar issues have been voiced in other communities. To Jamison, who started a group for progressive parents in her district, the complaints — many levied by a rival camp of conservatives that has become a vocal presence on social media and at school board meetings — feel coordinated.

“We need help,” she said.

To that end, Jamison has joined a new network organizing across Pennsylvania school districts, enlisting volunteers to track policies being put forward by conservative advocates. Running the program is pro-public-education group Education Voters PA, which is recruiting people to follow school board meetings and help create a database of “harmful” actions being considered by boards.

Among the topics the nonprofit is flagging as worthy of reporting: book bans, censorship of what teachers can say, and policies that discriminate against LGBTQ students, “such as refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns and names, restricting transgender students from participating in sports, prohibiting the acknowledgement of transgender students, and more.”

With greater awareness of what’s being proposed and where, like-minded parents and advocates can more effectively fight back, said Education Voters PA’s director, Susan Spicka.

“Clearly, extremists on the right are very well organized. They have talking points, they have exactly what they’re planning to do and they spread it to a whole network of people,” Spicka said, referring to such groups as Moms for Liberty, a national conservative organization championing “parental rights” that has 26 Pennsylvania chapters, including one in each of the four Philadelphia collar counties. “We’re working to build a group of organizations that can help counter that.”

Spicka argued that issues backed by Moms for Liberty and similar groups aren’t popular with many parents. But with a decline in local newspapers covering school boards, and people not tuned in to meetings, “a small group of extremists” can have an outsized impact.

“People have trusted for a very long time that things are going to go just fine in their school districts because people are operating in good faith. That is not the case in Pennsylvania anymore,” Spicka said.

Tiffany Justice, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, which has 260 chapters across 43 states, said the group provides “resources, connections and training,” but “doesn’t dictate priorities to chapters. The chapters tell us what’s important to them.”

“It just so happens there are different issues that chapters seem to have in common,” Justice said, mentioning “drag queen story hour” and “pornographic books” in school libraries.

Schools, Justice said, are pushing a “woke ideology” to children “that tells them just because you have a penis you might not be a boy, or vice versa.” That ideology is the “overarching umbrella” for many of Moms for Liberty members’ concerns, Justice said, including curriculum transparency and academic achievement.

Of the Education Voters’ effort, Justice said, “We celebrate more parents paying attention to their children’s education.”

While typically focused on school funding issues, Spicka said Education Voters — which is backed by the left-leaning Keystone Research Center — got involved with school boards last spring while meeting with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Education Law Center about issues in Bucks County.

The ACLU has filed a federal complaint alleging that the Central Bucks School District has created a hostile environment for LGBTQ students, with policies and actions including a ban on “sexualized content” in libraries, instructions that teachers ignore a student’s preferred pronouns unless they have parental permission, and orders to remove pride flags from classrooms.

The Pennridge School District has also instructed teachers to remove pride flags as part of a policy banning “advocacy materials” from classrooms.

While not universal, “it became clear this is a statewide thing happening,” Spicka said. She said her group has people “actively engaged” in 14 counties and 26 school districts.

As for the monitoring program, so far 30 people have signed up, with Education Voters hoping to recruit more people during information sessions in January, Spicka said.

Among them is Jamison, the Souderton parent. The district, straddling Montgomery and Bucks Counties, has drawn relatively little attention compared with places such as Central Bucks, she said.

But she’s worried it could adopt similar policies. Parents, including those with a local conservative group that bills itself as affiliated with Moms for Liberty, have pointed to Central Bucks and Pennridge as examples to emulate.

At an October meeting, one speaker drew applause after calling on the district to “remove pornography from our libraries, require parental consent for name or pronoun changes, require the removal of activist symbols from our classrooms, and give real consequences for those teachers choosing to indoctrinate in our schools.” (Earlier in that meeting, a mother held up a photo of her child, whom she said had been encouraged by teachers to identify as a different gender and who was now taking medication causing “the muscles in her vagina to collapse.”)

Addressing the audience during a November school board meeting, the district’s solicitor, Kyle Berman, said it took such allegations seriously, but had no evidence “that any teacher attempted to convince any student to claim a different gender.”

He also said it was “untrue” that pornography existed in school libraries, but said parents could raise concerns about specific books with administrators.

Given the “political toxicity” around the school board debates, Jamison said she and fellow advocates are looking not just for expertise, but also for support.

“Most of us are doing this in isolation,” she said. “To have this opportunity to connect with other people across the state ... it’s exactly what we need right now.”