In Ocean City, a new school board alarms the LGBTQ community and its allies

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — The fog blew up and over the bridge leading into Ocean City as the minutes ticked down to the start of the Ocean City Board of Education meeting Jan. 4. The newly elected board members huddled in a side vestibule of the high school waiting to go in.

In the front lobby, Jakob Pender and others dressed in rainbow-themed Pride tops also waited.

It was the first meeting where the new members would be installed: three parents who campaigned against New Jersey’s new standards for teaching health and sexual education and on “conservative values,” and who were endorsed nationally by Moms for Liberty.

The group set off alarm bells after appearing Sept. 8 in a city park alongside a pastor who railed against homosexuality and mocked gay marriage, but they unseated three school board incumbents: a hand surgeon, an internal medicine doctor, and an attorney for Pfizer Inc.

Ocean City is called America’s greatest family resort. But in the fog of winter, what is really going on a block from the beach and the boardwalk’s gentle amusement rides?

Is Ocean City’s goal to uphold an image of surfers and sun-kissed beach days, an idyllic girl-meets-boy beach romcom, a stubbornly dry town founded by Methodists where discussions of gender identity, sexual orientation, pronouns, and pride are just irritants to a greater notion of how the town sees itself?

Who really gets to decide what it means to be, as the mascot is called, a Red Raider?

After the seismic school board elections, these questions are reverberating on the island, where about 11,000 people live year-round, and on Facebook. The district of 2,000 students also draws from Longport, Upper Township, and Sea Isle City.

At that Sept. 8 rally, the pastor Gregory Quinlan railed against homosexuality and said Jesus Christ “defined marriage, defined family, defined sex,” adding, “Do you see LGBTQIA-XYZ anywhere in that definition?” (to which the crowd shouted “an emphatic no,” according to reports). Now the new board members who attended the rally are in a position to make policy.

Feelings were raw on Jan. 4 as the factions met across the U-shaped tables at the school library, both the new members and the queer community asking for tolerance and acceptance.

“I have to say, `Oh my gosh, what am I doing sitting here?’” said Liz Nicoletti, one of the newly elected members. “This is not something I wanted to do in my life.”

She recalled pulling her sons out of a Christian school and placing them in Ocean City, which then shut down during the pandemic. She said she was a stay-at-home mom, “the best job,” and mused about becoming a pickleball instructor, her husband urging her to get a job. She bristled when people chuckled.

“I know, we’re on the conservative side of things,” she said. “But we care. Please don’t laugh at me. Because that’s disrespectful. We all deserve respect. All of us. Even me.”

Lauren Knopp, a student representative on the board, told the room: “Students of this district are very stressed about the scenario that’s been happening, and I’m not going to leave here without everybody knowing that.”

The debate echoes others in schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including Bucks County, where the school boards in Pennridge and Central Bucks passed resolutions banning teachers from advocating political and “social policy” issues in school, including displaying Pride rainbow flags, or in Radnor, where a group of parents filed a police report about the controversial book Gender Queer, available in Radnor High School’s library.

Nicoletti and her running mate, Catherine Panico, won three-year terms, along with local attorney Kevin Barnes. Robin Shaffer won a one-year seat.

Nicoletti, Panico, and Shaffer want to overturn a 6-5 vote in August under the old board approving New Jersey standards for sexual education, with guidelines that include discussing gender by the end of second grade and types of intercourse by the end of middle school. Districts can set their own curricula and lesson plans; parents can also opt their children out.

But newly elected school board president Chris Halliday, an Ocean City architect and father of two children, ages 6 and 8, said he does not expect the issue to be raised again and is confident the district is implementing the state’s guidelines appropriately.

He said he also does not anticipate a vote on a teacher advocacy ban similar to the one adopted in Central Bucks, and in general hopes to move on to broader issues of academics and student well-being.

“It’s been a little diffused,” he said of ongoing debates. “There’s been a lot discussions and apologies. We want to make sure our teachers feel supported.”

“It’s a tourist town,” he added. “We welcome people.”

The three new board members have been mentored by longtime area conservative Seth Grossman, who runs the Liberty & Prosperity Group and in 2018 narrowly lost an election to Rep. Jeff Van Drew, when Van Drew was a Democrat.

Van Drew, meanwhile, now a Republican in the House majority, announced he is sponsoring legislation called “My Child, My Choice” that would require parental approval before topics related to gender identity, sexual orientation, and transgender studies were taught.

At the meeting in the high school library, the sides squared off in familiar fashion, and the discussion continued, to the point of exhaustion, on the Facebook group OCNJ School Discussion, administered by Shaffer.

Pender, a 2022 graduate studying physics at Rutgers, has painstakingly sought to counter those who have spoken out against considering a person’s choice of pronouns, gender identity, nonbinary students, and stressed the importance of teaching about sensitive topics in public schools, and respecting people’s wishes.

“It’s like a family town, America’s number-one resort,” Pender said. “They don’t want anything to do with sex. Parents don’t want to deal with any LGBT issues; that’s taboo to them. ‘We want everyone to be heteronormative and cis gender.’ That’s more the vibe.

“Sex education saves lives,” added Pender, who came out as nonbinary after graduation and uses both he and they pronouns. “Sex education has always been geared toward heterosexual people. I just think it’s important that kids learn that heterosexual cis gender doesn’t mean normal. That’s basically it.”

Shaffer, whose resumé includes time as a counterterrorism analyst at the U.S. State Department and senior insider-threat analyst at the Defense Department, is an Ocean City transplant from Maryland, where he served as a special-education vice principal.

» READ MORE: Central Bucks bans Pride flags

Shaffer, who lost a vote to become president of the school board, apologized to anyone who was hurt by the pastor’s words. He said he looks out at the audience at school board meetings with “nothing but love.”

“I like to see the seats occupied. I like to see people engaged in our meetings,” he said.

He said people have asked him to bar Pender from the Facebook group, but he has not.

He said the issue with the state standards is age-appropriateness.

“It has more to do with values and my role as a parent, as a dad,” Shaffer said. “[A]re children emotionally ready to receive certain instruction at certain points in their life? That’s where I have a real problem with pushing some of these concepts down to age 5.”

He said he was not looking to bury any hard truths of the town in the sand. He was also transparent about losing a Maryland administrative appeal in 2012 of a Calvert County school board ruling that placed a letter of warning in his file accusing him of inappropriate physical and verbal interactions with an unruly student while a vice principal.

“I moved my family to Ocean City because I believed in the idyllic Ocean City,” he said. He said he was not unaware of problems beneath the town’s veneer, like the multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment lodged against members of the Ocean City Beach Patrol.

“I will not be a party to sweeping problems under the carpet to appear to be a Hallmark Channel town,” he said.

“I just think there are some forces at play right now that push limits,” he said. “I know teachers who don’t feel comfortable teaching some concepts that are better left to parents.”

To those alarmed by their election, he said: “I think our actions will speak louder than our words. They’re going to be pleasantly surprised.”