Those who attended the Indian River County Republican Executive Committee meeting last week saw an anti-mask Facebook group successfully infiltrate the party’s most-powerful local organization, pack the room with supporters and begin dictating policy.
Not only did committee chairman Jay Kramer allow leaders of the “We The People Indian River County” Facebook group to speak in opposition to the school district’s mask mandate, but he then presided over a voice vote in which committee members overwhelmingly agreed to censure Brian Barefoot, one of our community’s most-respected Republicans.
The reason for the censure?
Barefoot is the School Board chairman who, along with Mara Schiff and Peggy Jones, voted on Aug. 24 to adopt the district’s mask requirement for Pre-K through eighth-grade students in response to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases locally – and in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wrongheaded executive order barring such mandates.
The extent of We The People’s takeover of the committee became obvious Friday morning, when the censure was first announced on the group’s Facebook page, where the administrator wrote:
“We hope it sends a message to Brian Barefoot that the people who oppose his illegal actions are not a minority NOR a handful of people. Hopefully, it’s a wake-up call to him to stop breaking the law. After all, his own party is condemning his actions.”
Which makes no sense at all.
The censure is, by all rational standards, an ill-conceived, empty gesture that lacks merit, deserves no credibility and, ultimately, will do nothing but damage the REC’s stature, particularly among traditional Republicans who know Barefoot as a man of principle and honor.
Barefoot, 78, is a former Indian River Shores mayor who enjoyed a successful career in investment banking, and served as president of Massachusetts’ Babson College for seven years.
He’s a smart, serious and thoughtful man who cares so much for our community that he stepped out of retirement to bring his vast knowledge, experience and professionalism to our School Board at critical juncture.
He should be celebrated, not censured, for standing up to DeSantis, who couldn’t be more misguided about the need for mask mandates in our public schools.
But even with some of our more-prominent elected officials in the room – County Commission Chairman Joe Flescher, Tax Collector Carole Jean Jordan and School Board Vice Chairman Teri Barenborg – no one spoke out in Barefoot’s defense.
Neither Flescher nor Jordan responded to messages left on the mobile phones. Barenborg said she only “sat there and listened” and did not participate in the vote, but decided over the weekend to resign her Republican Executive Committee membership.
“The vote wasn’t unanimous, but the ayes were noticeably louder,” said a committee member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But the vote never should’ve happened. This item wasn’t even on the agenda.”
The same member said votes aren’t supposed to be taken when guests are in the room, “and there definitely were guests at that meeting.” The voting also was conducted without a show of hands, so there was no actual count.
“I saw a lot of new faces,” the member continued, adding, “You might see a deep fracture in the membership after this, especially with the way this whole thing was handled. It was disgusting.”
Reached by phone last week, Kramer refused to comment on the censure vote, saying it was a “private meeting.”
Obviously, however, what happened at that meeting didn’t stay private long – the story began leaking the next morning – and the post on the We The People group’s Facebook page stated that a Republican Executive Committee representative planned to read the censure motion during the public comment segment of this week’s School Board meeting.
Barefoot, though frustrated, stood firm, saying he’ll wear the concocted censure as a “badge of honor.”
He’s not a committee member, anyway, and he refuses to succumb to pressure from a political committee or a Facebook group trying to bully officials elected to nonpartisan positions.
He attributed the group’s action to the “unfortunate political climate we find ourselves in, where the moderates in both parties are pushed aside,” thus creating a polarization that makes it “difficult to find a path forward.”
Far wiser than his myopic adversaries, Barefoot said it’s counterproductive to play politics with education when, in terms of academic achievement, our school district “ranks in the middle of the pack of 67 counties in a state that ranks near the bottom nationally.”
The district, he said, has “too many serious issues to confront to waste time on needless distractions.”
As for the Republican Executive Committee, “they want me to adhere to what they consider to be a good Republican,” Barefoot said, “but this isn’t the way the Republican Party that I’ve been a member of all my life should act.”
