Nearly five months ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis handed the Moms for Liberty control of the county’s School Board.
On Tuesday night, the community’s voters took the board majority back, soundly rejecting the hard-right fringe group and its culture-war agenda in an election that saw District 3 incumbent Peggy Jones win a second term and political newcomer David Dyer claim the District 5 seat the governor filled with an April appointment.
Jones defeated challenger Rob MacCallum, while Dyer ended Kevin McDonald’s brief stint on the dais. The margin of victory in both races was 57 to 43 percent.
MacCallum and McDonald lost despite getting endorsements from both DeSantis and the Moms.
“You can’t imagine what this means to us and the community,” Jones said in the festive confines of a jointly held watch party at the Garden Club of Indian River County, where she and Dyer celebrated their triumph.
“This election was not about us, it was about the kids,” she added. “These past few weeks were very difficult, but I believed the community would stand up to the negative campaigning and stand up for kids.
“We didn’t have the governor’s endorsement, but we still won.”
Dyer echoed Jones’ sentiments, saying the voters were given a clear choice – improving public education or continuing the Moms-launched culture-war disruptions that wasted countless hours of the district staff’s time – and chose wisely.
“You could be for public education or be for something else,” Dyer said. “The community made its choice. People voted not for Peggy or I, but for public education.
“They voted for school safety, for teachers, and for the administrators we have running our school district,” he added. “I pledge that I’m going to work really hard, too.”
Jones and Dyer both committed themselves to supporting Superintendent David Moore, whose leadership has produced “A” grades from the Florida Department of Education the past two years.
The Moms needed only one of their two candidates to win to retain control of the board and avoid the national embarrassment of being swept in both races in the hometown of the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice.
The group and its candidates were so bent on winning, in fact, that they resorted to a blatant lie about Jones’ position on proposed changes to federal Title IX legislation, claiming she supported biological boys playing on girls’ teams in school sports.
The tactic failed.
Both MacCallum and McDonald, who trailed throughout the early returns, clung to hope of a comeback. But as the results came in during their watch party at the Heritage Center, they could only accept their fate.
“Jones and Dyer ran an effective campaign that led to victory; I congratulate them both,” McDonald said. “The community made their choice, and I get to retire. I win either way.”
McDonald said he would continue to fulfill his duties until Dyer replaces him on the dais in November. He occupies the seat that was held by Brian Barefoot until he unnecessarily resigned in February.
Barefoot was thrilled the with result of the election.
“The community delivered and made it abundantly clear that the focus should be on improving educational outcomes – not culture war nonsense promoted by the Moms and their minions,” he said.
MacCallum, meanwhile, was pleased with his first foray into local politics.
“We ran a good, hard race, and we knew what we were up against,” he said. “A lot of people worked very hard to get us to this point. I’m not upset about it. We got our message out.”
MacCallum sent Jones a congratulatory text message after the results were in.
Jones, 70, was first elected in 2020, when she received more than 60 percent of the vote in her race against then-incumbent Laura Zorc. She has since distinguished herself as one of the most qualified and committed School Board members in the county’s 98-year history.
In nearly 50 years in public education – 37 of them in this county – Jones has served as a teacher, coach, dean and principal. She also spent five years as an assistant/associate executive director of the Florida High School Athletic Association.
The “Dr. Peggy Jones Principal’s Award” is presented annually to an outstanding senior at Sebastian River High School, where she spent 11 years as principal. The honor is accompanied by a $1,000 scholarship.
Jones’ performance on the board enabled her to fend off DeSantis’ politically motivated, Moms-inspired efforts to target her for electoral defeat with bogus claims that she, along with Barefoot, failed to protect parental rights and didn’t shield students from “woke” ideologies.
Both Jones and Barefoot defied the governor and dared to vote to temporarily impose on-campus mask mandates during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, after two teachers died and the district was forced to close schools because there weren’t enough staffers to cover the classrooms.
Dyer, 75, enjoyed a wildly successful career as a retail executive, serving as president and CEO of some of the world’s most-recognized apparel companies – among them Tommy Hilfiger, Lands’ End and Chico’s FAS – before retiring in December 2015.
But after graduating from Vanderbilt University with an engineering degree, he began his professional life as a math teacher at the American School of Asuncion in Paraguay.
Dyer would return to the U.S., where he entered the business world as an executive trainee at Miami-based Burdine’s department stores. He remained a strong advocate for literacy, however, and later served on a Florida Council of 100 education committee and, locally, as vice chairman of The Learning Alliance.
It wasn’t until this past winter, though, that Dyer, who has been visiting Vero Beach regularly since 2008 and has been a full-time resident since 2015, considered running for a seat on the School Board.
His decision was sealed in February when Barefoot expressed a desire for someone else – someone who would support Moore with the same fervor – to replace him on this summer’s ballot.
Barefoot, a former Indian River Shores mayor, was elected to the board in a landslide victory in 2020. But he said then he planned to serve only one term. At age 80, he welcomed Dyer’s candidacy and suspended his re-election campaign.
He also publicly endorsed Dyer.
Then, just two weeks after Dyer committed to run, Barefoot stunned the community by announcing he was resigning from the board because he had moved from John’s Island to Oak Harbor – from the island to the mainland – and no longer lived in the district he was elected to serve.
The next day, however, Barefoot learned his resignation wasn’t necessary.
The County Commission, as it does every 10 years, had re-drawn district lines after the 2020 census. As a result, the Oak Harbor community on Indian River Boulevard moved from District 2 to District 5.
Less than 24 hours after sending his resignation letter to DeSantis via U.S. Mail, Barefoot immediately tried to correct his mistake and restore his place on the board.
In addition to sending faxes and emails to the governor and secretary of state, Barefoot followed up with overnight letters that were to arrive in Tallahassee the next morning.
“I’m positive that my letter rescinding my resignation arrived in the Governor’s Office before my letter of resignation,” Barefoot said at the time, “and there have been other situations where the Florida Supreme Court ruled that resignations could be rescinded.
“So there’s a precedent.”
DeSantis ignored both the precedent and the will of the county’s voters, and never replied to Barefoot’s recission letter.
“I never got the courtesy of a response,” Barefoot said Monday. “I even sent a follow-up letter in which I warned him that his appointment could screw up all the hard work that had been done in our school district the past four years. He didn’t respond to that one, either.”
Instead, DeSantis continued his politicization of public education in the state and appointed McDonald, who was relatively unknown in the community but enjoyed the full support of the Moms group.
McDonald, too, had a successful corporate career, having worked as a business development manager for Ricoh Americas. His background in education includes seven years on the board – as treasurer, president and chairman – of a 400-student prekindergarten-through-grade-12 Christian classical school in New York City.
Since taking his seat at the dais, McDonald, 71, has consistently voted with the board’s two other Moms-backed members, twice-elected Jackie Rosario and first-termer Gene Posca, and joined them in their culture-war efforts.
MacCallum, 39, who owns EXIT Right Realty Florida in Vero Beach and The MacCallum Group Insurance in Massachusetts, entered the District 3 race last fall. He said his business experience, along with having two young children attending local public schools, qualified him to sit on the School Board.
His wife, Colleen, is Rosario’s representative on the school district’s book-review committee.
