Almost a month has passed since island resident Tiffany Justice made coast-to-coast headlines and was hailed as the leader of a national movement during the Moms For Liberty’s annual summit in Philadelphia.
Given Justice’s growing stature as a co-founder of this unapologetically political group, you’d think the big-time reporters who covered the Moms’ much-hyped event would be curious about her background – particularly the four years she spent as a failed, one-term school board member here.
But no one seems to be looking into that – not from the Wall Street Journal, not from the New York Times or the Washington Post, not from television’s major news networks, not even from the online news outlets.
I find it odd … and disappointing.
You’d think they’d want to know what in her education, professional experience or public past might qualify her for the out-front role she’s now playing in Republican politics and the ongoing culture war that continues to divide our nation.
At the very least, you’d think they’d want to know what the Vero Beach community thinks of her.
Apparently, though, there is no such interest – because my Internet search last weekend produced no links to national news stories that discuss, in any meaningful detail, Justice’s life before the birth of the Moms in January 2021.
There are only the basics: She’s a 44-year-old mother of four children, ages 11 to 18; she has been married for 19 years; she was a stay-at-home mom for more than a decade; and she served on the Indian River County School Board.
There’s only what she wants everyone to know – not what we know, and not what the rest of the country needs to know about the face of a small-but-vocal group that claims to have 120,000 members and 285 chapters in 44 states.
Truth is, we haven’t seen much of Justice the past couple of years. She’s not active in our local discourse, and there’s not much appetite in this community for the concocted cause she champions elsewhere.
Instead, you’ll find her in Tallahassee, or Washington, D.C., or anywhere else she can attract an audience for the polarizing propaganda the Moms spout under the guise of advocating for parental rights.
She knows she has no platform here.
We saw how little Justice offered in the way of public service during her often-chaotic stint on our School Board, where she wasted too much of everyone’s time squabbling childishly with then-chair Laura Zorc.
Justice regularly provoked conflict and stirred controversy with petty antics and snarky remarks that antagonized Zorc and too often dragged the board into crippling dysfunction.
“There has been tension since Day 1 with Mrs. Justice,” Zorc said during a 2021 board workshop, referring to a strained relationship that other board members say made them uncomfortable.
Mara Schiff, a Florida Atlantic University professor who shared the dais with Justice and Zorc for two years, said: “The ongoing cat-fighting was both toxic and embarrassing to me as an elected member of the School Board.
“More significantly, though, it took both time and attention from the far more important school board matters around actual education governance,” she added. “It was undignified, it was unprofessional and, in my opinion, it was juvenile.”
Throughout her term, Justice proved she was ill-equipped for – and overmatched by – a job that required more than simply caring about children. She lacked the maturity to handle scrutiny and the mettle to absorb criticism, whether from the public, other board members or the local press.
And there was plenty to criticize, especially her foolish attacks on this newspaper, which endeavored to provide its readers with tough-but-fair coverage of Justice and the board.
In fact, a review of Justice’s district phone records revealed a troubling text-message conversation between her and then-superintendent Mark Rendell in March 2019, when she wrote: “I am starting the takedown of 32963.”
Those same phone records also showed that Rendell spoke to and texted with Justice noticeably more than he did with other board members. Most of their exchanges concerned district business, but many others resembled friendly and occasionally personal conversations.
That could explain Justice’s fierce and relentless defense of Rendell, who, as I wrote at the time, “struggled noticeably during a tumultuous tenure marked by scandal, controversy and other problems resulting from his many wrongheaded decisions.”
It was Justice’s very public and unwavering support of Rendell, however, that spawned rumors of an inappropriate relationship – which made headlines when she tried unsuccessfully to have a longtime school district employee criminally prosecuted and fired for alluding to such gossip in social media posts.
Though Justice initiated the vendetta, which involved the Sheriff’s Office and produced a stream of news reports and columns that generated more publicity than the Twitter posts deserved, she naively blamed this newspaper for keeping the story alive.
Later, during a Florida School Board Association training session in March 2021, Justice accused Zorc of being the source of those rumors.
Justice said she didn’t trust Zorc, then whined about the lack of support she received from others on the dais, claiming that the board members’ reluctance to rally around her amid the rumors was why she “felt so miserable” around them.
Zorc denied the accusation, saying at the session, “I had nothing to do with those rumors.”
She also defended her actions in dealing with Justice’s questioning of her board leadership.
More disturbing, though, was Justice’s manipulation of the board and its secretary to call what was an unlawful meeting in April 2019, after the panel voted to not extend Rendell’s contract beyond 2020.
When Rendell offered to resign, Justice promptly skirted board rules and arranged a special-call meeting at which she attempted to convince the panel to use taxpayer dollars to give Rendell the severance package he sought.
It wasn’t until after Justice and board member Jackie Rosario engaged in a heated verbal exchange – Rosario called Justice a “liar” – that Justice finally admitted she had called the meeting, even though she lacked the statutory authority to do so.
The board members ultimately rejected Justice’s efforts to hand Rendell a payoff, which he didn’t deserve after leaving the district in a financial and administrative mess. Days later, they would learn he had already accepted a job as the principal at Cocoa Beach Junior/Senior High School.
This episode, however, was yet another example of Justice putting her own agenda and need to settle personal scores above the collective efforts of the board and best interests of the school district.
That would be the underlying theme of her four-year term and, ultimately, her legacy in this community.
That, and shameless hypocrisy.
For example:
- Justice, who continues to embrace the efforts of Moms chapters across the U.S. to remove from school libraries books it deems inappropriate, was a member of the School Board that approved the purchase of some of those books here.
- Justice, who was neither seen nor heard here as our county’s Moms chapter pushed successfully in May for the repeal of the School Board’s racial equity policy, was a member of the previous board that voted unanimously to adopt the policy in 2020.
- Justice, whose group says it will not “partner with government” and claims to be nonpartisan, participated in the strategy session last winter when Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the names of 14 incumbent school board members he’s targeting for defeat in next year’s elections.
DeSantis’ hit list, by the way, includes two incumbents here – lifelong Republican Brian Barefoot, a former Indian River Shores mayor whose 2020 candidacy convinced Justice not to seek a second term, and current chair, Peggy Jones, who might be the most qualified and effective school board member in the county’s history.
Also, several prominent Republicans, including DeSantis and former president Donald Trump, spoke at the supposedly nonpartisan Moms’ summit, which news reports say attracted about 700 people.
At that summit, Justice was cheered as if she were a rock star, promoting the group’s core belief that parents – not trained educators, particularly those who work in public schools – should decide what and how to teach their children.
Justice carried that same arrogant and combative attitude to Beachland Elementary School during the COVID-19 epidemic in April 2021, when, no longer a board member, she visited her son’s classroom, ostensibly because he was struggling with wearing a mask.
While there, however, Justice’s disruptive behavior instigated on-campus confrontations with her son’s teacher, Beachland’s principal and even Assistant School Superintendent Scott Bass, who was summoned to the scene.
You’d think the national news media would want to know all this – get to know the Tiffany Justice we know.
Maybe they’ll call today.
