The sickening and divisive politicization of public education in our community dominated last week’s School Board meeting, which dragged on for more than six hours before mercifully ending 20 minutes after midnight.
No one should be surprised that, aside from a few quickly addressed housekeeping items, nothing meaningful was accomplished in the pursuit of improving the quality of education in our schools and student outcomes.
As was evident throughout the meeting: The new board majority, wholly owned and operated by the local chapter of the Moms For Liberty, cares more about culture-war issues and control than academic excellence.
The dais from which the three Moms-backed board members rule is merely a prop for their propaganda.
And rule they shall – Jackie Rosario, Gene Posca and newcomer Kevin McDonald – wielding their 3-2 majority as if they had a legitimate mandate from the community, riding roughshod over a board minority that actually received more votes than all three of them combined.
Late in the meeting, in fact, Posca voiced his desire to launch a coup to wrest the gavel from Board Chair Teri Barenborg and remove Peggy Jones as vice chair, saying the majority should be given the “procedural power” to make such changes whenever it wants to and without cause.
All that should be necessary to remove a chair or vice chair, Posca argued, is that they are “perceived by the majority to no longer represent the board’s interests or carry out their duty appropriately.”
You’ll notice he didn’t mention the community’s interests – or that the board’s current majority represents only a small percentage of the county’s voters and an even smaller number of parents in our school district.
That’s because this majority was created in April, when the governor, at the Moms’ urging, ignored the will of county’s voters and appointed McDonald to replace Brian Barefoot, who mistakenly resigned his seat in February, when he moved from John’s Island to the mainland.
Barefoot would never have supported Posca’s wrongheaded and politically motivated attempt to unseat the chair and vice chair.
That should matter: Unlike Barefoot, a former Indian River Shores mayor who was elected to the board in a 2020 landslide, both Posca, who ran unopposed in 2022, and McDonald were awarded their seats without receiving a single vote.
But it doesn’t matter.
Nor does it matter that the board would need to rewrite its policy, which aligns with Florida law and states that the chair and vice chair are to be elected at an organizational meeting in November and serve one-year terms.
Or that the board’s attorney, Sid Ansbacher, said neither he nor any of the other Florida school districts with whom he consulted had heard of a chair being removed without cause.
Ansbacher also warned that such action could “create sort of a free-for-all.”
The majority was unfazed.
Rosario invited Posca to “fine-tune” his proposal and put in writing something the board could discuss at its next meeting.
McDonald, who is running against retired businessman David Dyer to keep his board seat and surely knows Posca’s proposal will be extremely unpopular with voters, chose to not take a position that went against his ally and clashed with the Moms’ seize-control agenda.
He said nothing.
You can expect, then, to see Posca revisit his suggested policy change, probably at the board’s June 10 workshop. If Rosario and McDonald line up behind him, there’s nothing Barenborg and Jones can do to stop them.
“It would be a setting a bad precedent,” Jones said after the meeting.
To this iron-fisted majority, however, precedent is nothing more than a minor annoyance, an obstacle to be overcome as it seeks to impose its will. The governor handed the Moms control of board, here in their birthplace, but they know there’s a real chance they’ll lose it in the Aug. 20 election.
They’re all-in now.
In this one meeting alone – in addition to Posca’s quest to take away Barenborg’s gavel – the Moms-backed majority also:
- Enthusiastically supported local Moms chair Jennifer Pippin’s petition to override a 6-2 decision by the board-selected District Objection Committee to return a book to school libraries.
- Eagerly endorsed Rosario’s resolution to reject newly amended federal Title IX guidelines, even though the board’s action was merely symbolic and could result in an Office of Civil Rights investigation that requires the district to spend tax dollars to defend itself in court.
- Approved, with the support of both Barenborg and Jones, changes to the board policy mandating that students participate in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day – but only after members were forced to endure another of Posca’s delusional rants about teachers not standing for the national anthem at high school graduations, which he said he saw again this year.
This time, though, Posca didn’t single out Sebastian River, as he had done twice previously, with his unsubstantiated allegations.
“I won’t say where it happened because, clearly, that caused hurt feelings,” Posca said. “But it did make me continue to wonder why it’s so hard to honor the flag of the country. Is it an accident? Or is it a Kaepernick-style protest?”
He was referring to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who, in 2016, knelt during the national anthem at the start of games to protest police brutality and racial inequality in America.
Posca then went on to take another shot at the teachers’ union – one of his favorite targets – for calling him out and denying his allegations.
Actually, Posca went even further, describing as an “angry mob” the community members who went to the podium during the meeting’s public-comment segment to address his attacks and speak against the board majority’s actions.
Just so you know: Posca, wearing a white physician’s coat bearing his name, attended the meeting remotely via a video-conferencing program and, thus, did not face his many critics that were among the 41 speakers who showed up.
But Posca welcomed the chance to engage in the board’s discussion and vote on Rosario’s Title IX resolution, which she said was needed to “send a message” that the recent revisions made to the federal guidelines were not acceptable in our district.
She wasn’t wrong: As most people would probably agree, biological boys should not be allowed to compete on girls’ sports teams, nor should they be permitted to use girls’ locker rooms or bathrooms.
But Rosario’s resolution was unnecessary, as Jones pointed out, because existing board policy and state law already prohibit such interaction. Even Superintendent of Schools David Moore said the resolution, if approved, would change nothing.
So why do it?
Why risk getting hit with an OCR investigation that could cost the district federal funding and tax dollars that might need to be spent on legal fees?
Why ignore Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz’s written recommendation that individual districts not take further action until receiving guidance from the state, which has already filed a legal challenge?
Clearly, Rosario was grandstanding, grabbing some low-hanging fruit – she knows nobody here supports the Title IX changes, which don’t take effect until August, anyway – and scoring points with the Moms and their governor.
She was also following the lead of Moms co-founder Bridget Ziegler, the controversial Sarasota County board member who presented a similar resolution earlier this month. Our district became the second in the state to take such action when Barenborg voted with the majority.
The local Moms, of course, celebrated the approval – and then shamelessly lied about Jones’ reasons for casting the lone vote against the resolution.
“Peggy Jones doesn’t support protecting girls sports and girls bathroom privacy!” the Moms wrote on their local Facebook page, where it shared video of the vote.
The community should be disgusted by their dishonesty, which, as usual, was politically driven: The Moms, who are desperate to hold on to their slim majority, are backing political newbie Rob MacCallum in his quest to unseat the widely respected and beloved Jones in August.
Jones, who has spent nearly 50 years in education, has long been a staunch supporter of Title IX. Rest assured, she has done more for women getting equal opportunities, especially in sports, than anyone affiliated with the Moms.
Her position hasn’t changed.
She voted “no” because it was the responsible thing to do – something the anything-for-attention Moms and their we-know-better majority wouldn’t understand.
That brings us to the majority’s short-sighted vote to reject and reverse the District Objection Committee’s overwhelming decision to put the harmless “Ban This Book,” which the petitioner admitted she hadn’t read in its entirety, back on school library shelves.
Not only did the board’s 3-2 vote tell the committee members they’re irrelevant, but its reasons were nonsensical. The book was not pornographic. It was about a 9-year-old girl who defied a school board’s book ban by establishing a secret lending library of the removed titles in her locker.
That was enough for the Moms-backed board members to lose their minds, with Posca arguing that the book was “liberal Marxist propaganda” – yes, he sees communists everywhere – that promotes “rebellion against the authorities.”
Likewise, McDonald said the book’s theme was to “rebel against the school board and administration,” and claimed it “challenges our authority.”
And when Jones mentioned that the book had been reviewed and approved locally by three different school-district panels, Rosario made sure everyone in the room knew, “We are the authority to make the final decision.”
That’s the way the Moms and their majority sees it: This is their school district, love it or leave it.
Ansbacher, who told Moore minutes after the meeting that he was quitting as the school district’s attorney, decided to leave it.
Will Superintendent Moore, who has worked wonders since arriving 4 ½ years ago, be far behind if the August election goes the wrong way?
“Everyone owning this school system is important, because it does not belong to the board, it does not belong to me,” the superintendent said. “It belongs to our community – everyone who lives in our community – regardless of political affiliation.”
Not anymore.
