After Losing Majority On PA School Board, Two Remaining Moms For Liberty Members Quit, Because Boo Hoo Sad :(
It's just no fun when your bigoted minority bloc isn't running things.
The fallout from voters’ rejection in November of rightwing culture-war scolds who’d taken over a Pennsylvania school board continues this week, as two of the remaining three far right members of the Central Bucks County School Board tendered their resignations. Apparently they decided it just wasn’t worth staying on the job if they had to be in the minority on the board, because if they couldn’t ban books and make life miserable for LGBTQ+ kids anymore, what’s even the point?
As you may recall, rightwingers won a 6-3 majority on the Central Bucks board in 2021, part of that year’s wave of crazies flooding into low-turnout county and school board elections and winning because voters weren’t paying attention. The Moms For White Grievance contingent on the Central Bucks board got particularly busy, making national news for banning LGBTQ-themed books, prohibiting teachers from engaging in “advocacy activities,” and getting the district sued by the ACLU for creating a “hostile environment” for LGBTQ+ students. Along with the book banning and a Florida-style ban on mentioning LGBTQ+ anything in classes, the district prohibited teachers from using students’ preferred names and pronouns unless they had express written permission from parents.
Last fall, the good people of the community got sick of it and Democratic candidates swept all five of the open seats, giving the board a 6-3 noncrazy majority. As you may also recall, the lame-duck rightwing board members then voted to throw an obscenely generous $700,000 severance package at the outgoing superintendent, who resigned right after the election. That’s now being litigated to see if any of it can be clawed back. Yeesh!
OK, one more callback and we’ll get to the new news. As you may also ALSO recall, Bucks County is also home to Clarice Schillinger, the fun rightwing mom who advocated for “parents’ rights” and held a drunken 17th-birthday party for her daughter, where she allegedly gave teenagers booze and punched a high school boy in the face. It’s a hoppin’ kind of place.
Now, the latest fuckbungle: At the most recent school board meeting on February 13, two of the remaining righties on the Central Bucks board, Lisa Sciscio and Debra Cannon, said they were “resigning” from their duties, although technically you can’t just say you’re quitting and then you’re gone. They followed that up with resignation letters, and the board will hold a special meeting this Friday to make it official.
As a local politics newsletter explains, Ms. Sciscio, as chair of the board’s policy committee, had been a central player in pushing the craziest rightwing policies, including
a policy that allows district residents to remove books from libraries that contain “sexualized content” and another that aims to prevent teachers from “indoctrinating” students.
At the board meeting last week, Sciscio complained that the rightwing minority on the board had been “kept in the dark” about the ongoing litigation over the former superintendent’s platinum parachute, and accused the majority on the board of trying to force out the three Republican members. A classic “you can’t force me out, I quit!” tantrum.
As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo, the central problem for the two departing rightwingers is simply that
it’s a lot less fun MomsforLibertying when you’re in a 6-3 minority than when you’re in a 6-3 majority. It probably doesn’t help that a decent amount of what the new board is doing is unwinding the suspicious if not necessarily unethical or illegal work of the old board.
Marshall also highlighted this nice op-ed by former board member Tabitha Dell'Angelo, who had been in the board’s liberal minority while the Moms for Bigotry had the minority (her term ended in November). Dell’Angelo writes that Sciscio and Cannon, by resigning just two months into being in the minority, “quit on the community and [sent] a poor example to Central Bucks students.”
Dell’Angelo recounts exactly how awful it was to be in the minority when Sciscio and her compatriots were on the board and running roughshod over any voices not aligned with their Christian nationalist agenda. She certainly empathized with Sciscio’s feeling of not being heard at all, noting
After two years on the board I never got a straight answer about anything, not briefed on important legal issues, I couldn’t even get an item on an agenda. I could not even get my colleagues to answer a simple question about who wrote the library policy.
They refused to answer.
We later found out they were working behind the scenes with the right-wing Christian Independence Law Center, secretly drafting policies and administrative regulations.
Ahem. And yet, says Dell’Angelo, she didn’t throw up her hands and quit, unlike certain people, because going so would have betrayed the folks who voted for her:
If I quit, I would be allowing uninformed and sometimes bigoted ideas to be amplified with one less person to ask questions or to offer an alternate viewpoint – isn’t that what we want after all – diversity of opinions? […]
I was also surprised to hear Mrs. Cannon say the minority was not allowed to speak. “They don’t want to hear what I have to say.” This came as a particular surprise to me since I was on the dais one night when she yelled at Mrs. Smith, “What makes you think, or gives you the right to be told anything at all?” Or another night when Mrs. Sciscio tried to cut school board member Dr. Mariam Mahmoud off saying, “you’ve had your two minutes.”
Do go read the whole op-ed. It is a delicious bit of score-settling, with receipts, served cold. It’s also a fine reminder that we all need to pay attention, more than ever, to the down-ballot races that we used to think we had the luxury of ignoring.
[TPM / Tap Into Doylestown / Bucks County Herald / Bucks County Beacon]
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My apologies if someone already caught this: "...who had been in the board’s liberal minority while the Moms for Bigotry had the minority..." Shouldn't that be "while the Moms for Bigotry had the majority"? Else I'm not following the meaning.
“… isn’t that what we want after all – diversity of opinions?”
Well, for a certain definition of “we”…