Sweeping parental-rights victories in the midterms suggest parents want control of their children’s education, Moms for Liberty president Tiffany Justice said.
While Republicans performed below expectations this election cycle, many school board hopefuls who campaigned on a platform of supporting parental rights triumphed on Nov. 8, even in solid-blue states, Justice told The Epoch Times.
Moms for Liberty recorded wins for pro-parental rights local candidates in Maryland and New Jersey, states that sent Democrats to Congress. Several Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates won in majority-Democrat districts in conservative states.
“What you’re seeing now is parents stepping up in their local communities and taking back their education system,” said Justice. “We’re a nonpartisan organization. We want people that support parental rights to win.”
Across the country, Moms for Liberty endorsed 270 candidates.
Defying the odds, more than 50 percent of those challenged incumbents and won, Justice said.
“If you look at the general percentage of first-time candidates that win, it’s much lower than half,” she said.
The win is even more impressive given that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) spent $59 million on left-wing political campaigns, according to Breitbart.
The Epoch Times reached out to the NEA and the AFT, but both didn’t comment by press time.
Florida Victories
For one candidate running on a parental-rights platform, vital issues included school policies on mask mandates, obscene books, and LGBT ideology. Parents also have raised concerns about school failures to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to acceptable standards.
School board candidate and incumbent Jacqueline Rosario ran for office with an endorsement from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. She and the other five DeSantis-endorsed candidates in the Nov. 8 election won school board seats.
“There is no place in public schools for woke ideology,” Rosario told The Epoch Times. “We need to remain or come back to traditional reading, writing, arithmetic, and science. These are the subjects that we are responsible for teaching.”
Florida schools must improve education for several reasons, she added. Math scores have dropped, and language scores currently average in the 50th percentile.
But instead of fixing these problems, schools have focused on woke indoctrination.
“It’s just not good … We need to do better,” Rosario said.
“It’s been incredible,” she said of the DeSantis endorsement. “It’s honoring, humbling, and exciting all at the same time. The work that I’ve been doing on the board has been exactly what the governor’s educational agenda is written as.”
She advised future candidates that their commitment to parental rights should be genuine.
“It has to be consistent, it has to be genuine, and you have to live it,” she said. “There are parents out there depending on you to be their voice on the school board.”
DEI Dynamited
When COVID-19 moved classrooms into living rooms, it lit the fuse of the parental rights movement, Courage is a Habit president Alvin Lui told The Epoch Times.
School went home; then parents went to school, he said.
For the first time, parents saw that schools taught kids radical gender ideology, indoctrinated them into activism, and exposed them to pornographic books, he said.
“When kids were home during COVID, a lot of parents saw what they were being taught,” Lui said. “It was the first time that parents got a peek into the classroom.”
In places like Maine, teachers offered children pornographic books, and schools put up hallway posters that encouraged children into radical gender ideology.
Some children told their parents they felt pressurefrom teachers and peers to declare they were new gender identities. A new education rule in Maine will allow schools to keep secrets from parents about their children.
“Maine’s Department of Education is about to pass a rule that lets school counselors and social workers take children away from their parents,” a Courage is a Habit video explains.
Shocked parents have opposed school curricula that taught their children radical ideologies, said Lui.
Most school boards have two- to four-year terms, according to Ballotpedia. And 2022 marked the first widespread opportunity for voters to make choices since the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Local elections for school boards remained hotly contested in Maine, parental rights advocate Shawn McBreairty told The Epoch Times by email. GOP losses in Maine were the result of conservatives failing to support educational freedom, he said.
“There was no rallying cry, no overall strategy to have each GOP candidate unify as a team to expose the horrific Maine educational situation, which is indefensible from the Democrats,” he wrote. “That’s why we got crushed.”
A local school district sued McBreairty after he read passages from obscene books found in the school, as previously reported by The Epoch Times. McBreairty eventually won a lawsuit against the school.
Elsewhere, the FBI opened multiple investigations into parents who protested schools, MSN reported.
The New Jersey Education Association released an election ad opposing parents, Justice noted. It claimed, “When extremists start attacking our schools, that’s not who we are.”
“Parents are involved and want to reclaim public education,” Justice said.
Moms for Liberty hopes that the wave of election wins will lead to increased educational achievement, she said.
“The people in control of education continue to sell snake oil solutions, like DEI and CRT and SEL,” she added, “instead of focusing on the real issue at hand, which is kids are not learning to read in school.”
Reporting by The Epoch Times.
