Maryland Students, Educators, and Schools Deserve Better
Don’t let these extremist school board candidates have a say over our schools.
Anne Arundel
County School Board
Anne Arundel County is facing extremist school board candidates who would force their political agendas into our kids’ classrooms.
In district 3,
Chuck Yocum says he would teach students that many January 6th insurrectionists were given “crazy sentences” for “nothing more than trespassing,”
And In district 5,
LaToya Nkongolo is a pro-book banning candidate who says that policies supporting LGBTQ people are causing “mental illness.”
Here in Anne Arundel County, we teach our children to treat others with kindness.
But Yocum didn’t get the memo — he publicly calls women “b*tch,” “slut,” and “wh*res,” and uses the slur “r*tard” to mock people. He has open disdain for our public school educators, telling them to “stop your incessant whining about how hard your job is.”
At a campaign event, Nkongolo echoed extreme, fringe conspiracy theories, calling Anne Arundel County Public Schools an “institution of grooming,” claiming that teachers are attempting to “influence our kids” to “cause sexual confusion.”
At a school board candidate forum, Nkongolo openly supported banning certain books from school libraries. It’s little surprise, then, that she hosted a meet-and-greet event with Moms for Liberty, an extremist group known for promoting book bans, including books on Martin Luther King and Anne Frank, and being accused of harassing educators and community leaders.
Yocum says that when teaching students about January 6th, he would cover what he calls “the media’s blatant distortion of the truth.” Defending his claim that “doctors are not the authority, teachers are not the authority, the government is not the authority” Yocum wrote that, “Drs said masks worked when all along knew did nothing [sic],” presumably referring to the Covid-19 pandemic.
We have real issues to address in Anne Arundel County Public Schools, and we need leaders who will put our kids first. But Chuck Yocum and LaToya Nkongolo are fixated on extreme fringe theories.
we need leaders who are focused on setting sensible education policy for our schools.
Calvert County
School Board
Calvert County is facing extremist school board candidates who would force their dangerous political agenda into our kids’ classrooms.
Melissa Goshorn, Joseph Marchio, and Paul Harrison are right-wing partisans who are endorsed by the shadowy, far-right, billionaire-funded 1776 Project PAC which focuses on stoking division around race, gender, and other culture war issues rather than on the issues that really matter to students.
The 1776 Project PAC previously endorsed a board of education slate dubbed “The Hate Slate” and has the dubious distinction of being charged with one of the largest campaign finance fines in Maryland history for failing to communicate appropriately with Maryland voters.
Goshorn describes herself as Q-anon and used her podcast to promote outrageous falsehoods about child organ harvesting from Holocaust denier Robert David Steele. She calls Covid-19 “a planned experiment” and says she doesn’t watch the news because “the media is the devil.”
She claims that “parents as a whole have become lazy,” and that schools are part of a conspiracy to indoctrinate children. On her podcast, she shared that she told her children not to have any one-on-one conversations with any teacher that has a “Safe Space” sticker in their classroom, a symbol that the teacher is accepting of LGBTQ students.
She even sued Calvert County Public Schools for allegedly promoting “radical ideology.” A judge dismissed the case, calling it “fundamentally flawed,” and scolded Goshorn and her co-plaintiffs for “clogging the docket” with “near baseless motions.”
Until recently, Goshorn was the Maryland Director of Power2Parent, a Nevada-based group that promotes school voucher programs that divert public schools funds to unaccountable private schools. Marchio and Harrison have aligned themselves with Goshorn’s campaign.
Board of Education members should be focused on the safety and well-being of students.
Yet at a recent Board of Education forum, Harrison advocated beating children:
“I’m not saying we should beat the hell out of our kids, but you know what we need, a little more of it.”
We have real issues in Calvert County Public Schools,
like addressing our educator shortage and expanding career and technical education.
But the Goshorn-Marchio-Harrison slate is fixated on fringe theories, driven by misinformation, and supported by out of state extremists.
We need candidates focused on the issues that matter to our students.
Frederick County
School Board
Jaime Brennan
“I don’t send [my kids] to school to be taught to accept as appropriate that which our faith calls a sin.”
“Some people would like to get treatment to get rid of same-sex attraction…there are people who have left the gay community and feel like they were pressured and influenced to participate in it.”
Colt Black
“You know, the emotional-social learning – that terminology, it seems very new age to me and I'm not necessarily a major supporter of putting more of that type of thing in school.”
Frederick County is a diverse, welcoming community. But we are facing extreme school board candidates who don’t share our values.
Brennan is the chair of the Frederick County chapter of Moms for Liberty (M4L), an anti-government extremist group known for promoting book bans, including books on Martin Luther King and Anne Frank, and accused of harassing educators and community leaders. In 2023, an Indiana chapter of M4L quoted Hitler in their newsletter. Last year in Carroll County, a campaign by M4L resulted in 39 books being pulled from school library shelves before any formal review.
Brennan has made openly anti-LGBTQ statements and wrote on Facebook that she “completely mistrusts every single teacher.”
Do we want someone with such disdain for educators making decisions about our schools?
Colt Black is just as extreme: during his failed 2022 congressional bid, he expressed skepticism about climate change, opposition to gun control laws to prevent school violence, and fierce anti-immigrant sentiment.
He opposes transgender students participating in school sports and believes that parents ought to be able to prevent their children from learning “something…against [their] religious or philosophical viewpoint” in public schools.
In an interview this year, Black mused that the school board could cut funding for extracurricular activities because “there are other places that folks can get involved in some of those extracurricular activities.”
The local Republican Party is backing both Brennan and Black, aiming to turn these non-partisan elections into races that mirror the divisive partisanship that we see across the country.
We have real issues to address in Frederick County:
Improving educator pay and staffing, keeping students safe, increasing access to career and technical education and pre-kindergarten, and so much more.
But Jaime Brennan and Colt Black are fixated on extreme, fringe theories and not the day-to-day priorities of students and educators.
Howard County
School Board
Ineffective legislator. Moms for Liberty cheerleader.
Anti-public school ideologue.
Trent Kittleman is no friend to public education.
In her eight years in the Maryland General Assembly, Kittleman passed just one bill.
Instead, she spent her time attempting to cut funding from public schools, divert taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools, and prevent the public from viewing campaign finance information.
She voted against bills to increase educator pay and staffing, expand career technical education and pre-kindergarten, and increase funding for Howard County schools.
At a time when we need to focus on keeping kids safe from gun violence, she:
voted against a bill to ban untraceable, unregulated ghost guns;
voted against a bill to increase security around the accessibility of guns, and;
voted against a bill to ban bump stocks, which allow rounds from the semi-automatic weapons so often used in mass shootings to be fired even faster.
She became an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, expressing hope that the Trump administration would “[redirect] education dollars to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice.”
Another alarming part of Kittleman’s record
is her zeal for Moms for Liberty, an extremist group known for promoting book bans, including books on Martin Luther King and Anne Frank, and accused of harassing educators and community leaders.
“I was going to start a chapter,” she recalled. “I fell in love with all the people. I thought they were reasonable and rational. But then I saw they were being called a terrorist group. You can’t get associated with that.”
—Kittleman on Moms for Liberty (2024)
Howard County deserves dedicated public servants,
not politicians who stoke division and align themselves with extremists.
Montgomery County
School Board
School board members Lynne Harris and Shebra Evans are running for reelection, but the current Montgomery County School Board has mismanaged the budget and mishandled a major sexual harassment scandal.
According to Montgomery County Council President Andrew Friedson, the school board has shown “a woeful lack of leadership, accountability and responsibility” in managing the budget, increasing class sizes, and cutting a popular program even in the face of strong public opposition.
Earlier this year, in the wake of a disturbing sexual harassment scandal, the school board apologized for how harassment complaints were handled in the school system. The subsequent settlements, legal expenses, crisis management fees, and the contract buyout for former Superintendent McKnight cost an estimated $2,359,021, per reporting by the Montgomery Perspective.
MCPS needs a change. We can do better for Montgomery County students, families, and educators.
However, that change should not be Brenda Diaz–who held a campaign event with Moms for Liberty, an extremist group known for promoting book bans, including books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank, and has been accused of harassing educators and community leaders.
Diaz is a favorite of the Montgomery County Republican Party, whose recent email blast highlighted her campaign no fewer than six times in a single message.
Diaz denies that the COVID-19 vaccine saved lives, saying vaccines “have caused much harm.”
She encourages the public to read what RFK Jr.–a notorious proponent of widely debunked, extreme fringe theories about childhood vaccination–has written about alleged “vaccine-related injuries.”
These extreme views earned Diaz the endorsement of UARE, a group that claims terms like “equity” and “social justice” are secret vehicles for teaching critical race theory (CRT) in schools.
Diaz’s links to UARE predate her campaign.
In 2022, a UARE event poster billed her as a consultant who “helps parents who are seeking to homeschool their kids,” and promised that she would “show how CRT is being infused into the MCPS history curriculum.” Brenda Diaz is too extreme for the Montgomery County school board.