Maryland Students, Educators, and Schools Deserve Better
Don’t let these extremist school board candidates have a say over our schools.
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.