These videos show several types. In many cases, the group of speakers mocked the crowd during the presentation.
At a February 2022 school board meeting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a woman named Laura Lester (first video) drew applause as she took the stage and delivered the first three sentences of her prepared speech: “Two weeks of ‘softening the edges’ has turned into two terrible years,” she said. “This case should end tonight. And when it’s over, I won’t clap, I won’t cheer, I won’t celebrate a freedom that shouldn’t have been taken away.” Lester did not respond to a request for comment.
A few minutes later, two women explain their plan to fight against the “illegality” of the school district, a man helping women. ran to school board members carrying a box (it contained a supposed transcript of the women’s statements). The school police caught him and laid him down in the corridor next to the building and shouted repeatedly: “You are working for me!”
At a school board meeting last year in Wayne Township, New Jersey, the crowd erupted into an argument when the school board president tried to stop a speaker, Pamela Macek (second video), who was criticizing a library book that “promotes profanity.” material and pornographic” by reading the paragraphs therein. (Iis an article that was published last month(Macek told ProPublica that he wasn’t trying to get the book banned but wanted it to go to guidance counselors’ offices and wanted parents to approve the student’s research.)
The board president tried to vote to end the meeting early. An attendee rushed to the front of the room to meet him, pointing his finger at him and shouting: “Stop the meeting and it will be held in front of your filthy house.”
Months ago in Penfield, New York, parents challenged the board to stand up against the state officials and the governor, crying because the surrounding areas have abandoned their responsibility due to the decrease in the disease. “You’re all in a very strong position here,” parent, Lauren Luft (third grader), told the group. “But you don’t have my son, okay?”
Luft went on to complain about the “threats” of diversity, equity and inclusion while making sure the institution pushes transgender students. “You have to understand that these are God’s children,” Luft said, his voice rising and shaking as the small crowd cheered him on. “You are teaching them to hate their bodies the way they were born, the way they were made!”
Luft did not respond to a request for comment.
After three other speakers voiced complaints similar to Luft’s, an attendee complained in her seat that a board member was laughing. “Be polite. You are an elected representative,” one attendee yelled at another board member. You represent us. This is not about you, my friend.
“You’re not going to stand here and do anything to me, you stutterer!” a board member responded. He stood up and beckoned to the parent saying, “Come.”
A parent and a man jumped on stage. (First video below.) His teammates pulled him away from the parent as the video of the meeting’s meal was cut.
In Chaska, Minnesota, Jonas Sjoberg had just walked off the stage, after using the time allotted to thank school board members for enacting a face-covering law, when another parent, Thomas Kahlbaugh, confronted Sjoberg, telling him, “All you’ve done is lie to the community” about the amount of community support for the cover-up.
A few minutes later, Kahlbaugh’s wife grabbed Sjoberg’s shoulder, upset that he had taken a picture of her husband. Kahlbaugh then grabbed Sjoberg’s phone (second video) and pulled him out of his seat by his shirt while bystanders called the police.
Reflecting on what happened, Sjoberg said that what happened at the meeting revealed how, as people in our community, “we are treating things with contempt” and that people ‘keep missing ourselves. Because of this, he said: “We meet in the public square and we can’t talk to each other, we yell at each other, we shout and scream, and we argue.” Is that what we really want?”
Kahlbaugh later sentenced to a year of probation for disorderly conduct and was ordered to have no contact with Sjoberg and undergo an anger assessment. The assault charge was dismissed. In response to ProPublica’s questions about the incident, Kahlbaugh said the review found he did not need to go to anger management treatment. He also accused the prosecutor of charging him a lot of money to get him to give a verdict. “My children will never set foot in a Minnesota Public School again,” he wrote. “These schools have been lost because of government corruption taking endless tax dollars while failing our children.”
In a similarly messy incident earlier that year in Salt Lake City, Utah, things got so bad that prosecutors filed charges against about a dozen bystanders.
After the public comment period ended, three attendees approached the microphone and refused to leave, yelling at board members as the board members began calling for the mask to be removed (video three). School board members quickly voted to end the impasse. When they started to gather their things to go, one of the people who was in front of the room encouraged the people to go with him, shouting: “Okay, let’s go.” Since he has left, we will take over.” He offered what he wanted to get rid of the mask. A group of attendees rushed forward, raising their arms in support.
Then 11 people were charged with disrupting the meeting. Many cases were resolved. Two people did not compete and were fined.
Many of the incidents involved protesters displaying masks or COVID-19 protocols.
Some critics were against the availability of books about LGBTQ+.
In some cases, attendees are arrested after encountering the police.
In many areas, people sued the school district, claiming that their civil rights had been violated.
Some of the arrests and interactions with the authorities were staged – staged and filmed for high visibility.
In Brevard County, Florida, a protester expressed his deep conflict with officials when he was barred from attending the 2021 school board meeting because he was not wearing a mask. “Move! You can’t touch me, you dumbass,” the defendant, Nicholas Carrington, yelled in front of the deputy. Another recording of the struggle with a fellow defendant continued for eight minutes before both were arrested.
In June, Carrington was ordered to pay $331 in legal fees disrupting the educational institution. His other charges – trespassing, resisting public authority and reckless intoxication – it was dropped, as well as criminal charges against the other defendant. (He was found not guilty of another charge.) In response to ProPublica’s questions about the incident, Carrington described himself as “revengeful” at a time when school district officials “were just letting in people who agreed with their story and were married to wear masks and be obedient.”
In the suburbs of Rochester, New York, parents used to have two separate visits with adults at school meetings. A parent participating in one of the games was among those who filed a lawsuit against more than a dozen school districts and superintendents accusing the schools of “educational misconduct,” in part for having stricter COVID-19 regulations than the state requires. . That case was dismissed.
Another parent, who was arrested at the time, continued file a federal lawsuit against the school district and the sheriff’s office last year, alleging wrongful arrest and civil rights violations and seeking more than $17 million in damages. The case is ongoing.
In another case, from an event in Round Rock, Texas, two school reunion attendees they said that their arrest was in retaliation for criticizing the principal of the school during public comment. In the case, the men refer to the security guards of the school as “hire”; claims he was “falsely arrested” and “justly beaten” by school district police; and states that the incident “ended with the Defendants in a state prison, after being arrested in the manner of an Al Qaida operative.” The case is still ongoing.
While in some areas the riots of the school committees led to disputes in the courts, in other areas it led to political issues.
In Indiana, a man who was arrested for disrupting a Penn-Harris-Madison school board meeting sat on the bench. (Prosecutors declined to indict him.) His appeals were unsuccessful. In Webster, New York, a man who played a major role in a sports team also made it possible for him to be part of the school.
Despite these losses, there was a political shift in power on several school boards, aided by some that began in chaotic meetings. Across the country, the series of fan-favorite series has become more popular and attracted some of the parents who packed the meetings.
Many of the nominees were endorsed by ethnic groups including the 1776 Super PAC, which supports “patriotic” education candidates, and Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based nonprofit that has banned their outcry. The students often promise parents to control what topics can be taught in class, what books can be checked out in the library and what LGBTQ+ rights can be granted. And the success of candidates – rather like Berkeley County, South Carolina, Wayne Township, New Jerseyand Sarasota County, Florida – politics and ideology changed those school boards.