If you haven’t paid attention to all the budget troubles going on around here..welcome to the terrible party. In the next few weeks the budget for FCPS is going to be voted on, and we need to make sure that our schools get what they need to educate our children. We’ll let a good friend of the Yokel explain it to y’all:
The most important duty of local government is to educate the children living within their borders. If we fail at this it really doesn’t matter how nice our parks, roads or other public services are. At the bottom of this post we are going to list the email addresses for county council members and County Executive Fitzwater so you can email them with your concerns.
Speaking of the important duty of education, one of the most important duties we have as citizens is to vote for competent school board members. That is where a fair number of us failed this time around. We tried to sound the warning about there being too many candidates on our side, but that warning did not reach enough ears and we are now left to deal with the consequences of it all.
Colt Black has decided to use his short time on the board to harass and demean LGBTQ+ students at school board meetings. From the Frederick News Post:
Referring to the part of a districtwide gender identity policy, Policy 443, that instructs teachers and staff members to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns, Black said at a Jan. 8 school board meeting: “Just as much as you have your right to be you, we have our right to be free from you.”
Lots of local folks filed complaints about this outrageous comment from a sitting school board member. Well, today an independent investigator determined that Black did not violate Title IX:
But that doesn’t mean that he’s not an unqualified bigot that shouldn’t be on the board. We’ll tell you right now that the 5 member panel of judges here at the LY have already tried and convicted him in our court of public opinion, and so has a majority of the school board:
We’ll remind y’all again in a couple of years, but we do need to remember how the math works when it comes to school board elections. We cannot pay this high price again.
We’ve been yelling to y’all for years about paying attention to the Board of Education race. Every time Cindy Rose threw her proverbial hat into the ring, we’ve been there with sirens and horns warning everyone about the danger of bigoted, anti-education people getting on to the board.
This time is no different folks!
Thankfully every time enough people in this fine county heeded the warning and made sure she (and many others like her) didn’t get a seat. Just look at the bullet we dodged:
Just imagine the rants that would take place at BOE meetings over shit like this!
Jamie Brennan and Colt Black are also threats to the education and well-being of children in Frederick County Public Schools. They can try and hide behind the veneer that they are in it to improve reading and math scores or restore the virtual school program, but we all know it isn’t true. A few months back your Lady Yokels attended a few candidate forums and had the displeasure of hearing Colt Black lying to the crowd saying that schools didn’t allow kids to check out books from the library and therefore weren’t reading. (Isn’t this what Cindy and Nancy Allen want since all the library books are full of porn?) Jaime Brennan is a dangerous Moms For Liberty candidate who needs to be avoided at all costs. Here’s a sampling of what some people who pay attention have been posting about her:
Hard pass on this one!
Here’s the dilemma, we have four really good candidates running with only three spots to fill. Therefore, in order to keep Jaime Brennan and/or Colt Black out (because they do have a following amongst our local Trumpers), we need to align behind three, and only three. In our opinion, because we’ve been watching these races closely for the last decade and a half, it needs to be the Apple Ballot candidates.
This is not a criticism of Veronica Lowe or anything she’s said or done. We are sure she would do a very good job, but we need to be real here. Liz Barrett recognized this danger when she didn’t receive the Apple Ballot endorsement and knew she risked letting someone like Cindy Rose in if she didn’t drop out. The Apple Ballot works and it matters to a lot of people. We cannot take the risk of allowing these people to slowly fill up our board. First Nancy Allen gets on, then if we aren’t carefully, Jaime Brennan gets a spot. Then it’s like that mint you put in your garden thinking just a little bit won’t matter and now all you do is pull up sprigs of mint all summer long!
We can’t risk becoming like Carroll County or the whole freaking state of Florida. It’s important that we teach kids the truth about what really happened in our country. It’s really important that we welcome all of our children and their families into our school community. And, it’s really important that we don’t allow people who would work against those goals onto our precious school board.
We are going to try our best to do just that for you today!
On May 14th you have a very important job to do! And that job is pick the most qualified, compassionate, intelligent people to be a part of our BOE. You get to vote for 3 (there’s thankfully many more than 3 to choose from this year) and 6 get to go on to the general election in November. And remember that your lack of party affiliation does not prevent you for voting for these candidates as it is a non partisan election!
We’ve created three categories for you to peruse today. The first category will be our approved candidates. The second will be those that passed the Yokel muster, but didn’t exactly make it to the approved category mostly due to a lack of information or because we felt their stance on the various issues was not well articulated. And finally we have a pile of rejections! Thankfully the approved category vastly outnumbers our rejections this time around.
Your Lady Yokels made our decisions based on a few criteria. First the issues on their websites, in news articles, video interviews, and in-person forums had to match what we thought was important in a candidate. We like to see candidates mention making all students feeling welcome, a support for teachers and paying them what they deserve, a focus on student mental health, inclusion of all kinds of people and events in school libraries and the curriculum, and a commitment to teaching children with scientifically approved methods and not educational fads. If there is any hint of a candidate discriminating against children OR advocating for the removal of accurate history or sexual education, they went immediately into the rejection pile! We know your code words people! They aren’t hard to crack!
Click here to discover how we found all the candidates.
We went in alphabetical order, not by who we liked the most.
Below is our approved list of candidates along with a link to their website so you can see what they have to say for yourself!
Jerry Alexandratos- in our original post we stated we couldn’t find his website, he has since contacted us with a link, and we have since moved him to the approved column!
These 8 would all make great members of the board! It’s so nice to see so many qualified people running this year.
The next set of candidates have a lot of promise, but some of them lacked information about what they would do as school board members. However, we didn’t feel as though they warranted an outright rejection.
Now our tone is going to change folks! The four candidates on this list must be avoided like the plague. We’ll give you some more details with each one for our rejection.
Colt Black, yes the same Colt Black that ran for Congress but now wants to be on the school board. Here’s something on his website that really got to us:
As a parent, you don’t cede your rights to guide and parent your child at the school door. So often times parents are treated as the enemy by teachers and administrators of schools. Spoken down to and disrespected. Enough is enough. It’s past time to ensure parents are respected by teachers and administrators and treated as a partner in their child’s education. Whether you are dealing with a student with special needs and are working to get your student the services they are entitled to or a disciplinary issue which is being taken too far. Or perhaps there is something your student or yourself object to on the basis of religious or philosophical thought which is causing the conscience to be violated and in turn violating your rights, parents need an advocate on the board who will stand up to ensure that every child receives a quality education.
Yeah, we had to read through that a few times as well.
So parents are the enemies of the teachers and administration? And why is that, because the parent doesn’t agree with what is being taught, or their kid misbehaved and actually faced some consequences? And what’s this nonsense about parents being abused?
We’re going to drop this right here for Mr. Black and anyone else who is curious:
2. Jaime Brennan is our Moms For Liberty candidate, she posted a series of videos that explain her position on the issues.
If you are interested in hearing someone bash kids and promote the removal of books from the school libraries (didn’t we already solve this?), go ahead and waste 6 minutes of your life. A friend of the Yokel sent us his rendition of her campaign sign that we think you will enjoy:
This lady tried last time around, and we need to reject her this time around as well. She’s a homeschooling advocate and lists on her website that she’s received the endorsement of an organization called Power 2 Parent, which is just as awful as you can imagine:
UPDATE: In our original post we weren’t able to find a lot of info on Tabitha McLoughlin. After looking at this graphic designer’s nightmare of an attempt at political propaganda we’ve decided to move her to the do not vote for column.
There’s still a few more forums for you to drop in on should you like to hear the candidates for yourself. Check out the League of Women Voters website for more details:
There’s lots to avoid this election season, the orange menace is back, and Dan Cox is trying to get into Congress, but don’t underestimate the importance of these school board elections.
Perpetual BOE Candidate You Know Who is planning an “education townhall” on Feb 27th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the C. Burr Artz public library. Since it’s at the library it’s required to be open to anyone who wants to attend, so please share widely. Surely it will be… uh…educational. It is worth noting that Cindy Rose filed today to run again for the Board of Education. I guess her previous losses left her wanting more of the same so let’s make sure she finally gets the message that we don’t want her on our board.
Topics to discuss are a bullet list of how to feel aggrieved. This means you are in luck if you hate those people who have a great idea that they will volunteer anyone but themselves to do the legwork on. This is an exclusive event for the airing of grievances, entirely free of action items.
– Do you or did you feel left out of your child’s education? (Would you still feel left out of it if you weren’t involved in litigation/exchanging eleventy bazillion emails with the FCPS Administration and BOE during times that other people are at PTA meetings or assisting in classrooms?)
– Are you currently disappointed in what your child is learning? Were you disappointed in what your child was learning? (Do you think it unnecessary and frightening to learn facts about things that have vast geopolitical ramifications, such as the world’s largest religion? Does learning a different way than you were taught 40 years ago frighten and disgust you?)
– Do you or did you feel you were not a partner in your child’s education? (If you did feel that you were a partner in education, on a scale of 1 to 10 how frightened were you of the school restrooms?)
Please come out and share your thoughts and concerns with local community members and education activists, whether or not you received the personalized pitchfork and tiki torch invite.
Local Yokel suggested items to discuss:
How about brainstorming on ideas that will make you a real partner in education instead of an adversary?
What can the community do to help alleviate over-testing?
What can I do to help advocate for more education budget dollars to attract and keep the best teachers in Frederick County?
How can I make sure that all kids have access to the appropriate learning level?
How can I contribute to ensuring we have adequate schools for our growing county?
If you have your own wishlist of items, please plan to attend. We’d love to hear how your feedback at the meeting is received.
frederick local yokel 