Bailey Gallion: Brevard County parents form new group to counter Moms for Liberty
News from Florida about a group that is working to counter Moms for Liberty’s repressive activism.
What started as a Facebook group meant to connect parents trying to keep facemasks in Brevard County Schools has since grown into a new political organization aimed at fighting for far more classroom changes.
Families for Safe Schools began in April on Facebook as a group called “Mandate Masks in Brevard County schools.” It gained momentum as a counterpart to Moms for Liberty, a vocal conservative parent group with a prominent presence at School Board meetings.
The parents who formed Families for Safe Schools have essentially taken a page from the conservatives’ playbook to fight back for what they believe.
FFSS members met each other at school board meetings as individual parents who showed up over the summer to support a mask mandate for schools as the delta variant of the novel coronavirus was surging through classrooms, infecting thousands of children and school staff.
As they talked to each other, the parents found they had other common interests and concerns. They shared worries about the rights of LGBTQ students and gun safety. They feared that the quest to ban “critical race theory” from classrooms could prevent their children from learning the full history of the United States.
Their main rallying cry was that School Board meetings have been hijacked by a loud minority using their voices to shape school policies while representing just a fraction of parents.
“If you were to judge strictly on who spoke at the meetings, you would have thought that 80% of the county was rabidly anti-mask,” said Michelle Barrineau, a Families for Safe Schools vice president and the mother of a BPS student. “And that was the representation that the board was seeing from the county, and it was just purely false.”
Here’s hoping we see more of these groups. Read the full article here.