Education Action Team
The Education Action Team aims to inform the community about threats to public education and to identify action steps that promote respect, fairness, opportunity, and funding for all students.
BOE Endorsements for your District
Education Team Recommends Board of Education Candidates
The Ed team gathered data from various sources (candidate pages, interviews/questionnaires, forums, meet & greets, etc.) as well as our own questionnaire and determined these candidates best align with the ideals and goals of IndivisibleHoCoMD.
Why We Still Need to Fight Against Moms 4 Liberty,
Even in Howard County
As many of you are aware, Moms 4 Liberty is an organization that was born out of the regressive hard right wing movement. It was developed as a seemingly “grassroots” parent organization but it is backed by the Koch brothers and other big players to fight against the popular ideals of equality, diversity, and inclusiveness in everything from library books to teacher training.
One of M4L’s platforms is engaging members to run for local school boards to enact policies that work against diversity and inclusion policies. They have been successful in banning no less than 50 books from Carroll County Public School libraries. And they have set their eyes on us next. Watch nearly any HCPSS Board of Education meeting in the last few years and they are there, spewing their nonsense and trying to get attention. Recently, there was a highly successful protest outside one of M4L’s public meetings at the library in Columbia. Howard County citizens have sent a resounding message that we don’t want them here. But, we have a problem.
Howard County School Board candidates have gotten the message that their affiliation with M4L should be hush-hush. Trent Kittleman, running for BOE in district 5, was a founding member of the Howard County Chapter of M4L, but you’d never know it. She asked to be taken off their roles when deciding to run for BOE. She may be trying to hide her past affiliation, but there is no evidence her views on educational policy have changed. This comes as a challenge when evaluating BOE candidates. It would be much easier if they wore their bias on their sleeve. So, we as the citizens of Howard County, must look deep to find the hidden code of whose ideologies may align with M4L.
Here are some issues that may be at the forefront of their campaigns:
-A focus on parents’ rights
-Parent “opt out” options for books or materials
-Redistricting that prioritizes “keeping neighborhoods together”
-“Equality over equity”
Although our highly rated school system has had significant problems of late, creating divisiveness and anger, we must be vigilant in selecting our BOE candidates so that we do not inadvertently allow a fox to enter the hen house.
We, as members of IndivisibleHoCoMD who believe in fairness, tolerance, inclusion, and democracy, must continue to work toward building a fairer democracy. That starts with and includes a highly effective public school system that stands for those same beliefs.