Speaker: Activists, media malign board members

OCEAN CITY — The rift over parental rights and being inclusive of LGBTQ+ students showed no signs of diminishing during public comment at last week’s Ocean City Board of Education meeting. 

One speaker argued that three new members of the board who ran last fall on their opposition to portions of new state Health and Physical Education Standards regarding sex education, sexual orientation and gender identity are being unfairly maligned by activists and the media. Other speakers said those members’ efforts and their affiliation with a conservative national group show there is valid reason for criticism.

Local resident John Henry said the November election “declared” that the people of the community agreed with the position of board members Liz Nicoletti, Robin Shaffer and Catherine Panico, who opposed the standards and spent month after month going to school board meetings to speak out against them and were elected, ousting incumbent board members. The standards were adopted in August just before the 2022-23 school year began. 

Henry tried to distance the board members from a speaker they hosted at a political rally in September. 

“We heard about a visitor from North Jersey who made some incendiary comments about the homosexual lifestyle during a parents rights rally,” Henry said. “Thanks to journalists who love bad news, we keep hearing about it.”

He said the speaker caused fear, anger and concerns about justice among a significant number of people in the community.

“The big injustice is the way three newly seated board members have been maligned by activists and journalists. If the comments made by the last-minute substitute speaker for that rally represented these three members, I could understand the very vocal objections, but those comments don’t represent this community or the majority of the members of this board or those three new members.”

The September rally

The Rev. Gregory Quinlan spoke at the rally, bracketed by the candidates. He offered a fiery homophobic speech that drew cheers and amens from the same crowd that cheered the candidates. None of the three candidates made homophobic comments during their own speeches, nor did they distance themselves at the time from the speaker. 

Shaffer spoke of the “unconscionable, disgraceful vote” by the school board to approve “standards that include radical sexual and gender orthodoxy,” calling them “perverse,” and he said people had to work with education leaders to “ensure we don’t slide further into teaching curricula that is overly political or advances social justice, CRT (Critical Race Theory) and even DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” narratives.

Panico argued against the opt-out provisions allowing parents to keep their students from hearing the lessons in the standards, saying they would still hear about it on the playground.

She also raised concerns about a gender-neutral bathroom at the high school and questioned how the district would handle a student transitioning their gender.

Nicoletti spoke of crying after having to take her kids out of Christian school with its Biblical education and putting them into public school in Ocean City. She criticized young students having to “decide what kind of sexual being they’re going to be” and choosing their pronouns.

That rally sparked a counter rally and formation of the group We Belong Cape May County that supports and affirms LGBTQ+ students.

Back at the meeting

Henry said he had reached out and had discussions with the We Belong group. He said there is work to do to “correct misunderstandings.”

He also called what’s happening a “false dichotomy.”

“Parents rights and the inclusion of every student, every child, are not mutually exclusive. Parents have a right to be concerned for their children no matter who they are,” he said, adding that the new standards don’t reflect the community.

“If parents want their children to learn about sexual and gender ideology early, they have every right to teach them those things, but the board now represents the majority of the community and we say no,” Henry said.

Parent Christine Stanford spoke next, saying she was one of the activists to whom Henry was referring.

Words matter, she said.

“When you say you welcome all types of students and in the very next breath say we need to stop teaching pronouns, you are invalidating your previous claim,” Stanford said.

All parents are concerned with academics, “but respect and acceptance are paramount. A child is not going to succeed in an environment where they are not respected. The need of love and belonging is at the heart of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Those needs have to be met before true learning and self-actualization can be attained. 

“If you believe in academic improvement, you must meet those needs first,” she said.

“When you are so flip with the statement, ‘We need to stop teaching pronouns,’ it shows that you do not have full understanding of what that even means. Teachers are not teaching pronouns throughout the day, they are acknowledging a person’s existence. It takes no time out of the day to be kind or respect students. Words matter. Don’t call the standards gender indoctrination standards. Words matter.”

Stanford said harmful language has been “trickling its way down from national political groups — Turning Point USA, Facebook pages like New Jersey Fresh Faced Schools. … The three new board members are affiliated with both.” 

“Can we not refer to students’ identities or discussion of gender as propaganda and indoctrination? Can we not label teachers as groomers?”

Jenna Smith of Upper Township, a 1998 Ocean City High School graduate, talked about the three board members’ affiliation with the group Moms for Liberty.

The group’s “popularity is driven by their use of social media to manufacture moral panic among conservatives, including battling mask mandates in schools, pushing for a parents bill of rights and curtailing lessons on racial equity and discrimination,” said Smith, who added she has four children who will attend OCHS.

“Moms for Liberty is vocally anti-LGBTQ and has advocated for a trans bathroom ban in schools. It also has positioned itself at the center of the book-banning movement as a way to whitewash American history and push an anti-LGBTQ agenda. It is using the cover of a Parents Bill of Rights to advance this campaign, intentionally stoking outrage and encouraging distrust in public schools,” Smith said.

Talking about how conservative efforts in Florida are driving teachers out of the profession and dissuading others from becoming teachers, Smith said, “Considering that Ocean City has elected three board members endorsed by the Moms for Liberty, we ask that this board remain vigilant regarding initiatives that will drive teachers out of the classroom.”

The Moms for Liberty website lists chapters nationwide, including one in Cape May County. On the site, it lists Shaffer, Nicoletti and Panico among the candidates it endorsed for school board.

Dr. Jeanmarie Mason, who described herself as a former school administrator and now a graduate professor, thanked the school board for approving the state standards. She said she worked on the standards with input from parents, parent groups, students, teachers and administrators. 

She said although there are “feelings and thoughts” that the opt-out provisions for parents don’t work, the data say otherwise.

The opt-out provision is successful because it gives parents who want to present these standards and these lessons to their children in the home the opportunity to do so.

The “powerful thing” that came out of the standards, Mason said, is what happened in the classroom. Saying she supervises guidance counselors, she heard that after lessons in the new standards were taught, “a few students were able to tell the counselors that they had been abused, either physically or sexually. … If there is an issue, please tell someone.”

Advocates of the new Health and Physical Education Standards have said that a reason for the inclusion of aspects of sex education and being able to identify body parts is to give students the tools to protect themselves.

Board members react

Later in the meeting during board member comments, Panico said she appreciated that the district followed through on the promise to post the new curricula developed by the district to teach the standard. It is available, in full, on the district website (oceancityschools.org).

However, she said, she noted very little change with what administrators promised. The “language is still there in all its glory,” she said.

When the board adopted the standards in August, administrators said that much of the controversial language in the new state standards would not be included in the district’s curricula, because districts were able to tailor it to their own communities. 

Administrators said teachers would be directed that if students wanted them to delve more deeply into topics with sex education, identity and gender, that they would be told to go home and ask their parents.

Panico suggested the district make it easier to find the curricula and that the opt-out form for parents be made more visible.

“There have been some concepts left in that we were informed were parenthetical and would be removed,” Shaffer said. 

“I think we have some more work to do, more questions to ask at future meetings. I think there is community interest in taking another bite of this apple because there is not satisfaction, from what I hear from constituents, about where our curriculum is based and how it was adopted subsequent to the standards being approved,” Shaffer said.

School board President Chris Halliday told Shaffer it would be appropriate to raise those concerns in committee meetings, which could presage action being taken at future board meetings.

By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff