When Amber Hoffman, a Boone County resident, and Alex Berling, of Independence, saw the flyer for an event at the Kenton County Library last year about alternatives for public education, they expected to arrive at an event about charter schools or some other discussion about potential change in education policy.
“There were several teachers that actually showed up at this event to defend public schools,” Berling said, “and to figure out what the heck this is about.”
The event was scheduled on Nov. 16, 2022, shortly after last year’s election at the Erlanger branch of the Kenton County Library. Flyers from the event were titled, Free our Children from Public Schools. The event’s sponsor was the political nonprofit We the People, an organization that is dedicated, among other things, to getting socially conservative candidates into local office.
“We went prepared with statistics on the funding of public education in the state, thinking that that’s the kind of conversations that we were going to have,” Hoffman said. “It turned out to be something so different.”
John Schrock was the event’s headline speaker. Schrock is a regional field director and public speaker for the John Birch Society, a far-right organization founded in the 1950s with a reputation for conspiratorial thinking.
Schrock gave a presentation about what he viewed as the problems with public schools, alleging that sex education in schools was a way of making children compliant enough to later be sex trafficked and that teachers were using class time to indoctrinate their children into socialist and Marxist ideologies.
Hoffman documented the event and later posted clips of it to her TikTok page. The clips are somewhat fragmented, but the videos show that the crowd was split on Schrock’s points.
One thing that Hoffman and Berling immediately noted was the lack of citations and attributions from Schrock during his presentation; they said he seemed to have cobbled together bits and pieces of school curricula in an attempt to support his political speculations.
“There were no sources,” Berling said. “It was opinions… stating things like teachers are groomers; teachers are terrorists.”
Eventually, the meeting turned hostile, with Schrock’s supporters and critics heckling each other.
Among Schrock’s supporters in attendance at the meeting was Boone County Commissioner Chet Hand. State Rep. Steve Rawlings (R-District 66) later posted on his Facebook page that he and state Rep. Marianne Proctor (R-District 60) had been invited to the event, but Hoffman’s videos don’t directly confirm their presence (note: a blog post praising Rawling’s legislative efforts appears on We the People’s home page).
“Be quiet, and let the teacher teach,” a voice from the supporters’ side of the room eventually rang out.
The voice belonged to Mirna Eads, the Campbell County Chair of Moms for Liberty, which recently held events at branches of the Campbell County Public Library.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that maps political extremist groups throughout the country, characterizes Moms for Liberty as a “a far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement. The group grew out of opposition to public health regulations for COVID-19, opposes LGBTQ+ and racially inclusive school curriculum and has advocated books bans.”
The organization has 295 chapters in 45 states, said Eads, although Moms for Liberty’s recent national summit in June put the number of chapters at 285 in 45 states.
After the November meeting, Hoffman made it her business to find out more about Moms for Liberty. In time, she learned that the group was establishing a new branch in Boone County, where she lived.
Hoffman gathered some her friends in public education and attended one of the group’s early meetings.
“We initially went there with the intention of just silently listening and filming it, to see what kind of stuff they were going to be telling people,” Hoffman said.
Eads and the other organizers spoke for a time, but eventually opened up the room for questions.
A man, who identified himself as Carl Ward, a former elementary school teacher in Covington, stood up to speak. He described who he was: Besides being a former teacher, he said he was a practicing Presbyterian and a gay man.
Even though he himself was a Christian, Ward said, “I have to respectfully disagree with this organization because it is well-funded by right, extremist politicians.”
Eads and the other organizers denied this immediately, but Ward continued to speak.
Someone from the audience asked why he was bringing his points up.
“Why am I doing this?” Ward said. “Because there has to be an effort; just as you are pushing an effort in Northern Kentucky, I am going to equally push back.”
Tina Descovisch and Tiffany Justice founded Moms for Liberty in early 2021 in Florida. Descovich had lost a heavily politicized reelection bid to the Brevard County school board in 2020 amid controversy about mask mandates and proposed increases in unionized teacher pay. She formed the group with Justice shortly thereafter.
Despite Eads’ protestations to the contrary, Moms for Liberty, both in Kentucky and throughout the nation, has integrated itself into the machinery of the Republican Party. The organization’s national website has a section for candidates they’ve endorsed throughout the country. Locally, this includes candidates like Proctor and Rawlings.
Moms for Liberty members worked this year to make their voices heard for the passage of a law establishing a state-wide process for parents to challenge books on school library shelves in the form of Senate Bill 5, sponsored by Jason Howell (R-District 1), Gary Boswell (R-District 8), Donald Douglas (R-District 22), Max Wise (R-District 16) and Shelley Funke Frommeyer (R-District 24).
Many school districts established complaint processes before the passage of the bill, but the new legislation standardizes things across the state.
Under Senate Bill 5, if a parent wants to challenge a book, they must first make a complaint to the school’s principal, who has seven days to investigate the book and make a ruling on whether the book should stay on the shelf, have its access restricted in some way, or removed entirely. The principal must then inform the parent of the school’s ruling within 10 days of the complaint.
If the parent disagrees with a principal’s decision, they can appeal to the district’s board of education, which has 30 days to review the book and allow the parent to make public statements at open meetings. Members then vote on what to do with the book, which serves as the final decision for the district.
Supporters of the law tout it as a necessary mechanism for keeping pornography and other graphic content out of children’s hands.
Critics of the bill, including many of the attendees to the meeting Hoffman and Ward went to in November 2022, view the law as a form of censorship.
“When I first started in libraries professionally in 1997, the big thing then was that libraries were just starting to get access to the internet,” said JC Morgan, library director for the Campbell County Public Library system. Morgan got into the library business after serving in the Air Force and has seen various efforts to restrict content from children’s eyes throughout the years.
“The internet was the Wild West, and people were concerned about what was being viewed on these internet-capable computers in their public libraries, right there in the sight of everybody,” Morgan said.
This worry eventually translated into a lawsuit and finally the Children Internet Protection Act, which requires both public libraries and public school libraries receiving federal funding to install mechanisms that prevent kids from seeing pornography and other graphic material online.
“This most recent round of people challenging things is a little different,” Morgan said. “While the first thing was national in nature, you didn’t have such entrenched opinions on either side of the political aisle so much about cultural issues. So it’s a little more emotional for, I think, everybody involved.”
In spite of this observation, he said that he was opposed to SB 5, both in principle and practice.
“I believe that it’s the family’s right to choose what their family’s values are and what they want their children reading,” Morgan said.
“So each should have their own rights to access what they feel is appropriate,” Morgan said. “I never placed any restrictions on my children’s reading, but my children, and most children, naturally gravitate towards things that are appropriate for them,” whether that’s picture books for toddlers or chapter books and novels for older kids.
Morgan said that Campbell County Library’s catalog is based on popular tastes and client requests. Usually, he said, if something is removed from the shelves, it either has outdated information, hasn’t been checked out in the long time or it’s physically deteriorated.
As far as content restrictions for books, however, once a child’s parent or caregiver signs over permission for a child to have a library card, there are no restrictions on what books they can check out, but content restrictions are still in place for computers.
Groups like Moms for Liberty often argue that their actions represent a parent’s rights to raise their children as they see fit, but critics see this as a rhetorically convenient misdirection, especially when speaking about Eads, who no longer has children enrolled in public schools, in spite of her advocacy efforts.
Crimson MacDonald, the chair of the Campbell County Democrats, who has children enrolled in the county’s schools, said most working parents don’t have time to monitor every nook and cranny of their children’s days.
“We’re about parents rights,” MacDonald said. “We’re about parents being able to put their kids in school and know that that’s a safe place where educated people with the background and academic knowledge know what material is most appropriate for children.”
In addition, Berling said that proponents of laws like SB 5 often claim to represent limited government before turning around and using state power to get books taken off of shelves.
“I just feel like this is exactly kind of government overreach,” Berling said, “and leading down the slippery slope, what’s gonna happen next? Are all these specific books going to be removed?”
Both MacDonald and Berling agree that if a parent has a problem with content or methods appearing in a school curriculum, that should be handled within the established mechanisms of individual districts, rather than through binding legislation.
“For some kids, the school library or books provided by a teacher, that might be the place, the only place, where a kid might feel safe enough to be able to read whatever book they want,” Berling said.
Morgan said he is a firm believer in laps, not apps. By which, he means, parents should “sit there with a child and have the child experience the parent’s emotions along with what they read.
“When Charlotte dies, we cry; we’re sad,” Morgan said, referring to the famous scene in E.B. White’s novel. “It’s good for a child to feel that emotion in their reading. So, I’m a big advocate of parents being involved in what their children are reading. Even though I did not restrict my own children, I was aware of what they were reading and talk with them frequently about it, help them through concepts that they might not understand. And that’s, I think, a parent’s role. Life is full of those things.”
In Morgan’s view, a good library ought to remain neutral to the push and pull of politics in order to fulfill it’s public function.
“Our job is to remain as neutral as we can,” Morgan said, “to provide a space for people regardless of their beliefs, to make everybody feel welcome… that’s racial, that’s sexual orientation, that’s religious beliefs. We have a Christian fiction section, and we have urban fiction. So we are constantly trying to make everybody feel like they can find themselves here in the library, or that they can help in their search for themselves here in the library.”
Moms for Liberty uses the Campbell County Library to regularly meet. When asked if he or the library at large had any issue with letting an organization that arguably wants to undermine its interests use its facilities, Morgan responded this way:
“As long as they abide by the policies of the library, to the guidelines we’ve set, then they’re free to use our rooms,” he said. “They’re not the first people who’ve used our rooms while not agreeing with everything the library stands for, and they won’t be the last.”