Hey CBSD: What’s up with Moms for Liberty?

No doubt you’ve seen the coverage of the big convention in Philadelphia over the July 4th weekend. “Joyful Warriors” descended on the city and hosted presidential hopefuls, garnered a lot of press, endured some protests, and joined ranks to “refuse to co-parent with the government.”

Which is rather like saying they refuse to drink their coffee with a fork. Um, okay. Who wanted you to?

Are our Central Bucks schools: Butler, Holicong, West the government? And if they were, are they parenting your children or educating them?

The whole Moms for Liberty movement stands on a false foundation. They’re still angry about Covid school closures and masks. They blame those on teachers. In their minds, teachers = the government. Therefore, teachers are evil agents of chaos who intend harm to children and must be stopped.

Does this make sense to you?

For the record, schools in PA closed in March of 2020 because then-governor Wolf ordered them closed. Central Bucks schools opened back up before the end of the first marking period of the following school year. There were no vaccines. The only thing that protected teachers from the virus were the hotly-contested masks. Teachers did everything they were asked. They reinvented their jobs over and over, depending on whether we were virtual, hybrid, or in person. They worked their vulnerable butts off. And for a hot second, the public expressed its gratitude for all CBSD teachers did and continued to do.

Then, the tide turned. Some parents seemed to swing from profound gratitude for what teachers do all day, every day to profound rage that the deadly virus prevented them from doing it as usual. They did not blame the virus. They blamed the teachers.

And here we are. It’s now a vendetta, and national manipulators are using it to discredit our schools, upend our school boards, accuse teachers of demonic practices, and sow distrust and disgust at teachers and LGBTQ kids. Nice.

Moms for Liberty seeks to weaponize this false and misdirected fear-born rage against the very people who did the most to help kids through the disruption of the virus. They want to foment anger and direct it at our schools. They’re receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from rich donors to drive the blame, the fear, the excoriation home. 

Their end game is the obliteration of our community schools. They want to turn our schools Christian or abolish them in favor of unregulated charter schools.

We are not saying that all Moms for Liberty members understand the end game or share its goals. Many are frightened, angry people who harbor lingering grief and dread over all that Covid took from us. But they are making the classic error of looking for a scapegoat, any scapegoat. Educators did not cause Covid, closed schools, masks, and learning loss. But that lingering outrage misplaced onto educators is a useful tool in the hands of the “Joyful Warriors”—a telling choice of words, that—who seek to increase the fury (book banning) augment the chaos, and profit from it.

It’s not about ALL kids and it’s certainly not about strengthening our community schools. It’s about power, naked, raw power, and money. It’s about electing their candidates, eradicating the Department of Education, humiliating teachers, and opening the door to the end of public education as we know it.

Let parents do the parenting, teachers do the teaching, kids do the learning, and let us rebuild our communities around the knowledge that while Covid took much from us, we never allowed it to take our humanity, despite what Moms for Liberty would have you believe. We did not and will not turn on one another.

We hope.