The Daily Signal - How Education Came to Dominate Virginia Governor's Race

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

It's Election Day in Virginia, and no issue has captured the attention of voters in the Old Dominion more than education. Battles between school boards and frustrated parents have attracted national attention, and led to a close race for governor. Ian Prior, a Loudoun County, Virginia, father and executive director of parents-based grassroots organization Fight for Schools, feels the enthusiasm that parents engaged in their children's education are bringing to the election. "Parents have this burning fire inside of them to protect their children, and it's almost a bit of a hero's journey, like Joseph Campbell, where they have really risen to the occasion and have found skills and strength within them that they may not have known that they've had, and that is really what this movement is about," he says. "It's about parents that have found that inner strength and are willing to put it all on the line." Prior joins the show to discuss how education took center stage in the race, and implications for parents’ rights in their child’s education.  We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden warns that unless immediate and definitive collective action is taken by the world, the “existential threat” of climate change could destroy people’s lives and livelihoods. Demonstrators for and against abortion stand outside the Supreme Court as the justices hear arguments on Texas' heartbeat abortion law. Philadelphia becomes the first city to end traffic stops for minor infractions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, November 2nd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. It's Election Day in the Old Dominion, and no issue has captured the attention of Virginia's voters more than education. Battles between school boards and frustrated parents have attracted national attention and led to a close race. Ian Pryor, director of Fight for Schools and a Loudoun County dad, joins the show to discuss how education took center stage in the race and the implications for parents' rights in their child's education.

But before we get to Doug's conversation with Ian Pryor, let's hit our top news stories of the day. During a speech at the United Nations Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, also known as the COP 26, President Joe Biden warned that unless immediate and definitive collective action is taken by the world, the existential threat of climate change could destroy people's lives and livelihoods. Here's Biden via the Hill. We're standing at an inflection point in world history. We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable clean energy future and in the process create millions of good playing jobs and opportunities around the world.

Cleaner air for our children. We're bountiful oceans, healthier forests and ecosystems for our planet. We can create an environment that raises a standard of living around the world. Biden also referenced his build-back better plan, an unprecedented one-point. $1.75 trillion dollar spending package that would include some provisions for climate change. My build back better framework will make historic investments in clean energy. The most significant investment to deal with the climate crisis that any advanced nation is made ever. We're going to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by well over a gigaton by 2030,

while making it more affordable for consumers to save on their own energy bills. With tax credits for things like installing solar panels, weatherizing their homes, lowering energy prices will also deliver cleaner air and water for our children, electrifying fleets of school buses, increasing credits for electric vehicles, and addressing legacy pollution. That $1.75 trillion spending package is currently stuck in deadlock, as Congressional Democrats struggle to unify their caucus to get the 50 Senate votes required to pass the legislation through reconciliation. Protesters for and against abortion stood outside the Supreme Court on Monday.

Inside, the nine justices heard arguments for two court cases that challenge Texas's heartbeat bill. Earlier this year, Texas passed a new law banning abortion after a baby's heartbeat can be detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy. Pro-abortionists immediately challenged the law. But Arguments Monday did not deal with the lawfulness of the bill, but instead whether the Department of Justice and abortion providers have the right to challenge the pro-life legislation. You see, Texas's heartbeat bill is written in a very unique way. The bill gives private citizens the power to sue abortion providers who perform abortions after a child's heartbeat is detected, or to sue those who assist a woman in getting an abortion. This is different from other abortion laws that usually place the power of enforcement in the hands of the government.

Challengers to the Texas law say the bill blocks women's constitutional right to abortion, and thus the bill should be subject to federal lawsuits. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh upheld the Texas law in September, but his questions and comments Monday imply he may be concerned over the unusual way the law is enforced. Kavanaugh said during arguments, there's a loophole that's being exploited here or used here in referring to the way the bill is enforced. He added that the question at hand is whether or not to close that loophole. It's not clear how quickly the Supreme Court will rule on this case. As the deadline for New York City's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public employees came on Monday,

9,000 city employees were placed on unpaid leave for refusing to get a shot. According to USA Today, more than 12,000 city employees are in the process of applying for medical or religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine, which are still being sorted through. Data released by the New York City Mayor's office shows that 22,800 municipal workers remained unvaccinated. In a Monday tweet, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, vaccine mandates work. 91% of our city workforce has gotten vaccinated against COVID-19, and that number is still growing. As a result of lower numbers of employees, some city services have had to scale back. The New York City Fire Department reported it might need to shut down up to 20% of fire companies and reduce the number of ambulances remaining in service by 20% as well.

Additionally, groups representing city employees have indicated that they will continue to push back against the mandates. In a Monday statement given to Fox News, President of the Fire Department of New York Uniformed Fire Officers Association said, We were trying to negotiate more time to make these decisions, just like the Diplasia administration gave every other organization every other year in the city. Philadelphia is becoming the first date to end traffic stops for minor infractions. Police will no longer be allowed to pull someone over for having a break light out or an expired registration tag. The change is being made in an effort to cut down on citizens' negative interactions with police. In October, the Philadelphia City Council passed a new bill called the Driving Equality Act. The act separates traffic violations into two categories, primary and secondary.

The new bill allows police officers to only stop individuals for primary traffic violations that put public safety at risk. Council member Isaiah Thomas authored the bill. He wrote on Twitter Sunday that traffic stops are traumatic for drivers and scary. for police officers. Limiting them makes everyone safer and communities stronger. The City Council said in a statement that these bills and the traffic stops that promote discrimination while keeping the traffic stops that promote public safety. Philadelphia's mayor Jim Kenney is expected to sign the bill into law later this week. The law is formally going to take effect in about four months.

Now stay tuned for my conversation with Ian Pryor as we discuss how education has taken center stage in Virginia's 2021 election cycle. Are you looking for an easy and entertaining way to keep up with the news you care about? The Daily Signal and Heritage Foundation YouTube channels offer interviews with policy experts on the most critical issues and debates America is facing today, as well as short explainer videos that break down complex issues and documentaries that dive deep into the way its policy actually impacts people. Go ahead and subscribe to both the Daily Signal and Heritage Foundation YouTube channels today.

You can search for either on your YouTube app or visit YouTube.com slash heritage foundation and YouTube.com slash daily signal. Our guest today is Ian Pryor, executive director of nonpartisan parents-based grassroots organization Fight for Schools and a dad from Loudoun County, Virginia. Ian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Doug. So we are recording this. Today is Election Day in Virginia. The state will elect its next governor, other statewide officials, and candidates for the General Assembly. Unlike in other elections, education has really come to dominate the field in this election cycle.

So what is the energy right now on the ground like regarding schools? What does the atmosphere feel like? It's a massive energy from parents, you know, all across Northern Virginia for sure. You know, I was at a school board meeting last week. I think there were 121 people signed up to speak in person. We all waited outside in the cold. They don't let you go in and use the bathroom. So you kind of have to wait outside.

We had a big screen as we were watching the speakers. We actually put a camera in there this time so that we could get the speaker's faces out there. And I've seen parents that I never saw before. Go and speak at the school board meeting. Demanding accountability. You know, we talked a little bit before we started this podcast on. the fact that the Loudoun County School Board essentially covered up a sexual assault to pass a political policy.

And that has really unified parents across the political spectrum because it doesn't really matter ultimately what the policies that they're passing are in this case. What matters is that they're passing politically expedient policies and they're not being accountable and the results are student safety is compromised. It seems like at the beginning of this race, education. was not the focus. So can you maybe walk our listener sort of what change and how it proceeded to become more about education from what it was about before?

Yeah, well, you know, like any good superhero movie, I'll start with the origin story. Last year, you had a bunch of parents, again, Democrats, Republicans, trying to get schools reopened. You know, Loudoun County was far behind other school systems in the country with letting kids back in school. And these parents were dedicated. They were organized. They went to school board meetings.

They wrote their local elected official. And they were actually able to help make change at the General Assembly and a law that now required that schools be open this year. The next inflection point, though, was in March of this year where you had a viewpoint-restricted closed Facebook group, which had six school board members and the Commonwealth Attorney for Loudoun County participating. and one of those school board members put out a call to these activists, which were about six or seven hundred people, to start pushing back against parents that were opposed to critical race theory. What happened next was that somebody went in there and said, here's how we're going to do it. We're going to infiltrate their groups. We're going to publicly expose them.

We're going to hack their websites. Another person said, well, here's how we're going to list the names. First name, last name, area of residence, school board member. And they proceeded to list between 60 and 70 parents. in the community to be canceled. And most of those parents actually had just been going to school board meetings to speak up for opening schools. Funnily enough, I would put on there twice, once for writing an article in the Federalist, and a second time for, quote, going to a school board meeting and expressing First Amendment concerns, end quote.

And, you know, I think that just says it all. So that really was the beginning of the idea of fight for schools, which we call a back deck pack because there are about eight of us that, met on somebody's back deck, and it was a combination of people that were in the open schools movement and people that had been put on this list. And we decided we were going to start fight for schools. We're going to focus on local school board elections. The next one, when we talked a little bit about this off the air, was you had a teacher named Tanner Cross, who went to a school board meeting as a citizen of Loudoun County and spoke out against

a proposed policy that would require teachers and students to refer to other students by their preferred pronouns. It would also allow for students to use whichever bathroom of the gender they identify with. They put him on administrative leave. He ended up winning his case at circuit court and fought back a frivolous appeal by Loudoun County Public Schools. And it just brought more people to the table that wanted to push back. President Obama, when he was campaigning in Virginia, he talked about education and specifically mentioned phony trumped-up culture wars. What did you think of those statements. And then I'm also curious if you heard anything from other parents, sort of what their impression about that was. Yeah, I thought President Obama's statements were

just offensive. And specifically, because on that very day, the individual that sexually assaulted a girl at a high school in a bathroom was convicted. So he's out there talking about trumped-up conspiracy theories. So does he know more about what's happening in my kids' schools than I do? Does he know more than the other parents what is happening in their schools? Of course he doesn't. That is just some sheet music that Terry McCall's campaign and the DNC gave to him to go out there and say something and try and make this about anything other than the facts. And the facts are that parents are seeing what is happening.

You have a school system in Loudoun County that spent $500,000 for a report on systemic racism, yet they still can't bring themselves to fund an independent investigation into what happened with this sexual assault cover-up. Now, school boards and relationships with parents have been getting quite a bit of attention nationally, not just in Loudoun County, but across the country. Have you heard anything from other parent groups or other organizations that have been dealing with these sort of school board meetings and school board associations in other states? Yeah, I mean, all the time. We get emails from people across the country. How do we do what you're doing? And it's a little tough because we've been blessed with a school board that continues to make mistake after mistake after mistake.

And with those mistakes are opportunities to highlight exactly what they're doing wrong. So I don't know that every school board in the country is as bad as Loudoun County Public Schools or as politically incompetent as Loudoun County Public Schools. But I do think that parents getting involved, going and speaking at their local school board meetings, it's like a Hoosiers moment. Remember the scene from Hoosiers where it's like, if coach goes, I go. If he stays, I stay. Or like in footloose. I mean, this is what the country is founded on, which is local issues where people can go and debate them in front of their elected officials. And we need to get back to that.

And, you know, I think that what we've seen over the summer is an unwillingness from these. elected officials to collaborate with parents and to collaborate with their constituency. They've got to figure out how to get it right because this issue is not going away. I want to go back to something that we talked about briefly about this story, about this boy who raped a girl in a girl's locker room or a girl's bathroom who was wearing a skirt. And then later on, he was moved to another school. As you mentioned, he's been convicted. But I'm curious as to what the sort of reaction from the parents and from sort of

folks in Loudoun County maybe who weren't as engaged with this beforehand. What happened after they heard about this? Well, I think the first reaction was outrage. You know, we have been highlighting the deficiencies of this school board and this superintendent for months. And I think people that may not have been engaged realized, hey, I think those parents were right. This is what they've been warning about. The other thing that we've seen is people coming out and saying, you know, my friend was sexually assaulted. My daughter was sexually assaulted. they're not focusing on this core issue of student safety. And I think that it is an extremely unfortunate thing that happened that, you know, we had one girl that was sexually assaulted in a bathroom and now an allegation that this individual went to a different school and sexually assaulted someone else.

But, you know, to pull a positive, if you can, out of this situation is that kids and students and parents are going to be more vocal about this issue. And I think that is important because we need to make sure that our schools are safe for our daughters and our sons and that sexual assault is treated seriously and that schools focus on things like this, not on becoming social justice activists. I want to really hammer in on that term safety here because we've been hearing a lot about safety in terms of school boards. Like some of the school boards feel like they're being threatened. And so in a relatively infamous letter now, Attorney General Garland issued a statement to the FBI, asking them to coordinate with local school boards and local authorities to comment on, you know, domestic terrorism and stuff like that with parents. He has decided that he will not be walking back that initial memo. What does that say to you about their priorities? Well, a couple of things.

I've gotten to read a lot of these emails that have gone to school board members. And some of them are horrible. And they really kind of tick me off because that's not how you operate. Like if you're going to email them, be substantive, but they're also not credible threats. Right. And so, you know, for the Attorney General of the United States to collaborate with the White House, the National School Board Association to put out this memo in record time, and I think Senator Lee brought that up, how quickly that memo was put out after the NSBA School Board letter, it just shows that the priorities of this administration are

more of the same. It's politics of division. We want to silence people. We want to cancel people. We don't want to hear a different point of view. And that has unfortunately been the trend in our politics for the past decade or so. But I do think that this issue, when we're talking about education and our children, safety, what they're learning is a unifying issue that can actually push back against this politics of division and hopefully bring us to a place where people will focus on issues and less on, are you a Democrat or are you a Republican? Are you this or are you that? They'll focus less on the divisions and more on the unification of parents around this issue. Do parents and children feel safe in Loudoun County these days? I almost wonder if there's sort of

like this idea that parents don't feel like their children are safe based on these policies that are coming out. Yeah, I think they don't. I think that's what we've seen over the past month is that parents are afraid to send their kids to schools. I mean, some parents tell their kids don't go to the bathroom at school. And that's unfortunate. I mean, look, they passed this transgender bathroom policy and they said, well, the state required us to do it. Well, I looked at the law, and I've studied the law.

The law is pretty vague. I mean, they could have passed this policy, gotten stakeholders together from, you know, people that oppose the policy, got different ideas on how to craft a policy that still respects people's First Amendment rights, their rights to religious freedom, their safety, concerns of parents, and they still could have done it. But they didn't care. They wanted to pass their political agenda the way they wanted to pass it. And as a result, you have parents that are concerned with the safety of the children.

So I guess seeing that you've been doing this for as long as you have been, what have you learned during your time as the leader for Fight for Schools? And then what can parents in other states do to make sure that their parental rights to, you know, be a part of their child's education are being respected? I think the thing that I've learned is that parents have this burning fire inside of them to protect their children. And it's almost a bit of a hero's journey like Joseph Campbell where they have really risen to the occasion and have found skills and strength within them that they may not have known that they've had. And that is really what this movement is about. It's about parents that have found that inner strength and are willing to put it all on.

on the line. You know, they go out there, they put on their suit of armor, they take slings and arrows from the media, from their own school board members, from the Attorney General of the United States, from social justice activists. But you know what? We're still here. And we're still going to be here, no matter what happens with any elections, we're still going to keep fighting to make sure our children are learning what they need to learn to be mentally tough adults that can operate in the real world and be successful and be safe while they're learning. Well, Ian, before we wrap up, I want to give you the opportunity to let our listeners know if they want to learn more about what you guys are doing and maybe how they can get involved. Where should they go?

They should go to fightfor schools.com, you know, sign up for our emails. If you want to donate, that'd be great too. We do have to pay for lawyers to be in court with these school board members. And, you know, I'd say pay attention. Go to school board meetings. Watch them. If you can't go speak, go attend, find out what's going on. and make sure that when your school board members are up for re-election, that you vote and that you know the issues.

Don't just rely on, you know, their nicely crafted websites and statements. Go out there, talk to them. Ask them the questions that need to be answered. Well, that was fantastic. So that was Ian Pryor, executive director of nonpartisan parent-based grass rates organization, Fight for Schools, and a dad from Loudoun County, Virginia. Ian, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot, Doug. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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