The youngest of three children in a proud Irish family, Bridget Ziegler says most of her childhood memories, growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in a Chicago suburb and later in Michigan, are of food and family. She was a performer, too — like the time at her older sister’s birthday party when Ziegler made sure the camera found her, arms raised, stealing the spotlight.
Politics were talked about sometimes but not often. And while food and family ruled, she never thought of herself as a fighter. Maybe some fights with her siblings. But not politically, and not as a right-leaning leader in an area, schools and education, that was often dominated by people who lean leftward.
Yet Ziegler, now 40, stands out in Florida and nationwide as a leading advocate in a fight for the future of elected school boards and their role in overseeing everything from curriculum choices to bathroom policies to book selections. It’s a role Ziegler came to somewhat by accident, somewhat in a “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” moment.
In addition to being elected on Aug. 22 to what will be her third term on the Sarasota County School Board on Florida’s west coast, Ziegler was recently named director of school board programs for the Leadership Institute. The institute is based in Arlington, Virginia, and teaches conservatives how to succeed in media, politics, and government. The Leadership Institute appointment — “Bridget comes with a strong endorsement from Gov. [Ron] DeSantis,” according to an institute fundraising note — comes after Ziegler co-founded a pair of organizations in Florida that trained and worked with conservative school board members. She also worked with state leaders and legislators to help get a parents’ bill of rights passed.
“The momentum for this moment is happening now,” said Ziegler, “in Sarasota and across the country.”
The moment Ziegler is in the middle of has drawn the attention of a variety of national media outlets, many of which are not in favor of the school board transformation Ziegler is shepherding. In May, the Washington Post published a story under the headline, “As a community veers right, political division tears apart Sarasota.” USA Today, Salon, and Mother Jones have also recently published pieces focusing on Ziegler and the national conservative school board movement.
Ziegler, according to several school board members across Florida who have worked with her, handles critics the same way she’s approached her eight-year political career: by staying focused, positive, and resolute. “She’s very principled,” said Tina Descovich, a school board member in Brevard County, on Florida’s east coast, from 2016 to 2020. “She knows who she is, and she doesn’t change with the way the wind blows. And you don’t see that a lot.”
Eric Robinson, a leader in local Republican politics and former Sarasota County School Board member who served alongside her for one term, said Ziegler combines charisma with conscience. “She always does the right thing, and she never gives up,” he said. “If there are obstacles, she will just go around, go over, or go through to get it done.”
What Ziegler won’t do, according to several people in her network, is go low in a fight. “I can be more of an in-your-face kind of guy,” Robinson said. “But when I would really get going with someone, she would admonish me and say, ‘We’re not them. We don’t do it that way.’”
The word “fighter” comes up often when people talk about Ziegler. When Ziegler and some fellow conservative school board leaders won a four-year battle to get a parents’ bill of rights passed in Florida in 2021, they sent a token of appreciation to legislators who stood by the proposal. The gift: a one-foot-high statue of a boxing glove.
Ziegler initially saw her life in New York, working in the fashion industry. She worked in some tony retail stores while in college, including Gucci and Christian Dior. Several promotions in the stores delayed her graduation and ultimately she fell a semester short of obtaining a degree from Florida International University in Miami before moving on to the business world.
She stopped in Sarasota, where her parents had retired, in the fall of 2010. “I thought I would be in Sarasota for a quick second on my way to New York,” she said.
The first delay was that Ziegler got a job in insurance, about as far from selling pricey handbags at Bal Harbour Shops as possible. Turns out she had a knack for it, and she loved figuring out complex situations for commercial clients. The second delay came when Ziegler met her now-husband, Christian Ziegler. So much for her brief stopover in Sarasota.
Christian is prominent in Republican politics in Florida and with the GOP nationally, both with a consulting business and in electoral politics. He’s worked for Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) and was an early and vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, first in 2015 and then in the 2020 election cycle.
It was Christian who subtly suggested to Bridget she run for school board in 2014 when there was an opening. Bridget called her father for advice, and the counsel proved prophetic. She said: “He said, ‘Just be careful. There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny on you.’”
Then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed Ziegler to the open school board position in June 2014. She won a four-year term in November that year.
It was in those early days as a first-time elected official that she began to have a series of “mad as hell” epiphanies. “I was very fearful,” she said. “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
The first thing she said she didn’t know was that, rather than a resource for newly elected school board members, the Florida School Boards Association was really a template-based training ground that offered no diversity of political thought. “We were basically told, ‘You’re here to support the superintendent and support the public school systems,’” Ziegler said of the Tallahassee-based organization. “No one even thought your job was to have oversight of taxpayer money and also advocate for families and children. That’s not why I ran for school board.”
Then, in the fall of 2014, the FSBA teamed up with other groups, including the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, to challenge an expansion in Florida’s school choice programs. Ziegler and some other conservative school board members argued, unsuccessfully, against joining that lawsuit.
By 2015, Ziegler and some of those other frustrated conservative school board members formed the Florida Coalition of School Board Members to combat that bias. One of her fellow co-founders, Erika Donalds, was elected to the school board in Collier County, south of Sarasota, in 2014. Like Ziegler, Donalds was thrown off by the lack of support and training for school board members who are conservative. (School board races in Florida are technically nonpartisan.)
Donalds said Ziegler quickly took on a leadership role in the group, whose members call themselves the “OGs.”
“Bridget is incredibly courageous in the face of adversity,” Donalds said. “She never backs down from what she knows is right.”
There were other groups Ziegler supported and helped lead, such as Moms for Liberty. And her national profile kept growing, with appearances on Fox News and other networks leading up to the August 2022 election. That also led to conversations with the Leadership Institute. She’s going to run the group’s training center for conservative school board members out of an office in Sarasota, where she plans to add three or four employees. “We looked around and thought, ‘There’s a real need to create a training like this,’” Ziegler said.
Ziegler said she plans to tackle that work while also focusing on the Sarasota County School Board and raising three young daughters with Christian. Will she ever run for higher office? “Never say never,” she answered, but she also acknowledged she has a rare opportunity in Sarasota. In the recent election, two other conservative school board members won their races, flipping a board that had 3-to-2 conservative minority into a 4-to-1 conservative majority.
That opens up possibilities to shift the direction and thinking of the board Ziegler hasn’t seen in her eight years there. It’s pressure she embraces and is ready for, having immersed herself in all things school board and taxpayer oversight, sheepishly conceding to being something of a passionate policy junkie. “There are few people other than me,” Ziegler said, “who get up in the morning and think about these things.”
Mark Gordon is an editor and reporter in Sarasota, Florida.
