The National School Boards Association is looking at a shortfall of at least $1.1 million. It turns out that calling parents terrorists for speaking out about their children’s education was a bad choice.
After it was revealed that the NSBA sent a letter to the White House likening parents to terrorists and called on the Justice Department to investigate them by using the Patriot Act, 17 state board associations cut ties with the group. That will cost the organization at least $1.1 million and likely more, according to Axios, because of “contributions related to NSBA conferences and events.”
The letter was sent by the organization’s president, Viola Garcia, and CEO, Chip Slaven, without the approval of members of the board of directors. It turns out that those members understood their job better than Garcia and Slaven. Comparing parents to terrorists might work if you’re an MSNBC pundit, but not as much when you run a federation of state associations of school boards.
It is astonishing that NSBA leadership would allow this situation to have reached this point. Parents were justifiably upset with how schools had been handling several issues, from COVID-19 to teachers inserting social justice and racial politics into lessons they had no business politicizing. Teachers union complaints were expected given the disaster we know them to be. So, too, was fanatical media coverage, as legacy media worried that parents speaking at school board meetings would create problems for Democrats.
But the NSBA should have known better than to join in on that pile-on. Indeed, several members of the board of directors did know better than that. But Garcia and Slaven went ahead and took it even further than the unions or the media did, asking the Biden administration to bear down the full weight of the federal government on concerned parents.
The NSBA put it best in its apology, admitting that there “was no justification for some of the language in the letter.” It is unfortunate for those NSBA board members who would have advised against this, but this is what the organization has brought on itself. All that’s left is for the rest of the organization’s membership to walk away so that the consequences of such a reckless action are made clear.
