The State of Education with Melvin Adams
The State of Education with Melvin Adams
Ep. 62 "Can Local School Boards Win Back Education?" - Guest Veronica Gemma (Part 2 of 2)
- Veronica is the Education Director at PA Economic Growth PAC. Check out their website, or find them on Facebook.
- If you have questions for Veronica, email her at vegemma5@gmail.com or DM her on Facebook.
- Check out Noah Webster Educational Foundation’s online course for school board candidates, as well as events and ongoing training for elected school board members on our website.
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ADAMS: What you saw then, was this committee was formed, the superintendent was supporting it, pushing it. And to be clear, I’m sure that a lot of that was coming from federal mandates and other things…
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: So he would say, “Look, I’m just trying to do my job.” Arguably, yes. Arguably, no, because at the end of the day, it’s the kids that matter, not the bureaucrats.
GEMMA: That’s right.
ADAMA: Somewhere that’s telling us the way they want us to operate things. So let me ask this question: in Pennsylvania—every state’s different—in Pennsylvania…there’s a state school board and then there are local school boards. We have this on our website under the resource “know your schools.”
In Pennsylvania do the local school board members have quite a lot of ability to implement things like policy—obviously they do the hiring/firing and so forth—but do they just purely make sure what the state school board says happens get’s done to the T? Or is it that they actually—does the state board set minimum policy and minimum guidelines and the local schools boards actually govern and actually administrate in the sense of the local school systems?
GEMMA: Well, something else I learn and I talk a lot about now with candidates, is the school board members need to realize their power. Because every school district—school board—in their own governing body, okay?
ADAMS: Okay.
GEMMA: They set their own policy for their district. The PDE—the Pennsylvania Department of Education—they put out benchmarks for academics per grade level. And the school district can use whatever materials or curriculum they choose to reach those benchmarks.
ADAMS: It’s interesting, actually there’s a majority of our states that operate that way. I believe that’s the best way, that’s the way it ought to be and it’s important for people to understand it.
In most cases—I’m talking now to our audience and to citizens out there—in most cases, the local school boards have significant authority to give leadership and guidance to critical areas that go on in their school systems.
Including the type of curriculum that’s going to be followed, many of the policies that are implemented, carried out…processes, all of those things. Local school boards have quite a lot of authority and ability there. That’s why we believe that local school boards are so important and why having good leaders there is so important.
Alright, so you had this committee doing their thing, and they started to then implement this into the classrooms and the texts were the books and stuff that were being used. Were they being used as curriculum content or were these just—I shouldn’t say “just”— were these issues that related primarily to holdings in the library?
We’ve talked a little bit about racial issues, but I’m confident there were also gender and sex-related issues as well.
GEMMA: Absolutely. They were tackling it all.
I caught it before it was approved. After I was in the committee meetings and I wasn’t getting anywhere with the superintendent or the assistant superintendent about my questions and concerns, I then thought, “Okay, well, they had their chance. I’m going to bring this to a public meeting and I’m going to start asking questions.
I didn’t go out and start attacking, I just started asking the hard questions to bring this to the public so they could hear my concerns and what was going on and what the plans were.
So it was time to approve the PDE’s benchmarks, which the districts call curriculum…I disagree with that term for benchmarks. Curriculum is the whole package.
ADAMS: Right.
GEMMA: You have your benchmarks, you have your assessments. You have your programs which you use to teach, which is the curriculum. So I asked questions. Right in the height of “defund the police” being pushed one of the benchmarks was teaching the value of police. I saw these books that were very anti-police. So my question was: “What are the instructional materials that you’re using to teach this benchmark, “the value of police”?
They could not answer. I disagree with the public school teaching the value of parents or the role of a parent. So that was another question. There was a benchmark that actually—it almost looked like a…it was the word “vs.” The teacher authority vs the parent authority. Once the student is in school like why is that even a benchmark?
I brought that up and I asked, “What does that mean and what instructional materials are you using to teach this? I cannot approve this not knowing what you’re using. In my opinion it’s not the government school to teach the value of a parent vs the value of the teacher. Two different things.
They could not answer my questions. It did start a conversation among the board. I did share that I was concerned with home of the things I heard discussed in the diversity committee meetings and it needs to be addressed before we approve these so-called benchmarks/curriculum, whatever you want to refer to it as.
And then the next day I was in the newspaper. Never expected any of this, by the way. I was just asking innocent questions, had no idea that I was—I made sure I did not use the trendy terms, such as white privilege, in my questions, such as “white saviorism” in my questions. I made sure that I didn’t even go there.
And the next day I was in the newspaper as a racist.
ADAMS: Interesting.
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: Was that—well, we don’t need to go into that. That can go a lot of different directions.
So that kind of stuff unfortunately does happen, and in communities. Let’s kind of hone down. At the end of the day, you became a target.
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: Did you find other conservatives on the board who decided to stand with you? Or did they not because they saw what was happening to you? And at the end of the day, tell us kind of what happened. Give us your story there in just a couple minutes, if you would.
GEMMA: It was myself and one other fellow board member. Her name was Vickie. She also added to the conversation at that board meeting.
Now, let me just say, parents were engaged because they didn’t want masks. Parents were engaged because they wanted their kids back in school playing sports, and then they went away. We were still remote-meeting, so we didn’t have an audience in the room.
That was August 10th, I think, 2020. That night when I started asking questions started it. There were maybe fifty people on the livestream. The next week, August 17th, it went up to 952. People were deciding to listen in and get engaged. They wanted to know what was going on in their kids' classrooms.
ADAMS: Now, these are parents?
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: Okay.
GEMMA: Letters started rolling in. In favor of my questions, in favor of transparency in what is being taught in the classrooms, against anything related to anti-racism or Critical Race Theory, oppressed vs oppressor concepts.
Letter, after letter, after letter. And it is the law that the public is to be heard. They had to read every letter out loud in the board meetings. It was considered citizen comment. So every letter was read and for every—I don’t know—for every twenty-five letters there was one that might have been agreeing with the CRT. Right?
So you did have a little bit of both…people seeing what was happening to me and trying to stand back because they didn’t want that kind of attention. They were afraid for their jobs, it was the height of cancel culture. I just kind of fell into it and figured, “I need to keep fighting because I’m not going to back down now. I need to finish what I started.”
Plus it’s important. We need to fight for the next generation. So what happened—we have a local grassroots group called Free PA here in York County that started during the shutdown. And the leaders of that asked me to come speak to tell the community what was going on.
I went there and I prefaced my speech with, “I’m not there representing the school board, I’m there as a parent informing the community.” I didn’t release anything that was not public already. Just, “This is what’s going on, this is what I saw in these public committee meetings.” People need to be aware, because if we don’t tackle this now, our children, the next generation, burning down our cities in ten years. It’s quite concerning.
And people started waking up in our community about it. So when the booklist came out, it was two months of debate in school board meetings—that was August—so then finally by November we tabled the booklist. Because I proposed a curriculum committee to be developed so we could vet the books.
Every piece of instructional material needs to be content and age-appropriate. That’s what the goal was. But the superintendent and the rest of the school board that wasn’t willing to step out allowed it to get kicked down the road. It never came to fruition.
I got in contact with another superintendent from a local district in another county who mentored me through this a little bit and he explained how a board should be structured. Our board was not structured this way and every board should be structured as a committee-structured board.
ADAMS: Right.
GEMMA: Where you have a committee for all of the major areas of the district. Curriculum, sports, extra-curricular, obviously budget and finance policy. We had a policy committee, they said that was by law, but I think they all should be. Because you need oversight on all of it.
Even groundskeeping. There need to be committees to have oversight and accountability in where the money’s going and what the kids are being taught.
ADAMS: So what happened then was, because of your pushback it appears that there started to be some organization, some resistance, whether it was teacher’s unions or community people, I don’t know. Maybe you want to tell us some of those things.
Basically, there became a big push and a lot of money invested to get you off the board. Talk to us quickly about that.
GEMMA: Sure. The curriculum committee never happened and that’s because of the resistance from most of the board members and the board president. Which, to this day, if that happened, we would not be in this position.
So, my term was coming up and I decided I wanted to run again. And during that time—campaigns start around March the previous general election—the superintendent…we pushed back on him on a lot of issues. Many, many issues. He’s so used to controlling everything, we basically pushed him out and he retired early.
But he didn’t go out without a bang. What he did was, he took that Google file—the booklist was on a shared doc—a lot of were looking and seeing what was on the book list or how it was growing. And some of the teachers that were involved in the diversity committee actually edited that booklist even after it was tabled. It should never have been touched. They started removing some of the books I was questioning.
The superintendent, on his way out in September 2021, grabbed that list, he changed the name [from] “Diversity Committee Booklist” to “Banned Booklist” and he leaked it to the press. And that was in the heart of our campaign. It just blew up.
There’s activist teachers at the high school that were grabbing the students to be their mouthpieces, and they were protesting in front of our building every morning. A lot of these activist teachers run a club called “The Beautiful People Club” and they target ninth-grade kids that come in, they target special needs—autistic children—to join their Beautiful People Club. And it’s all about LBGTQ and transgender.
This is going on under the noses of this administration and the school board. So while they were protesting, the newspapers were going crazy. My opponents raised $75,000 and were sending mailers—just attacking me. You know. Saying I’m messing up children’s minds. But they were sending them to Republicans. They were sending them to my voters.
It worked. I mean, we only had $25,000. They had $75,000 to work with. And their money came in from all over the country. Some of the most liberal states in the country—Seattle, money came in from Portland, Oregon, money came in from the Virgin Islands. Act Blue—we all know what Act Blue is—the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the teachers unions…never has there been that much money raised for school board.
My first race—we spent maybe $7,000 between primary and general. This time we did spend $25,000 because we had more donations, right? Because of what the opposition was doing. So yeah, I was labeled the book-banner.
ADAMS: You were defeated, is that correct?
GEMMA: I was defeated.
ADAMS: I think there are a couple takeaways that all of us listening need to get from this.
First of all, it takes a lot of courage to really lead and to be bold on issues that are important. And for the good and health of our communities, especially for our children.
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: First of all, I want to thank you for the stand that you took. No question about it, we believe you were on the right side of those issues. And it’s not about book banning.
GEMMA: No.
ADAMS: It’s about, ultimately, what is the purpose of the school? And does that content actually help fulfill the mission of the school? Typically, schools are there to train people in the academics and the rigor and prepare kids for life.
It’s really the parents and other faith-based groups and community groups that the parents choose to associate with in the community—it’s really up to them to take care of these other issues on belief systems and their political and social issues. We need to get all of that stuff out of our schools.
And really focus on making sure our kids are protected and that they are equipped so that they can become great citizens. Just pitting kids against each other is unhealthy by any standard.
Do we care about individuals with gender confusion and so forth? Absolutely. Those individuals need to be cared about. But it’s really not the school’s issue. That needs to be taken to other places in the community and it needs to be directed and guided by the parents.
So first of all, I just want to make that really clear that I stand with you there. I think most parents across this country would stand with us there. What’s important, now, for parents to understand, is that in these issues, it’s critical that parents get engaged.
A lot of people think, “Look, these things only happen in distant places, or they only happen in urban cities,” and so forth. No, no, no, no. Your country is pretty conservative and it’s fairly rural. And we see that all across the country. These issues are not just going into certain areas, it’s universally saturating into the school system. It’s being driven from the top down and so forth.
Parents, you need to get involved. You’ve got to know what’s going on in your schools. You’ve got to hold school board members accountable for what’s going on in the schools and if school board members are not fighting for your kids and your rights, as parents, you need to replace them.
GEMMA: Yes.
ADAMS: Let’s go a step farther, even, than that. As parents, you get bombarded by campaigns. And the question always is, “How do I know who’s the best person, the right person?” Let me just say: don’t believe everything you see. Don’t believe everything you hear. You need to engage with the candidates themselves and find out from their own mouths what’s really going on.
You can do that. It’s not that difficult. You just have to reach out. Their candidate information is always available, you just need to reach out and find out. Ask your questions and get answers for you, so that you are well-prepared and well-equipped and you are not just picking up campaign rhetoric that often is aggressive and attacking and often very misleading. Unfortunately politics has come to that in many, many cases.
Let’s talk now, Veronica…what are you doing now in your community to try to stay engaged, stay involved, work with community leaders and parents and continue to do what you believe to be the right thing? What are you doing right now?
GEMMA: I joined a local grassroots PAC called PA Economic Growth PAC. That was started here in York County by some really great business owners and a few state representatives for support and guidance.
It was basically started to keep businesses open during the mandate, but then it moved into supporting some grassroot candidates to primary other candidates and get good people up in Harrisburg. They’ve been very successful in that.
They asked me to join them as their education director for their education piece of the PAC. You know, the tasks change, depending upon the season or what the time of year. Right now, for the past several months, I’ve been recruiting school board candidates.
Because what you say, “if the school board directors aren’t doing what you want, parents, run. Run for school board, get involved, get engaged. You will be astounded by what you learn and your eyes will be opened and it is quite rewarding to be able to be in a position to be something bigger than yourself and have impact. Especially when it is concerning our children, our next generation, and eventually our state and our country.
It is difficult, because people are skeptical about going through what I went through. But I come alongside these candidates and I help them through the process of getting on the ballet and some campaign strategy. We have a team of people through the PAC that is willing to help train, as well.
When I ran for school board, there was nobody. But now we’re assisting and supporting, endorsing. Helping financially in some districts, depending upon the type of campaign might be running there.
Once these candidates are elected, they get in those seats, we then offer a training about, “Okay, now I’m elected. What do I do now?” kind of thing. We do have to get the state board training but we want to go beyond that. We want to teach them what they really need to know. How to work with the system and how to make the system work for them and the students.
We’re putting the students and the taxpayers first.
ADAMS: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. If people want to reach out to you or contact you, how can they do that?
GEMMA: Well, they can email me, they can find me on Facebook, they can contact the PA Economic Growth PAC Facebook page.
ADAMS: Do you have a website?
GEMMA: Yes. It’s paeconomicgrowth.com. And again, we’re on Facebook. They can contact me through there. And my email is vegemma5@gmail.com. They can email me anytime and ask questions. I’m always willing and open to help and assist.
ADAMS: Veronica, thank you for your time as you’ve shared some of the things you’re working on going forward. I think that’s a great idea.
We do some of those very same things here at Noah Webster Educational Foundation and people can learn all about, not only the candidate training we provide online, but also the continuing education we do for school board members. Summits and so forth. All of that can be found on our website at nwef.org.
Thank you, Veronica, for what you guys are doing. Together we’re all working for the benefit of our children, our families, our school, and our country. Thank you so much.
GEMMA: Thank you, Melvin.