A New Age of Partisanship

Traditionally, a local safety valve enabled communities to set their own course in public education, even in times of intense disagreement over national issues

Stephana Ferrell can still recall precisely when she realized that the school board wars in her part of central Florida weren’t going away. Parents angry over a mask mandate in the Orange County School District celebrated when, in fall 2021, the state banned mandatory masking. Now those same parents were turning their anger in a different direction.

“Suddenly it was all about getting books removed from libraries,” says Ferrell, who has two children in the local schools. The same parents who had been demanding an end to masking now were showing up at school board meetings to read explicit passages from books. “It was like a switch flipped.”

Ferrell would go on to co-found the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a nonprofit organization aimed at defending the right of Florida students to access information and ideas while at school.

The group advises school board members and parents on how to counter the book challenges that have spread across Florida — what Ferrell sees as a partisan effort aimed at stoking distrust and dissatisfaction with public schools. In response, Freedom to Read encourages its parent activists to take the high ground, consciously steering clear of the scorched-earth politics for which conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty have become known.

“These groups want the yelling and the complaining because it erodes trust in public schools,” Ferrell observes. “Our goal is to lower the temperature and make school districts nonpartisan again.”