Last fall, six newly elected conservative members of the Berkeley County, S.C. school board launched a shock-and-awe campaign at their first board meeting, shortly after they were sworn in.
Over the next three hours, despite objections from the other three board members, the conservative majority abruptly fired the district superintendent, terminated the district’s in-house lawyer and banned critical race theory (CRT), an academic framework that analyzes American history through the lens of racism but which has become a political catchall term applied by some conservatives to any teaching that addresses race or diversity.
Their decisions were met with cries of anger and frustration from the standing-room-only crowd. One of the dissenting board members called the superintendent’s firing a “political witch hunt.”
The morning after, the conservative parents’ rights group Moms For Liberty took a victory lap, sharing an article on the superintendent’s ouster with their 68,000 followers on Facebook with the caption: “6 new board members clean house first night on the job.”
It was a decisive win for a controversial activist organization barely two years old. The six conservative board members had been endorsed by Moms For Liberty during the November 2022 election, and their wins gave the nonpartisan school board a solidly conservative majority in the affluent suburban county north of Charleston.
Born out of parental frustration over COVID-era school policies like mask mandates, Moms for Liberty has experienced a membership explosion since its incorporation in Florida in early 2021. The organization now claims it has 115,000 members in 275 county chapters across 45 states.
It’s one of the largest and most visible of a pack of conservative groups that have popped up across the country post-pandemic, dedicated to advancing a slate of issues they label “parents’ rights,” that typically include opposing public school programs, books and curriculums that address issues like racial discrimination and inequity, gender identity and sexuality. They’ve gained notoriety and media attention for disrupting school board meetings with claims the schools are teaching critical race theory, attempting to ban books from school libraries, and pushing back against LGBTQ+ inclusion.
But more recently, the group has focused its efforts on local school board elections, training and endorsing candidates. Its website lists a goal of recruiting members to “serve as watchdogs” over every school district in the country.
The Berkeley County school board wasn’t an anomaly. As Moms for Liberty has worked to elect sympathetic school board candidates, similar board takeovers have replayed in school districts across the country, from California to Colorado, Florida to New York.