Mom Stands Up To Woke Mob In School

Father, help more parents and others to take a stand for how the children in our nation are being educated in our school systems. We need You Father; combat this evil with Your truth and raise up teachers who will proclaim You.

We love this story of someone who stood up to the woke mob and won. You will love her courage and her determination. It is a model to follow.

. . . Picking fights with lawyers and Green Berets can be a bit risky, and that is doubly true when one of them has extensive experience with totalitarian tactics. . . .

Gordana Schifanelli is a lawyer married to a former Army special forces officer, and what’s more, she grew up in a Communist household in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. All of which makes for a powerful opponent in what has shaped up as a battle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore between forces of wokeness in Queen Anne’s County Public Schools and some concerned parents.

“It’s totalitarian, what they’re doing, so I know it,” she said. “I was in the middle of a NATO bombing and barely survived. Now you want to tell me I’m a racist? Whatever.”

The battle began in June, when Superintendent Andrea M. Kane sent a letter to parents filled with attaboys for environmental improvements in the schools and news about the coronavirus, which had forced them all to close. Sandwiched in between, however, was a lengthy screed about systemic racism, the righteousness of Black Lives Matter and the frightening news that the schools in that sleepy community were infested with racism.

While Ms. Kane, who is Black, voiced her concerns in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Mrs. Schifanelli was appalled on many levels. . . .

“Who’s racist? Where is this racism in our schools? I’m sending my kids into some rampant, festering racist place?” she said. “I think Black parents would also want to know who is being racist at school.” . . .

“You shouldn’t be using your microphone to promote your partisan political position as a public employee,” she said. “My kid’s 11. You want to regurgitate a particular political view about police and how they deal with criminal defendants and use my kids as your social justice warriors? The he** you will.”

Mrs. Schifanelli was also uncomfortable with Ms. Kane bringing in an activist group, Students Talking About Race, that tries to “encourage uncomfortable conversations and activism,” to instruct students. After a July session with the group raised some parents’ ire, the arrangement was quietly dropped, she said.

But just as she had once found her unwillingness to join the Communist Party an unwelcome stance in her childhood home, she now found her desire for a nonpolitical classroom and social justice-charged administration unwelcome among the powers that be in Queen Anne’s County, whose population is about 90% White and 7% Black, according to census data.

“I wrote and called everyone saying I thought this was wrong,” Mrs. Schifanelli told The Washington Times. “And everyone told me, ‘they have First Amendment rights; goodbye.’” . . .

So she voiced her opinion on Facebook and Instagram, where she learned she was far from alone.

Her pages, Kent Island Patriots and Maryland Patriots, attracted thousands of hits. They also attracted enemies who used every tool they could to silence and smear her and others, according to lawsuits Mrs. Schifanelli and others filed that now appear headed toward a jury trial. . . .

The response from Big Tech and leftists in her community would have made Tito proud, Mrs. Schifanelli said referring to Josip Broz, the late dictator of Yugoslavia.

First they shut down her personal Facebook page.

“So I said, ‘OK, I’ll create my own,” she said. Facebook and Instagram shut down the “Kent Island Patriots” and “Maryland Eastern Shore Patriots” pages, too. When her 17-year-old son tried to start a Facebook page, he was blocked, she said.

The people seeking to censor Mrs. Schifanelli’s opposition to left-wing politics, many of whom did not have children in the public school system, attacked her as a racist. They leveled their accusations with the Maryland Bar Association and at the U.S. Naval Academy, where she teaches economics and law twice a week.

Another target of theirs did lose his job, and he is a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit. . . .

The situation is one she considered impossible in the United States, a country she said she looked up to even before she met Marc Schifanelli when he was attached to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade as a civilian contractor. . . .

But Mrs. Schifanelli’s aversion to politics changed when she found herself under attack. She decided to change the school board and went looking for candidates.  . . .

“I told Marc we’re going to clean this mess up we’re having in public schools,” she said. “He looked at me. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Politics?’”

Mrs. Schifanelli also recruited Helen Bennett, a local pet store owner, but the newfound political group learned they were too late to get on the ballot. With social media outfits blacking her out, they were reduced to sending thousands of postcards and ran as write-ins. They both won handily, while Dick Smith, an incumbent school board member also skeptical of Ms. Kane’s program, cruised to reelection, giving the reformers a majority on the five-person board. . . .

Ms. Kane disappeared beginning in late October, later claiming illness, and Mrs. Schifanelli said her efforts to uncover racist teaching or incidents in the schools turned up nothing.

“As of today, I have not received one piece of paper, one shred of evidence that anyone has been racist in our public schools,” she told The Washington Times.

Neither the new board nor Ms. Kane expressed any desire to continue their relationship, and in January the board began looking for a new superintendent.  . . .

Meanwhile, the defendants in her civil actions have tried, unsuccessfully, to get the lawsuits filed by Mrs. Schifanelli and others thrown out or moved to federal court.

Mrs. Schifanelli says she has no interest in a settlement because she doesn’t want any money. Rather, the goal is to show publicly that the schools are not a hotbed of racism and to reveal the organized way those saying that the schools are have targeted her and others for cancellation. . . .

Prayer Points:

• Pray for courage for parents to challenge the narrative of widespread, systemic racism in schools–if it is there, it should be dealt with directly. If it is not there, it should not be said that it is.
• Pray for all those people who have spoken up and have been cancelled–people who have lost their jobs and/or been censored online.
• Pray for creative and strategic ideas.
• Pray for the truth of God’s Word to take hold in our communities–that we are all equal in Christ and that in Christ we will find the answer to all of life’s problems.

(Excerpt from The Washington Times. Article by James Varney. Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images) Reprinted by permission, ifapray.org