GOP School Board Candidate Accused of Creating Bogus Academic ‘Network’
A Republican school board candidate in Pennsylvania is accused of inventing a bogus academic “network” to attack books promoting diversity.
Christopher Bressi, backed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, is seeking to flip the Downingtown Area School District to the GOP. And according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, he’s relied heavily on something called the “Society of College Medicine” to do that.
Members of the school board began receiving emails from the “society” back in the summer of 2021, warning of books that had supposedly been “red flagged” by academic experts. Signed by the “Violations Department,” one such email warned school district administrators to remove White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo from the reading list. Subsequent emails flagged other supposed violations for “extremely divisive” reading material, with the “society” writing that the school district had been ranked “in the bottom tier of all schools we assess globally.”
But the so-called Society of College Medicine does not exist beyond a single website that was apparently set up by Bressi, according to the Inquirer. The website purports to be a “School Safety & Emergency Preparedness Website & Network” but appears to feature no content of its own, instead providing a collection of links and information pulled from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Why would this person who has been acting so underhandedly to target our school district now want to be on the school board? That’s a concern,” one local parent told the newspaper.
Bressi has said in campaign videos that one of his priorities is to “keep politics out” of schools, and he says he is only running for the school board “at the behest of concerned parents.”
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But he reportedly cited his own “Society for College Medicine” to stoke outrage about what he described as the “bigotry” of critical race theory in a local Facebook group. While he claimed the numerous “red flag” warnings sent to district officials had been effective, school board members were already well aware that the whole thing was a sham, the Inquirer reports.
“There is no Society of College Medicine, let alone a violations department,” Justin Brown, the district’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, was quoted as telling board members in an email. “This is simply someone trying to troll the district.”
The “Violations Department” nevertheless sent several follow-up emails to district officials demanding a response and making increasingly bizarre claims, including that children “exposed” to “CRT” books should immediately get counseling.
Bressi has not yet commented on the matter.
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