SEIDMAN SAYS: Sarasota ranks No. 1 for beaches - and for wild School Board meetings

Sarasota is No. 1 in beaches, arts … and out-of-control school board meetings

By now we’ve grown accustomed to seeing Sarasota at the top of the “best of” lists -- best beaches, best places to retire, best schools, best arts. Now we’ve laid claim to a more exclusive, if dubious, title: No. 1 school board meetings battleground. “Sarasota has become the epicenter of the epicenter of everything that’s going on using the cultural war as a way to win elections and create chaos,” says Carol Lerner, a retired educator and chair of Protect Our Public Schools (POPS) Manasota, formed in 2017 to oppose the threat of increasing school privatization. “And education has become the playing field.”

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The latest salvo in a skirmish that’s been building over two years came at last Tuesday’s Sarasota County Schools’ board meeting, when Tom Edwards – filling in for the ailing chair, Jane Goodwin – temporarily cleared the room of spectators to restore order after several warnings about verbal disruptions, then adjourned 20 minutes later when the agitators refused to leave.

The boisterous crowd had shown up armed with righteousness and “clickers” (to circumvent “no applause” rules) after frequent speaker Melissa Bakondy – a member of the Moms for Liberty group originally co-founded by School Board Member Bridget Ziegler – was physically removed from the previous April 19 meeting by school police officers for making off-agenda remarks criticizing individual board members.

That incident went viral, earning the attention of national (FOX News) and international (the Daily Mail) news outlets and sending local supporters of groups like Moms for Liberty, Moms for America and the Proud Boys into overdrive.

When media reports mistakenly identified the officers who removed Bakondy as deputies of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman jumped into the fray, circulating a video to assure residents “I do not condone tax-paying citizens being silenced” and insisting his office “would never participate in preventing a citizen from expressing their First Amendment rights.”

The owner of the local weekly paper wrote an editorial calling for Goodwin’s resignation, claiming she had “muzzled and beheaded” Bakondy and that she, Edwards and School Board Member Shirley Brown “set themselves above the people they are there to serve.”

That editorial, in turn, was e-blasted by Ziegler’s husband, Christian Ziegler, a Sarasota County commissioner and Florida GOP vice chair, who said the “liberal majority” of the board was “engaged in an active War on Parents that is sad, infuriating and shameful.”

It’s been nearly two years since a series of SCS professional development workshops on “cultural responsiveness" were cancelled after some parents complained they pushed a Black Lives Matter agenda. Overnight, School Board meetings became the turf for protest of everything from the teaching of critical race theory to LGBTQ rights and mask mandates.

As threats, lawsuits and false accusations mounted – Goodwin had embezzled money, Edwards was a member of Antifa and former chair Brown was a potty-mouthed tyrant – Goodwin and Brown, in moments of pique, made verbal missteps that confirmed to their adversaries they were, in Bridget Ziegler’s words, “overreaching and out-of-touch.”

By last spring, with raucous sessions lasting as long as five hours and protesters “depriving all of the speakers of their First Amendment rights and the audience of their right to hear the proceedings,” says Lisa Shurr, a parent and co-founder of Support Our Schools (SOS), the board began workshopping ideas to squelch the pandemonium.

Their decision – passed on a 3-2 vote, with Ziegler and Karen Rose dissenting – was to separate public comments into two segments, one relating only to agenda items, and reduce speakers’ time limit from three to two minutes. This made everyone unhappy; in fact, it’s the only thing the opposing sides have ever agreed upon. As Ziegler predicted, it has also increased polarization.

All of this might have been prevented in the first place if longstanding rules of conduct – forbidding personal attacks, out of order comments and jeering, cheering or clapping – had been enforced. But on several occasions Timothy Enos, then chief of the school’s police force, declined to remove conduct violators at the chair’s request.

Enos, by the way, abruptly resigned in December to – what else? – run in the upcoming School Board election Aug. 23. He will vie for Goodwin’s seat against Nora Cietek and Gregory Wood.; Robyn Marinelli and Lauren Kurnov will run for Brown’s; and Dawnyelle Singleton will challenge Ziegler. (Goodwin and Brown are retiring.)

As the Greek statesman Solon (c.630-560 B.C.) – credited with laying the foundation for democracy, though his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline failed – once said, “A society is well-governed when its people obey the magistrates and the magistrates obey the law.”

To maintain fairness and decorum in a democratic society requires adherence to established rules, even when we don’t agree with them. Those unhappy with the instruction and direction of Sarasota County Schools have options: They can put their child in a private school. They can run for the board themselves. They can go through proper channels to file complaints and follow the (sometimes tedious) processes to resolve them. And like the rest of us, they can use their vote as their voice.

As we saw in the Jan. 6 insurrection, making your case by force is dangerous and destructive. It benefits no one – least of all the students the board is meant to serve – for Sarasota to become an international paragon of bickering, belligerence and bad behavior.

Contact Carrie Seidman at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or (505) 238-0392.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Carrie Seidman: Sarasota is No. 1 for unruly School Board meetings