Last week, as Duval’s incoming School Board members joined the four returning representatives to discuss board leadership, the conversation quickly became contentious. 

“We had an issue within our schools where we had a teacher who was unsafe — I’m not going to point fingers, but the man was in your district,” incoming District 7 representative Melody Bolduc said to District 3 rep Cindy Pearson, in reference to Douglas Anderson teacher Jeffrey Clayton’s arrest last year.

Pearson had just expressed her interest in serving as the board’s vice chair, and precedent suggested she would have the opportunity to serve in a leadership position. But most of the board instead united behind April Carney for vice chair.

“I am reading the writing on the wall, and this is going to be a continuation of the punishment that I received for not being a ‘good Republican’ when I voted for masks,” Pearson said.

“We were just talking about nonpartisanship and now you’re talking about being a good Republican,” Carney said, cutting Pearson off. “I mean, I think that’s really snarky.”

“Give it up, April,” Pearson said.

“Oh my gosh,” Carney said. “Cindy.”

As the meeting wrapped, Carney urged the new board members to keep it friendly, even when they disagree.

“Well, unfortunately, it’s already started with the chairman,” incoming District 5 rep Reginald Blount responded.

Carney held her hand up for Blount to stop.

“Mr. Blount, this is what I’m asking you not to do, OK? This is what I’m asking you not to do. You have to let it go,” Carney said. “Because we will never be able to work and drive the district forward for children if you have a chip on your shoulder. We’re never all going to agree.”

Blount directed criticism back to outgoing chair Darryl Willie, whose term ends in 2026. Willie had mentioned that five of the board members are now endorsed by Moms for Liberty. 

“Everything was ‘Moms for Liberty’ when you first saw me, and now you’re saying ‘Moms for Liberty’ now,” Blount said. “It started out pretty bad right now.”

“OK. The truth is the truth,” Willie said. “That is who you are.”

“First of all, I’m not a mom, OK?” Blount retorted. “They just happen to be some ladies that like me.”

Moms for Liberty is a far-right education advocacy group that describes itself as “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist group” last year.

---

With their swearing-in Tuesday, Blount, Bolduc and Tony Ricardo join Carney and Joyce to form a strong conservative majority on Duval’s school board — and to make Duval’s board Florida’s flagship for parental-rights school boards.

All five come with the endorsement of Moms for Liberty, a national movement founded in Florida that sprang up in reaction to what some parents saw as pandemic-era overreach. The board’s makeup is a massive shift from the pre-pandemic Duval School Board — which more than once butted heads over policy with the GOP-dominated state administration. 

Florida’s school board members serve four-year terms, so the 2024 elections were the first opportunity for voters to address the decisions that board members elected in 2020 made during the early days of COVID.

During the public comment portion of Tuesday’s meeting, numerous speakers mentioned masks and other pandemic precautions for the reason they started to get involved in the school district. 

Dozens upon dozens of people clad in Moms for Liberty stickers and T-shirts packed the auditorium at Duval Schools’ headquarters for the ceremony to officially swear-in Blount, Bolduc and Ricardo Tuesday evening, an event that would normally draw a handful of family members. 

Duval Moms for Liberty supporters walked around passing out cellophane goody bags that included invites to an upcoming party. As each new member took their oath, the crowd erupted in raucous cheers and waved little American flags.

After the new members were sworn in, the board chose Joyce as chair and Carney as vice chair, with 6-1 votes for each. 

Willie later explained his dissent as “not personal.”

“I feel a deep obligation to vote in a way that aligns with the values and priorities of the people that I serve,” he said. 

Opt-in sex ed?

The board’s new direction was already on display at the workshop last week, when — in addition to the sniping over their self-elected leadership — members discussed pending policy changes on book removals and sex education. 

Though incoming members did not contribute to the discussion, palpable tension in the room offered a preview of what’s to come from a board contending with sociocultural issues. 

For one, the state’s recent change to sex ed standards limits what districts can teach. In January, the board will vote on a proposed change clarifying that Duval Schools will teach an abstinence-based, state-approved curriculum instead of developing its own materials.

The workshop discussion centered on whether sex ed should change to opt-in instead of opt-out, meaning parents would instead have to explicitly give permission for students to attend sex ed lessons. 

About 60 students district-wide were opted out of the 5th-through-12th-grade program this year.

“Those aren’t large numbers,” board member Charlotte Joyce said. “I don’t feel like they are reflective of what we’ve heard from the community.” Joyce is advocating for sex-ed to become opt-in only. 

“The numbers are the numbers,” said Willie, the previous chair. “I think it’s something that we’re hearing that a lot of folks aren’t as concerned about,” Willie said. “If they were, the numbers would be flipped.”

“‘Parental rights’ is a big issue right now, not just in the city of Jacksonville,” Joyce said. “Based on the election that we just had, parental rights is first and foremost also in the United States of America. And so what I’m saying is these numbers don’t reflect that.”

Pearson, though, worried that making sex ed opt-in would allow some students to fall through the cracks unintentionally. 

“If parents have rights, they have the right not to pay attention,” Pearson said. “That’s part of the bucket of parents’ rights — they have the right not to be engaged, not to pay attention.”

Joyce also objected to a proposed change to Duval’s sex ed policy that lays out a process for reviewing and recommending changes if the curriculum isn’t “reflective of local values and concerns.”

“This policy did not have that language in 2017,” Joyce said at the workshop. “I want to know why it was added.” 

Local book lists

During discussion on instructional materials, the board’s conversation drifted to the state’s recent requirement for teachers to catalog their classroom libraries. 

Paula Renfro, Duval Schools’ chief academic officer, explained that Duval teachers use software to scan each book they want to bring into their classroom. Because books are approved at the district level, a book that has already been approved for another teacher is automatically OK’d. Otherwise, the teacher must wait for approval. 

Noting that the process is redundant across Florida’s 67 counties, Pearson asked whether the state should keep a master list of approved books to reduce the workload for district media specialists tasked with approving books. 

Joyce, however, said local approvals are necessary.

“There are books that might be approved in Miami-Dade but would never get approved in Clay,” she said.

Before the shift 

The ideological shift in Duval’s school board reflects a calculated— and, in Jacksonville, at least, successful — effort from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who began working three years ago to create strong conservative majorities for the governing bodies of the state’s school districts.

As Fox News reported at the time, DeSantis, Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice and a handful of state leaders met in February 2023 to craft a list of 14 school board members to target to oust in the 2024 election cycle. 

Two members on DeSantis’ list were from Duval County: Kelly Coker and Cindy Pearson. 

Coker and three other board members across the state opted not to run for reelection, and all four of their seats flipped to registered Republicans in the election. Though school board elections are still nonpartisan and members run without party affiliation, Duval GOP Chair Dean Black told Jacksonville Today earlier this summer that his party would treat school board elections as if they were fully partisan.

Pearson was one of just two Republicans on DeSantis’ target list. She learned of the list from friends who read about it in the news and texted her.

“The whole situation felt very personal and very punitive,” Pearson tells Jacksonville Today.

She ran for reelection and eked out a win against Becky Nathanson, who founded the Duval County chapter of Moms for Liberty. Before the August election, Nathanson told Jacksonville Today she was running for office because she felt Pearson had not been conservative enough during her first term.

Though she was not on the dais as she had hoped, Nathanson attended Tuesday’s ceremony and spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, reflecting on the board’s ideological shift.

“Many of us never thought we’d see a night like tonight,” Nathanson said.