No more book bans: how Florida students are pushing rightwingers out of school boards

Jimmy Glover’s youngest children were in high school when he noticed their Florida school district taking an unsettling turn. Beloved books were being pulled from shelves. Teachers were scared of being targeted.

“There was this culture of fear that was permeating throughout the district,” Glover said of Sarasota county.

By channeling anger against mask mandates in schools, the rightwing group Moms for Liberty, founded in Florida, built an outsized influence on school boards across the country in 2022. Soon, members began pressuring schools to remake their curricula along conservative ideological lines, erasing mentions of LGBTQ+ Americans, slavery, racism and more.

As a Black dad living in a historically Black part of Sarasota, Glover said he was especially disturbed by governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement that Florida schools would begin teaching students that some Black people benefited from slavery. “Now my children and the students in my community weren’t going to be learning about the true history of this country,” Glover said.

So the father of four decided to run for Sarasota’s school board this year. He is part of a larger movement of students, parents, teachers and concerned community members pushing back against the influence of groups like Moms for Liberty in Florida public education. They wanted schools that were safe and welcoming for all students, and that focused on learning rather than scoring points on the national political scene.

And last month, they won.

Progressive candidates beat opponents backed by or aligned with Moms for Liberty in school board races across the state – in many cases reversing gains made by the group in 2022. Of the 30 candidates the group supported that year, 20 have declined to seek re-election, have been defeated or will face runoffs in November, according to the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida.

In Sarasota, home to Moms for Liberty’s cofounder Bridget Ziegler, progressives flipped the school board, with liberal candidates Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry replacing more conservative members (school board races in Florida are technically nonpartisan). Glover got more votes than either of his conservative opponents, but his race will go to a runoff in November since no candidate won a majority.

When reached for comment, Moms for Liberty referred the Guardian to a public statement disputing the notion that the recent Florida election represented a loss for the group: “Moms for Liberty-endorsed school board candidates won or advanced in 11 of 15 races across Florida.” But the group had issued fewer endorsements than in past elections and declined to endorse any candidate in several counties. That included Sarasota county, where board chair Ziegler, who has been plagued by scandal, was not running for re-election.

Meanwhile, organizers for Glover’s campaign and others say the elections in Florida mark a turning point, a rejection of rightwing educational ideology in a deep-red part of a deep-red state. And, they say, the victories hold lessons for progressives campaigning on the national stage in the midterms and beyond.

“We know that a better future is possible,” said Sebastian Martinez, president of the Sarasota Next Gen Democrats, a youth organizing group that helped campaign for the county’s progressive slate. “We’ll work every day to get there.”

Students step up and organize

Glover wasn’t the only Florida parent concerned about the influence of Moms for Liberty over his children’s education. The group had success in 2022 by appealing to voters angry about pandemic school closures, and by joining the larger rightwing campaign against “critical race theory”. But Moms for Liberty’s popularity has waned since then, said Liv Coleman, a professor of political science and international studies at the University of Tampa.

By the time Stephanie Vanos ran for Orange county’s school board in 2024, the top question voters asked her was: “Are you the one who wants to ban books?”

“It speaks to the outrage at state censorship in our schools and the complete disrespect for the first amendment,” said Vanos, who won her seat that year.

But that outrage had yet to be fully harnessed.

Martinez, now 22, has been active in school board organizing since he was 16. He started Next Gen Democrats last year as a way to expand young Sarasotans’ role in Democratic politics. “I really wanted to see young people not just get involved in organizing, but to become part of the party,” he said.

For youth, one barrier to political participation is money, Martinez said – they can’t afford to volunteer their time when they could be working a paid job. So to help recruit and retain young canvassers, the group offered $20 an hour. “The Democratic party is supposed to be a party of working-class people supporting working-class people, and so it only makes sense to then pay people to work,” Martinez said.

Sarasota Next Gen Democrats recruited about 20 high school students to phone bank, knock on doors and distribute yard signs around the county, said Kennedy Cole, the group’s political director. They also helped decorate a school bus that drove around Sarasota on Election Day, getting the word out about progressive candidates.

Students “were sick of what we’ve seen from our school board, and we knew that Megan, Beth and Jimmy would help return normalcy to it”, said Cole, a 17-year-old high school senior. “Students really worked their butts off to get those results.”

It wasn’t just students. Youth organizers met regularly with other community activists, including a group of retired women who sent 7,000 handwritten postcards to Sarasota voters. A parents’ group invited candidates to a local park to meet voters while their kids played. Equality Florida spent $250,000 on mailers in support of candidates around the state who were facing opponents aligned with Moms for Liberty.

“In order to do something like this, it takes a web of people,” Cole said. “It’s a lot of different people operating in their own ways.”

‘Tired of the chaos’

Whether they were knocking on doors or meeting families at the playground, winning candidates spread a back-to-basics message that resonated with voters across political lines. Cole likes to tell the story of a close friend whose conservative parents voted for liberal school board candidates “because they were tired of the chaos” that Moms for Liberty had brought.

Sarasota schools’ statewide ranking had slipped since conservative activists took control of the school board, said Mayberry, a former teacher who won a seat representing Sarasota’s fifth district. “The focus came off of academic performance,” Mayberry said.

She and other successful candidates campaigned to restore that focus. They ran on issues like school funding, academic achievement and support for teachers and students, Coleman said. “They really just focused on things that affected people’s everyday lives.”

That approach could be instructive for candidates around the country, in November and beyond. Sarasota Next Gen Democrats and their allies built a movement that was “not right v left, not parents v students, not students v teachers”, Cole said. “We were able to organize as a community coalition of people who were sick and tired of political games being played with our students and our education, and want a better change for the future.”

That future includes continuing to campaign for Glover, who will face Republican-backed candidate Heidi Brandt in a runoff election in November. If Glover wins, he would be the first person of color ever to serve on the Sarasota county school board. He’ll also have his work cut out for him in a district reeling from book ban battles and facing funding cuts as a statewide school voucher program pulls money from public schools.

“We have a big challenge coming up,” he said. “We’re coming out of a time when culture wars and personal agendas dominated the headlines, so we have a lot of work to do.”

But he and the organizers behind him are optimistic – not just about Sarasota, but about the country as a whole.

“If it can happen here,” Martinez said of the victories this August, “it can happen anywhere.”