Will The Real Wackadoodle Please Stand Up.

Volusia School Board member and Founder of Florida’s Conservative School Board Association speaks at Moms For Liberty Summit and EVERYONE (including Moms for liberty) is Appalled.

A YouTube video has recently surfaced featuring comments made by Volusia County School Board’s new Chair, Jessie Thompson, as part of a panel discussion at this summer’s Mom’s For Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit.” Thompson’s community is not pleased.

Yesterday, the mayor of Deltona, Florida asked the Volusia County School Board to remove Ms. Thompson from her current role as Chair and called for a public apology from Ms. Thompson for her “derogatory” and “offensive” comments made during her presentation at the 2024 Moms for Liberty Summit, entitled “How to Work With Your School Board.”

Thompson’s presentation was a perfect example of how NOT to work with your school board.

After being elected to the Volusia County School Board in 2022, Thompson founded the Florida Conservative Coalition of School Board Members (FCCSBM) which she describes as “a group of all the Conservatives School Board members doing stuff together so that we don’t individually get labeled crazy by the media.” FCCSBM partners with Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, School Boards for Academic Excellence (SBAE) and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Academy, a division of Turning Point USA “dedicated to reclaiming the education of our children… and RESTORING God as the foundation of education.”

Thompson was joined by Bryce Fiedler, the Director and Founding Member of Carolina Academic Leadership Network (CALN). Fiedler’s CALN was created by the John Locke Foundation in June 2023, with the goal of “empowering” school board members. David Hoyt, Executive Director of School Boards for Academic Excellence (SBAE) was supposed to join Thompson’s panel but was delayed by weather. Pro-public ed writer Peter Greene wrote about SBAE and warns if “Your Board Working With This Anti-Woke Board Group? Watch Out.”

Thompson’s panel was supposed to “explore the most effective reform strategies for curricular audits, academic goal-setting, parental rights, controversial subjects and materials transparency, holding administrators accountable, budget cuts, labor reform, and more.” Instead, Ms. Thompson used the time to bash her fellow Volusia County Board members, denigrate her district’s “A” rated high school and explain how she uses deception to advance her cause.

[Fun fact: Even Volusia’s Moms for Liberty chair, Jenifer Kelly, was “appalled” by Thompson’s remarks. “I couldn’t find how that pertained with the topic of that breakout session of how to engage and interact with school board members” she told the Daytona Beach News Journal. “That’s the exact opposite of how you should engage and work with your school board.” Exactly.]

Thompson began by saying her fellow Volusia board members are “Not nice people.” She also said she was “hated by the rest of my board” (I wonder why?).

Apparently, the former Chair of her Board, Jamie Haynes, was a particular thorn in Thompson’s side. She referred to Haynes, a career educator and former district administrator, as a “longwinded” kindergarten teacher and Thompson says she enjoyed using Roberts Rules of Order to cut her off when she believed Haynes had spoken long enough. She also complained that the chair wouldn’t put any of Ms. Thompson’s items on the agenda (again, I wonder why?). Apparently Thompson sees the problem as “she hates me, and he hates me, and she hates me, and No one listens to what I say. I can talk till I’m blue in the face.”

She refered to the Hispanic school board member on her board, Ruben Colon, as “a tan gentleman.”

She refered to regular public commentators as “liberal Wackadoodles” and lamented that conservative public commenters never thank her for the good work she is doing, saying “I haven’t had once anyone say, Good job. High five. You did great. Thanks for not putting pornography back on the book shelves.”

She warned that anything she says or does can be taken out of context and that “the teachers union is taking things I’ve said out of context a billion times.”

She advised speaking “liberal lingo” when approaching a liberal board member because “they don’t like facts and data.” She believes communicating with liberals is “a feelings-based thing.” “If you can come to a liberal chair and say that there are feelings involved and feelings hurt, that’s how you get stuff done.”

She believes her district’s school board attorney is “God awful.”

She encouraged conservative board members to find a conservative news outlet to “get out the other side of the story” because “we have all liberal news outlets as far as the written word.” She said, around Florida, her FCCSBM members have found “the media is not our friend at all.”

She believes before she joined the board, her fellow board members never visited their schools and “sat in an ivory tower.”

She admitted to falsifying a medical excuse so her children wouldn’t need to follow her district’s mask mandates in place during Covid.

She said school board members can be slow and “it’s easier to spoon feed to school board members.” She admitted she has fed members false data because they are unlikely to research it themselves.

She shared how she went outside the school board to work with the Sheriff’s department to pass some safety and security items by hiding them in long contracts she didn’t think her board would read. She said “it was magical. They still don’t know what’s in there.” (By the way, it may have felt magical but it was also unethical.)

She really got into hot water with her community when she complained that Florida’s standards were so low:

“When I say the standards are low, we have one high school, and I don’t mean to take anything away from students or parents, and it is a Title I school, so high five for doing this. They had 100% graduation rate last year. A hundred percent. Now, I’ve walked that school multiple times. I’ve met some bright students, and I’ve met some students that I wouldn’t trust filling up my tank of gas. So I find it really hard to believe that they graduated. Graduation is now turned into basically just handing out participation ribbons.“

These are the coments that caught Deltona Mayor Santiago Avila Jr.’s attention. He is now urging Deltona residents to contact Volusia County School Board members and ask for Thompson’s removal as chair. He also encouraged Deltona residents to contact Thompson directly and ask for a public apology.

The Daytona Beach News Journal contacted local Moms for Liberty chair, Jenifer Kelly, who confirmed that Thompson’s disparaging comments about students were in regards to those attending Deltona High “because that was the only Title-One high school with a 100% graduation rate.” On Facebook, Kelly said that Moms for Liberty-Volusia, “does not support or agree with many things she (Thompson) said in this video. Most of it is false.”

Needless to say, Thompson’s advice is NOT good advice regarding how to interact with school board members, something newly elected Volusia School Board member Donna Brosemer ALREADY understands:

“The foundation of a good relationship between board members is the ability to trust each other, so we have to be careful that our comments, whether public or private, don’t do anything to damage that trust.” Donna Brosemer 

Jessie Thompson could learn something from her.