Who is Terry Stoops and What is the Purpose of the FLDOE’s “Academically Successful and Resilient Districts” Office?

[An article, published this morning in the Orlando Sentinel, answers many of the questions I was investigating while writing this piece over the last 3 days. Obviously, great minds think alike. Please read Leslie Postal’s piece “New state education office boosts conservative school board members in Florida, emails show,” which I will be quoting here.] 

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A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Florida Freedom to Read Project (fftrp.org), a group formed to fight book bans in Florida’s schools, discovered this recent email exchange between newly elected Volusia County School Board member, Jessie Thompson, and Terry L. Stoops, Director of the Florida Department of Education’s newest office, Academically Successful and Resilient Districts (ASRD).

Thompson, a DeSantis-endorsed board member elected in November 2022, now serves as president of the newly reconstituted Florida Conservative Coalition of School Board Members (FCCSBM), a group originally founded in 2015 as an alternative to the Florida School Board Association (FSBA). While the FCCSBM now insists it is no longer seeking an adversarial relationship with the FSBA, in the above email, Dr. Stoops encourages Thompson to join forces with the new conservative school board group in Virginia, the School Board Member Alliance (SBMA) “to create alternatives to establishment organizations that exist for their own sake.“

Who is Dr. Stoops? What is the purpose of his Academically Successful and Resilient Districts division? Why is he making disparaging remarks about the FSBA? 

This is everything posted on the FLDOE website about the ASRD:

“The new Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts (ASRD) supports district school boards and superintendents by offering day-to-day guidance and best practices relating to Florida’s innovative educational framework. The Florida Department of Education created the Office to facilitate partnerships with district leaders to ultimately better serve Florida’s students, families, and educators.

Policy Topics

The Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts will provide guidance to district and community leaders along a range of policy topics, including but not limited to:

• Parent’s Rights
• Academic Standards
• Curriculum and Supplemental Materials
• School Safety
• Teacher Professional Development and Supports
• Educational Choice
• Workforce Education

The office operates in accordance with the State Board of Education’s mission to put students first and provide access to a world-class education for students of all backgrounds and abilities.

https://www.fldoe.org/schools/k-12-public-schools/asrd/

It appears the office’s current staff consists of Dr. Stoops (Director) and William Patrick (Deputy Director).

As reported in the Sentinel, Stoops’ “first months of work show interest in meeting mostly with conservative school board members, records show, including Moms for Liberty members and those endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis”

They describe Stoops’ background, as reported on his LinkedIn page:

• prior to joining the FLDOE in April 2023, Stoops worked for 6 months as the Advisor of Academic Research and Policy for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. While there, he drafted what would become a framework for a North Carolina “parents’ bill of rights,” legislation that like Florida’s was criticized as anti-LGBTQ, and pushed for more school choice options, such as charter schools and school vouchers.
• From 2005-2022, Stoops worked for the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank, where he focused on education policy.
• He has a PhD from University of Virginia, where he studied the Social Foundations of Education

According to the Sentinel, Stoops’ calendar for April and May showed meetings with DeSantis-endorsed school board members from Orange, Volusia, Manatee and Putnam counties and “with the leaders of the Florida Citizens Alliance, a group that has been railing against school textbooks, claiming they wrongly taught evolution, “revisionist U.S. history” and “political and religious indoctrination.”” They also showed attendance at a Moms for Liberty meeting in Leon County and at a Leadership Institute training in Sarasota hosted by Moms for Liberty founder and Sarasota School Board Chair, Bridget Ziegler (Also DeSantis endorsed, Ziegler is married to the Chair of the FLGOP.).

The Florida Freedom to Read’s FOIA requests showed that Stoops was reaching out to specific members of school boards, namely the conservative ones. For example, he has been communicating with Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member elected to the Orange County School Board in November, but NOT the other 6 members of her board. In Volusia County, where FCCSBM president Jessie Thompson serves, two conservative members got emails but the other three did not.

Deputy Director Patrick William joined the ASRD in June, after serving for 18 months as FLDOE’s Deputy Director of Communications. Patrick’s professional website describes him as a “Freelance Journalist, Copywriter & Professional Ghostwriter.” His LinkedIn profile shows his past employment:

• Regional Reporter, Franklin News Foundation, previously the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, an online nonprofit news organization that publishes news and commentary from a free market, limited government perspective on state and local politics.
• Senior Writer and Researcher, Government Accountability Institute, a conservative think tank in Tallahassee,  founded in 2012 by Peter Schweizer and Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) with funding from Robert Mercer and family. {ICYWW Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (Brexit) by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage. He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president.]
• Florida Bureau Chief; Journalist, Franklin Center, see the Franklin News Foundation (above).
• Statehouse Reporter, The James Madison Institute, whose “mission is to tether the Sunshine State to the wisdom of free-market capitalism, limited government, the rule of law, economic liberty, and the principles that have made our nation great.”

According to this email to Alicia Farrant, Stoops is “focused on assisting school board members and those who interact with them,” in order to determine how he can “best serve school board members and parents who interact with them.”

By “parents who interact with them” does he mean the Florida PTA, Florida’s largest parent organization? Or does he believe that, like the Florida School Board Association, the FLPTA is another establishment organization that “exists for its own sake?”

According to FOIA requests from Freedom to Read, Stoops has been directly communicating with Moms For Liberty, Florida Citizen Alliance, County Citizens Defending Freedom (CCDF), the founder of Vermillion, the Herzog Foundation and Liberty University, a private Baptist university which is also a provider of Christian homeschool curriculum. It appears Stoops has not yet reached out to the FLPTA.

Keeping politics out of the classroom will be very difficult if we cannot keep partisan politics off our school boards and out of our Department of Education. I’m afraid, in Florida, we are probably too late.

Will the ASRD office only serve those with certain political views? Well established non-partisan education advocacy groups, like the FSBA and the FLPTA, appear to have been dismissed or disparaged, while agenda-driven ideologies are encouraged. As Florida Freedom to Read’s founder, Stephana Ferrell, suggested “This department seems formed for the sole purpose of ensuring the DeSantis agenda is worked into policy. It is using tax payer funds in a very deliberate, political way.”

When combined with the current move towards endorsing politically aligned school board members, and now targeting moderate Republican incumbents for removal, the FLDOE is just one step away from being weaponized against public schools entirely… or, perhaps, we are already there…

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Many thanks to the moms at Florida Freedom to Read for their deft use of public records requests.