Moms for Liberty, union face off

BY ESTEBAN CANDELARIA JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

Election season for the Albuquerque Public Schools board is officially underway, and a power struggle, most visible in races for two board seats, is brewing between the teachers union and the local chapter of a national group that’s increasingly wading into school board politics across the country — known as Moms for Liberty.

The Albuquerque Teachers Federation, which commands a bargaining unit over 6,250 educators strong, has been gearing up for this fight for about a year and has labeled its efforts in this year’s election as “retaking our school board,” in “one of the most important board races … in the history of APS.”

In the midst of a heated battle last year over a controversial parental rights

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Spectators argue during a school board meeting in November to decide the fate of a controversial parental rights policy at the Albuquerque Public Schools headquarters. The overall fight over the policy was one of the early clashes between the teachers union and local chapter of Moms for Liberty in Albuquerque.

CHANCEY BUSH/JOURNAL

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policy, which critics said could make some LGBTQ+ students unsafe by outing them, even when they don’t feel safe coming out to their families, the ATF published an article linking Moms for Liberty to the policy. ATF likened the possibility of the group and its allies gaining power over the board to a doomsday scenario.

“If (Moms for Liberty) and their allies gain the majority on our school board it is game over for APS,” the article read. “We’ll have our chance to push back (one) year from this month. We must VOTE in the upcoming 2023 School Board election.”

Moms for Liberty was founded in 2021 in the wake of mask and remote learning mandates and carries a central message of advocating for parents’ rights. The Associated Press has reported that across the country, the group has been criticized for making pushes in districts to remove books from libraries that mention or center on messages of diversity, and for spreading anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama, has classified Moms for Liberty as an extremist group, describing it as a “far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities.”

The group’s leaders, however, including the founder of Moms for Liberty’s local chapter, Sarah Jane Allen, have rejected those claims. “I don’t know where they get the ‘extremist group’ from,” she said. “We’re just parents.”

The local chapter of the group wasn’t in place until August 2022, Allen said, and thus did not officially endorse any of the candidates in the 2021 elections. Still, she says she helped elect candidates to the current school board, and the now officially in-place chapter is supporting candidates in two races this year: incumbent Peggy Muller-Aragón for District 2 and Stephen Cecco for District 4. Cecco told the Journal about his last-minute decision to file for the District 4 race that when Moms for Liberty heard he was running, the group “came in to support.” “They’re taking parents’ rights away, which is completely against anything that I believe in,” he said, speaking in general about New Mexico’s education system. “A young kid, especially a middle-school child, can’t figure out what flavor ice cream they want. And they’re supposed to be given the job of figuring out their gender? That’s sick.”

Muller-Aragón declined to comment on this story.

The ties

According to campaign finance filings in the 2021 election, board Secretary Courtney Jackson, member Crystal Tapia-Romero and member Danielle Gonzales each received contributions from Allen and her husband.

GonzalesandTapia-Romero each received at least $500. Jackson received at least $1,375 overall. Allen, however, said those contributions were personal ones from her and her husband.

“They had the same values as I did. They always said, ‘We’ll listen to the parents and the children — we’ll put the children first,’” she said. “They also believed that children need to be returned to the classroom.”

Tapia-Romero said she is not at all affiliated with Moms for Liberty, and that her primary hope for the coming election was that “they’re aligned with the new system that we’ve adopted.”

Gonzales said her contribution came primarily from Allen’s husband, that their conversations only surrounded topics like workforce development, that she had no affiliation with Moms for Liberty and that she would “completely condemn their platform.”

Gonzales, Tapia-Romero and Jackson also were supported by the New Mexico chapter of commercial real estate association NAIOP’s political action committee and the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce.

During last year’s controversy over the parental rights policy, Jackson, the lead author on the proposal (which was ultimately approved, with revisions), said at the time that it wouldn’t grant any rights to parents or guardians that they don’t already have in APS.

Instead, she said, it just consolidates those rights into one accessible place, and that she based the idea for the proposal on community members reaching out with questions, which she herself had a hard time finding answers to.

That closely mirrored language in an op-ed penned by Allen and published in the Sept. 11, 2022, edition of the Journal, which read the policy “does not create, grant or give any rights to parents that are not already present within the district.”

“What it does instead is consolidate, make accessible and give an understanding of what exists in policies, procedures and state and federal law,” Allen continued. She also wrote the policy “wound up being tabled by the board due to pressure from outside groups that seem intent on pushing their agendas onto schoolchildren.”

Allen said she only speaks with Jackson about issues facing the school board, to include the parental rights policy, because she’s her district school board member.

“I do not abuse our friendship,” Allen said. “We understand each other, and we both have a desire for our children to get educated. That is where we are on the same page.”

Jackson added that she and Allen initially connected over her platform of running “to be the parents’ voice on the board of education,” but that Allen does not influence Jackson’s votes.

“I am making all of my decisions based on what is best for student outcomes,” Jackson said.

The teachers union has historically also had a hand in school board races, which is common for many districts. Board President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova and members Barbara Petersen and Josefina Domínguez, for example, all have been backed by the ATF.

But ATF President Ellen Bernstein said neither she nor the union is constantly bending their ears telling them how to vote on specific issues.

“That would be some heavy-duty lobbying,” she said. “Once we endorse somebody, and we work for them, and we go to their house and knock on doors with them, and talk with them … and then they get elected — we trust them to do the job with the philosophy that we endorsed them for.”

“I’ve never found it important to have regular communication unless something is alarming,” she added.

In years past, the APS school board has been dominated by union-backed candidates. But that changed about two years ago.

During the last elections, in 2021, three of the four newly elected board members — Jackson, Tapia-Romero and Gonzales — beat out the union’s picks for the seats, with Domínguez being the only ATF-backed candidate to win her election.

And this year, two of the three seats up for grabs are held by union-endorsed board members who have decided not to run again — Montoya-Cordova, of District 1, and Petersen, of District 4 — meaning that now, the union is in a position of hoping to keep those seats and, possibly, wrest away the District 2 seat.

“We have one person right now (Dominguez) who was a former teacher … very respectful, understands the work of public education, chooses to lead from a very broad lens, cares about equity, cares about attracting and retaining the professionals we need,” Bernstein said. “We need to give her three friends.”

This year’s election, Bernstein added, is going to be a “vote of belief system.”

“People who believe in public education, who are respectful of educators and the incredible work we do every day, who understand the role of public education in our society — I think those people need to understand what other people with malicious intent and a lot of money to spend are doing and what they want to do with our schools,” she added.

Allen, for her part, said the race is important because “I believe that (Muller-Aragón and Cecco) are more willing to listen to the values of a family and the parents than the other candidates are.”

Jackson, though, rejected the idea of the upcoming election as a political power struggle, and insisted it should be focused on the betterment of APS’ students.

“What everybody should be focusing on is student outcomes, and … who’s going to focus on the goals, who’s going to focus on the guardrails, who’s going to support the strategic plan. This upcoming election is about candidates who want to see our students improve, who want to see our outcomes get better,” she said.

“We shouldn’t be focusing on what divides us. We should be focusing on what brings us together,” she added.

Sarah Jane Allen

Courtney Jackson

Ellen Bernstein