Virginia Beach School Board Holds Virtue-Signaling Vote at 2:15 a.m.

by Kerry Dougherty

Wanted: One more member with common sense for the Virginia Beach School Board. Unfortunately, that won’t happen until the next election in 2024.

In the meantime, the narrow woke majority that did its best to keep masks on kids, keep schools closed, dumbed down the city’s public schools and pandered to special interests, will continue to virtue signal and hold pointless, anti-parent votes under the cloak of darkness.

At 2:15 in the morning to be precise.

Perhaps you heard, the Beach school board held a marathon meeting Monday night that stretched into Tuesday morning. Not because the members were desperately trying to find ways to improve academics or test scores, but to grant LGBTQ+ students special protected status that isn’t extended to any other minority, including children with disabilities.

Oh, and there is another, more insidious reason the board passed this resolution: to extend a defiant middle finger to Gov. Glenn Youngkin whose Department of Education has prepared policies guaranteeing parental rights regarding trans students.

The Beach’s ill-conceived resolution passed by a vote of 6-5.

One more member, folks, and we can put an end to this late-night lunacy.

The majority also voted down a resolution, introduced by common-sense Board member Vicky Manning, to create a list of sexually explicit materials available in middle school and high school libraries. That vote was 5 in favor, 6 against.

Sigh.

One more member. That’s all we need to restore sanity in Beach schools.

About 100 people spoke on the resolution that was supposedly aimed at preventing the harassment of LGBTQ+ kids, but in reality pretends to elevate them to some sort of privileged position.

It’s worth remembering that harassment and bullying of ANY student already violates public school policies.

This vote was the very essence of virtue signaling.

This board allows students to speak first at meetings and about 50 of them did, each parroting the speaker before in endorsing the LGBTQ resolution.

Tedious.

Most, if not all, of the children attend the legal studies program at First Colonial High School. Many of the parents, who were allowed to speak after the kids, objected to the resolution.

The vote on the nonsensical measure, proposed by Board member Jessica Owens, was conducted at 2:15 am Tuesday.

Appalling.

No public body ought to be voting on ANYTHING after midnight. It violates the spirit – if not the letter – of Virginia’s open meeting laws. They’re called “Sunshine Laws” for a reason.

Of course, by waiting until after 2 a.m. many observers had given up and gone to bed. That was the whole idea.

Virginia Beach’s woke school chief is on his way out. Time for the school board’s majority to join him.

Republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed and Unedited.


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Comments

26 responses to “Virginia Beach School Board Holds Virtue-Signaling Vote at 2:15 a.m.”

  1. walter smith Avatar
    walter smith

    Abolish the Federal Dept of Education.
    Maybe abolish the State Dept of Education.
    To the extent public funds are used for public education, let the money follow the student.
    Ultimately (get ready for heads to explode) the best schools will be explicitly Christian based (or Jewish, maybe even Muslim and Mormon) because there are ultimate standards, and parents will want their kids to go there, even parents who aren’t necessarily Christian. Western Civ built a great world for a reason, and it is time to wake up to the reality that removing that reason has been a disaster…
    Why are kids unhappy? Confused? On anti-depressants?

    1. VaNavVet Avatar
      VaNavVet

      There have been other great civilizations that have made contributions to the world.

      1. walter smith Avatar
        walter smith

        Uh huh. Aztecs? Want to give Greeks or Romans credit? Egypt? Western Civ, took the best of anything they had, and built a great world (as great as you can have with imperfect humans), and Marxists are destroying it. State your affirmative case for the “other great civilizations.”

        1. Monica Wright Avatar
          Monica Wright

          You wouldn’t have math or gunpowder but for the Middle East and East. However would you control/subdue ‘savages’ then? Western ‘civilizations’ have been sources of light and dark (literally…the enlightenment and the dark ages). The West is not the keeper of all knowledge and wisdom or the font from which all worthwhile information flows.

          1. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            Name the better one then.

          2. Not Today Avatar
            Not Today

            I reject the very notion of ‘better’ when it comes to civilizations. They have advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses. They’re different, and genius exists in all.

          3. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            OK. Go be gay in current Muslim countries. Maybe get your time machine out and go to one of those South American cultures where the artwork shows the heart being pulled out as an offering.
            Western Civ was the best, and might even return to it if we can get all of you Marxists and moral relativists out of power and ridiculed, as you should be.

        2. VaNavVet Avatar
          VaNavVet

          Have you ever heard of Confusius and the Doli Lama?

          1. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            Are you 12 years old? I misspell occasionally, but if you cite these people as why the West is beholden to them (it is not), you might want to spell the names correctly.
            Other than Confucius jokes from my childhood, how has Confucius built Western Civ?
            And as to the Lama, he’s a big hitter, but what else? (That’s a joke from Caddyshack, but your examples are pretty stupid. How did they build the modern world? )

          2. VaNavVet Avatar
            VaNavVet

            All of us herein know that you are “perfect”. Never said that they built Western Civ in fact just the opposite. You merely have to do a simple search to see the contributions of their civilizations to the modern world.

          3. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            Name them. And then name how the former civilizations few contributions that survive were superior. They weren’t and you moral relativists are destroying a great culture by only focusing on flaws and denying the good.

          4. VaNavVet Avatar
            VaNavVet

            For you it is all about superiority not merely a range of contributions to the modern world. Have a nice Father’s Day.

          5. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            Nice try. It is about reality. It is about the ability to look at the world and observe what has happened and be guided by it. Western Civ – really birthed out of Judeo Christian ethics and morality – created a great civilization. The greatest since the Garden of Eden (which we screwed up). We are destroying from within, like Rome, by abandoning the Judeo Christian worldview which built such wealth and freedom and tolerance and an ability to handle disagreements without violence or oppression. The current Left is Marxist – Gramscian/Foucault/Friere/Marcuse destroyers – and what you hope to replace with will lead to poverty and repression.
            Martin Niemoller wrote a poem about this…

          6. VaNavVet Avatar
            VaNavVet

            Karl Marx was part of Western Civ.

          7. walter smith Avatar
            walter smith

            Uh huh. Sorta like claiming Hitler was a Christian. He hated Christianity and was a loser and a horrible human being. His Man = God philosophy is what is destroying Western Civ. The fallacy that we can control everything to create Utopia on Earth.

          8. WayneS Avatar

            Confucius and the Dalai Lama are individuals, not civilizations.

            They contributed to their civilizations’ religions, philosophies, and cultures, but they are not civilizations in and of themselves.

      2. WayneS Avatar

        How many of them remain extant?

  2. James Wyatt Whitehead Avatar
    James Wyatt Whitehead

    Sounds like VB stole the Loudoun County school board playbook.

    1. VaNavVet Avatar
      VaNavVet

      How is wanting to prevent harassment of LBGTQ students anti-parent? Is it because it in opposition of parents that want there to be harassment? Is that what Kerry is implying?

      1. James Wyatt Whitehead Avatar
        James Wyatt Whitehead

        Didn’t say that now did I? School boards need to do their business during normal hours not after midnight. Most certainly not at 2 in the morning. The only useful thing I can think of after midnight is a run to the 7-11 for some chili dogs.

  3. vicnicholls Avatar
    vicnicholls

    and as the last speaker of that night, I agree.

  4. VaNavVet Avatar
    VaNavVet

    Sounds like once again the young people (students) were on the correct side of history and tolerance while the reactionaries refuse to acknowledge that LGBTQ kids face special problems and might need a helping hand. Kerry needs to listen to Trump that “woke” is now a meaningless term.

  5. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Here is the code to understanding Kerry–“woke”–anything Kerry opposes. “common sense”–anything Kerry supports. “Virtue signaling”–anything Kerry opposes.

    Omigosh–the School Board actually allowed students to speak! Most of the parents who spoke later opposed the resolution. Naturally, the school board should have listened to the parents.

    Passed “under the cloak of darkness”. Horrors! But, wait, wasn’t that because the school board had agreed to hold a “marathon” session and hear everyone who wanted to speak? I bet that if the school board had limited the number of speakers, Kerry would then have been wailing that the board refused to hear the parents who had come to the meeting.

  6. Turbocohen Avatar
    Turbocohen

    I ran for Republican Party of Virginia Beach chairman a while ago over this issue. The local party literally ran splitters against republicans and guaranteed the democrats would maintain their slight majority. Ask the RPVB chairman why his close ally Bruce Meyer helped democrat Kim Melnyk run against a conservative republican.

    1. Monica Wright Avatar
      Monica Wright

      You probably got lucky. You might have ended up like the national GOP post-Dobbs, desperately seeking shelter from the wrath of moderate/independent voters.

  7. DJRippert Avatar
    DJRippert

    On a more general note, the perception that the left / Democrats are anti-parent is a very good campaign point for Republicans. In a recent poll, 61% of American parents believe children under 13 shouldn’t be on social media at all. Think about that. A material majority of surveyed parents think kids should wait until high school (age 14) before getting social media accounts. How do you think those same parents feel about explicit material in middle school libraries?

    I’ve recently had the opportunity to speak with people involved in college and university boards outside of Virginia. A common comment is the lack of maturity these universities are seeing among the entering students. One board member from a top 20 university told me that the administrators at the university where he is a board member assess the emotional maturity of their entering class as 14 (vs the average chronological age of entering students, 17 – 18). Even well adjusted 14 year olds have very different (and usually more) mental health issues than well adjusted 18 year olds. The university in question is significantly increasing its mental health outreach program.

    America is facing a generation of children who are struggling at best and lost at worst.

    A recent poll asked U.S. voters if they thought “parents not having enough say over what is taught” in schools was a problem. A majority of respondents (64%) characterized lack of parental input in school curriculum as a problem, while 32% did not.

    That was voters.

    An even larger number of parents (70%) believed that they did not have enough say in what their children learned in school.

    Regardless of the issue under debate, stunts like making controversial decisions about school policy at 2:30 in the morning appear to be designed to further distance parents from what is being decided.

    Let’s hope that Republicans and right-minded Democrats running for election in Virginia this Fall understand what Glenn Youngkin understood – diminishing the role of parents in their children’s lives is a formula for losing elections.

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