EXCLUSIVE: How the parents of Florida’s Indian River School District are fighting to get porn out of schools | The Post Millennial

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EXCLUSIVE: How the parents of Florida’s Indian River School District are fighting to get porn out of schools | The Post Millennial

The August 28 Indian River School Board meeting was unusually packed.

Over 50 members of the Vero Beach Florida community sat waiting for their turn to stand before the five members who make up the Indian River School Board: Chairperson Dr. Peggy Jones (District 3), Vice Chairperson Teri L. Barenborg (District 4), Gene A. Posca, M.D. (District 1), Jacqueline Rosario (District 2) and Brian M. Barefoot (District 5). Also present was the school superintendent and a lawyer for the school board.

In recent times, attendance at school board meetings across the country has spiked, as mothers, fathers, grandparents, and clinically trained child advocates have voiced outrage, desperation, and frustration at the inaction local officials and school board members have displayed in response to school libraries stocking their shelves with pornographic material.

To be clear, regardless of whether these school boards take the matters under review or engage in some drawn-out process to determine whether the books should be removed, the books are indeed pornographic, and providing pornography to a child is a crime.

The Indian River School Board had 51 people waiting to speak. Most came prepared with excerpts from books currently in school libraries available to children as young as ten.

The excerpts all used horrifically graphic language to depict scenes of children engaged in sex in the greatest detail: children being raped, prostituting themselves to adults, forced into incestuous encounters, learning how to masturbate, and narrating sexual fantasies about engaging in sexual acts with transgender classmates. Some books gave instructions on how to engage in gay sex. Others assured middle school readers that girls can be boys and vice versa. Graphic novels depicted naked men and advised the best way to "give a handy."

Almost every book presented had been previously challenged, meaning that parents had already been through this, they'd already stood before this board and read stomach-turning excerpts expecting that the books would be reviewed and removed. Instead, the books remained. So here they were again, reading the same excerpts, being told the board would take the books under review.

Speakers used their allotted 3 minutes to beg for action to be taken, mothers and fathers' voices cracked as they read their statements, hands trembling with rage.

At its core, this issue is one that has been spreading across the country with unprecedented frequency in issues concerning children: parental rights and the alarming rate at which parents are finding themselves hobbled by progressive agendas, liberal legislation, and socialist ideology that places the state in the role of the parent.

A heavy security presence lined the perimeter of the Indian River School Board Meeting. The armed officers blankly scanned the crowd, standing ready to act on the orders of board chair Peggy Jones, who warned the school parents at the onset that if they spoke out of order or read excerpts that were deemed inappropriate or obscene, the officers would act.

This produced a conundrum of sorts: in order to demonstrate the pornagraphic nature of the books lining the schools' shelves, the parents had to actually read the words aloud. But as the meeting progressed, the chair of the meeting continuously interrupted the parents to issue warnings and remind them that "children could be watching."

The twisted logic of "You can't read these obscene excerpts because children might be watching" highlighted what parents all over the country have been coming together to address: according to the chair, the excerpts were not appropriate to be read aloud in a school board meeting full of adults in case children were watching. However, the entire reason the meeting was called in the first place was because the school libraries were providing children with the exact books from which the excerpts were being read.

An hour and twenty minutes into the almost six-hour board meeting, it was difficult not to feel that no matter how graphic or sexually violent the children's library books were, things were not changing. At no point did any board member express concern or horror at the idea that a child in their district, a child under their care, could be exposed to pornography. Pornography has been proven to be harmful to adults—but to the developing mind of a child? The list of themes documented in the books ranged from rape to bestiality to incest.

Regardless of the category of sexual deviance these authors chose to write about in a style of detail that surpassed any visual representation that could be acted out in front of a camera, one thematic thread connected all the books: extreme sexualization of children.

School board members at this meeting as well as across the country seemed to understand what these books were depicting and that by allowing the books to stay in school libraries they were in fact supplying the material to children—encouraging them to consume it.

And yet, with each desperate parent's three minute address to the board, the members remained unphased, holding to the notion that they themselves could and would do nothing; that there was simply a process to be followed, and no amount of emotion or pleading would change anything.

Then a thing happened.

A woman approached the podium to address the board. She began to read an excerpt from Fallout by Ellen Hopkins, an author whose books have sparked outrage for their excessive depictions of drug and alcohol use by children as well as graphic descriptions of physical and sexual abuse of children. Marketed for young adults, Fallout was on the library shelves of middle schools when the mother began reading a particularly graphic description of a young girl losing her virginity in a painful and traumatic scene.

Less than a minute into her allotted time, Peggy Jones stopped her and announced, "I'm issuing a content warning in case any children are watching." Once again, the twisted logic confounds, as the book itself is available to middle schoolers.

And then came a woman's voice: "Just shut it down!"

It was unclear who exclaimed this, only that she was clearly exasperated.

Peggy Jones immediately cleared up any confusion about the owner of the voice as she turned her head to the far side of the board member's seating and barked "Ms. Rosario, I'm running this meeting, not you! Do not interrupt me!"

Jackie Rosario, a bright-eyed school board member who won her second term with the backing of Moms for Liberty, a national nonprofit organization, and Governor Ron DeSantis for her strong stance on parental rights, her criticism of critical race theory and her Christian views, remained calm in the face of the older school board chair yelling at her, but stayed true to her tell-it-like-it-is demeanor when she replied.

"What you're doing is trying to censor citizens," Rosario said.

The attendees of the meeting erupted in applause.

Chairperson Jones, yelling into her mic, shot back, "No, I am not! Order! Be quiet! We will all make a decision at the end of this. We have a process! Looking at this, how long has that book been on the shelf? When was it ordered?"

Jackie Rosario then responded with something that put things into perspective: