Shoplifting With The School Board
Two conservative school board members were arrested for alleged theft, while 15 Republican governors blocked a food assistance program for children. Who's the worse thief?
Here are three recent stories about theft.
In Florida, a conservative former school board member was arrested Thursday for allegedly making $100,000 in unauthorized personal purchases on school district credit cards. In Tennessee, a conservative school board member resigned on Tuesday, after she was arrested for allegedly stealing $728 worth of products from Target.
And in Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming, Republican governors have opted out of a federal program that would have given their states millions of dollars to feed children from low-income families during the summer.
A right-wing political movement that fetishizes the individual over our mutual obligations will always have a soft spot for self-enrichment. While that tendency is most obvious in small-time conservative officials who steal, its most aggressive expression comes in broad strokes of legislative cruelty from Republican leaders who gut public programs while plying the wealthy with benefits. The former school board member from Florida faces between three and 55 years in prison if convicted for her alleged theft of school funds; the Republican governors’ decision to deny benefits to 8 million children is entirely legal.
Both former school board members promoted themselves as budget-focused religious conservatives.
In Florida, Lubby Navarro was appointed to the Miami-Dade school board in 2015 by then-Gov. Rick Scott (who’d made a similar school board appointment of soon-to-be Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler the previous year). Navarro won re-election in 2016 and 2020, increasingly aligning herself with an ascendant anti-mask and anti-LGBTQ+ parents movement. During a serious delta wave of Covid-19, Navarro was the only school board member to vote against mask mandates. Navarro also created controversy in 2022 when, during a school board discussion over creating a Day of Prayer in Miami schools, she declared that “God and Jesus Christ” were the only god. She resigned on Dec. 30, 2022, one day before she would have run afoul of a new law that prevented elected officials from working as lobbyists. (Navarro was a medical lobbyist earning a salary of more than $220,000, on top of her $46,000 school board income.)
While on the campaign trail, Navarro characterized herself as a fiscal conservative who would “demand high standards of fiscal responsibility.” When voting down an LGBTQ+ history month in 2022, she described the school district as a business in which “our customers are our parents.”
In Tennessee, meanwhile, Collierville school board member Keri Blair’s campaign platform also included “importance of balancing a budget.” Blair also underscored her Republican connections. Advertising her involvement with the Conservative Women of Collierville (a group that posts this kind of anti-gay thing) and Republican Women of Purpose, Blair described herself as a conservative and wrote on a campaign site that “even more important than my identity as a wife and mom is my commitment to Jesus Christ as my Savior.” Although not publicly affiliated with Moms for Liberty, Blair received an endorsement from her local chapter of the far-right parents group in 2022. Blair also accepted campaign donations from the chapter’s treasurer.
For all their appeals to Christian morality and fiscal conservatism, both women stand accused of repeated theft. Police claim Blair shoplifted from Target at least seven times between Nov. 25 and Dec. 30, stealing more than $700 in products. Blair resigned from the school board on Tuesday “for personal, family reasons,” the Collierville district announced on Facebook. Navarro is accused of stealing more, and directly from her district. Prosecutors claim Navarro used school district credit cards to buy approximately $100,000 worth of groceries, business class airline tickets, hotels, premium kitchen appliances, furniture, a phone, and a pair of fake bellies modeled after a pregnant woman’s stomach. (A search warrant alleges that she used the bellies to fake a pregnancy after a bad breakup.)
In both cases, prosecutors have documentation of the alleged thefts, and the women have resigned their school board posts. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that allies in right-wing parenting groups will publicly support them.
But above a certain threshold of power in Republican politics, diverting money from children becomes not a faux-pas but a move to boast about at fundraisers.
As part of a bipartisan budget agreement in 2022, federal lawmakers enacted a food assistance program for children from low-income households. Available to families below the poverty line that already receive free or reduced-price school lunches, the program will target summer food insecurity by giving families $120 per child, to be spent at approved food retailers.
The program will award states millions in federal funds, and require states to pay a relatively small administrative fee for participation. But despite the program offering free money to children, 15 Republican-led states declined to participate by the Jan. 1 enrollment deadline, the Washington Post reported.
As I wrote last week, Republican governors’ justifications for blocking the program have ranged from classist rhetoric about EBT benefits leading to “childhood obesity,” to outright opposition to social spending. “I don’t believe in welfare,” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said when opting out of the program late last month.
That frugality is less evident in many of the same governors’ stances on taxing wealthy individuals and corporations in their state. Pillen, for instance, championed major tax cuts for corporations and high-earning individuals last year, leading to fears that funding for schools and health care could be in jeopardy.
A November report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the cuts would reduce Nebraska’s public funds by $3.1 billion over the next five years, a 7.6 percent overall decline in funding. “This revenue loss equals roughly what Nebraska spends on its entire Medicaid program, which serves nearly 400,000 low-income children and adults, seniors, and people with disabilities,” the report found.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who also opted out of the federal funding for children’s food, said his decision was a rejection of “attempts to expand the welfare state.” Reeves and other current and former Mississippi officials are currently weathering a sprawling welfare scandal in which tens of millions in federal funds earmarked for Mississippi’s poorest residents were redirected to some of its wealthiest. That allegedly includes up to $94 million in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds that never reached their intended recipients, but were instead redirected to things like a new volleyball facility built at the urging of football star Brett Favre, at the university where his daughter plays volleyball.
These acts might be harder to police than a few cases in which school board members were caught stealing on self-checkout cameras. But they’re motivated by the same contempt of civic service and mutual responsibility that drives a school board leader to allegedly spend district funds on a personal trip to the Dominican Republic. The irony is that, while these former school board members face court cases constructed from their own sales receipts, the governors who parted children from their lunch money might brag about the move on the campaign trail.
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! How’s everyone’s post-holiday recovery? I feel like we’re still in the thick of it. Somehow my oldest kid and all his friends are having birthday parties right after the new year. While I crunch the numbers on sheet cake-per-preschooler, here are some of the stories that caught my eye over the past week:
-Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made the New College of Florida a centerpiece in his dismantling of education in the state. After cracking down on educators at the historically liberal institution, DeSantis has led a conservative overhaul of the college, appointing Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler and far-right thinkfluencer Christopher Rufo to influential posts at the school. Now the college is launching an online degree (in some cases, as little as a one-year certificate) in collaboration with conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports. The program will follow a “Great Books” curriculum developed by Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade. Leaked emails have previously revealed Ricketts spreading false “birther” conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, and claiming that “we cannot ever let Islam become a large part of our society. Muslims are naturally my (our) enemy due to their deep antagonism and bias against non-Muslims.”
-Meanwhile in Escambia County, Florida, a far-right crusade against libraries has led a district to remove 1,600 books from schools, pending an investigation into the titles. The removed books include frequent targets for censors, like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, as well as books on Black history, like the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and comics by author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Incredibly, five dictionaries and eight encyclopedias have also been removed from the schools, “all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with ‘sexual conduct’ from schools,” anti-censorship organization PEN America reports.
-The family of a transgender teenager in Oklahoma is suing the state’s board of education, accusing the board of creating an emergency rule specifically to block the 16-year-old from changing his gender identity in school documents, NBC News reports. Ryan Walters, the state’s media-seeking school superintendent specifically spoke out against the teenager updating his school documents. “We’re going to stand against this,” Walters said in October. “We’re not going to do the transgender game of back and forth, back and forth.” The teenager’s family says the ruling is discriminatory, and risks outing their child as transgender to classmates.
-In New York City, an ill-supported safety net for migrant families has left some facing eviction from city shelter, City Limits reports. Elizabeth Leon, a pregnant mother of two from Venezuela, said a wave of evictions from a family shelter in Manhattan forced her to skip an important ultrasound appointment, in order to move her 9- and 12-year-old out of their housing on short notice.
“We had two hours to pack everything and go,” Leon told City Limits. “We didn’t have enough suitcases to hold everything so we had to throw a lot of stuff out. We kept clothes and only what was necessary. We left the rest behind.”