Masks started this fight. Love or hate them, these NC parents aren’t going away.
READ MORE
In NC schools, the masks are off
Over two years into the pandemic, NC state agencies are now relaxing mask mandates. But not everyone may feel ready, while some may be relieved.
Expand All
Masks started this fight. Love or hate them, these NC parents aren’t going away.
What are the lasting effects of masks on kids? What if some still want to wear them?
Parents of high-risk children ramp up COVID precautions as Charlotte mask mandate ends
The masks are off in NC, but will you still wear one? Vote in our poll.
Mask mandates and angry parents: Public schools are NC’s latest political combat zone
Before she became Enemy No. 1 of many other parents in Union County schools, Britney Bouldin blended right in.
Like the time she stood in her front yard, playing Frisbee with her son, who hurled the disc into the street. A well-meaning neighbor jogging by stopped and began walking toward it.
Bouldin came unglued.
“I started screaming, ‘No, don’t touch it,’ over and over. Like him touching the Frisbee was actually going to potentially kill us,” she remembers.
It was early 2020 and this used to be considered a totally normal reaction.
So was “washing” or quarantining mail and packages (which Bouldin did).
So was staying home, disinfecting groceries and using gloves all the time (she did all that, too).
Back then, Bouldin — a speech therapist and a 47-year-old mom of three — like so many moms everywhere, stopped at nothing to keep the virus at bay. It would be months before health officials in the U.S. confirmed COVID-19 was rarely transmitted via surfaces — like that of a plastic Frisbee.
But soon, things would change drastically for Bouldin.
School politics unleashed
Her kids were miserable. She was depressed and lost stamina to keep everyone looking on the bright side.
More than that, a few months into the pandemic she lost trust that public health restrictions — based on what many others would call science or even simply “the facts” — like masks and lockdowns would keep the world safe.
Fluid and changing, sometimes contradictory, public health messages have tested the American public’s patience and trust throughout the pandemic. For Bouldin, she’d see a story, for example, about front-line doctors questioning COVID rules and deep skepticism would set in. She found it hypocritical that some pundits would harshly criticize gatherings like those for a funeral, for example, but not mention potential COVID dangers of thousands forming protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020.
“I finally hit a wall and told my husband while hysterically crying that I would rather get COVID and die than continue to live the ‘lockdown life’ because the ‘lockdown life’ wasn’t living,” she said. “It was dying.”
Still, this too — COVID fatigue and the related drain on mental health — was and is common. The public’s obedience to pandemic restrictions and rules, like mask wearing, waned even before vaccines were widely available last year.
But it was what Bouldin did next with her frustration and activism via Moms for Liberty that made her stick out.
Now she’s the leader of a parent-filled group whose major victory last year was getting their public school system to forego a mask mandate and a few other COVID-related rules recommended by public health officials.
“Our kids were not OK and our parental rights were being taken away,” she said. “We don’t agree on everything but we all agreed on the important issue, which is protecting and restoring parental rights.”
Moms for Liberty has 274 chapters nationwide, active in many school districts, including one in Mecklenburg County and 10 others in North Carolina. The Union County group formed officially last April. Its mission statement calls for schools to be “free from mandates, free from indoctrination, free from discrimination, and free from sexual abuse through over-sexualized teaching materials and books.”
It started with the masks — but that’s far from being the central fight today (most school districts in North Carolina have already or soon will eliminate mask mandates).
COVID, for these parents, ignited or reignited an intense interest and desire to have influence over public school policy at the state and local levels. Over recent months, Moms for Liberty has been called upon to attend rallies against an effort to make COVID vaccines mandatory for older students in North Carolina, and some members have helped a smaller group of parents attempt to ban sexual-explicit books in classrooms.
When an independent school locally adopted a rule that teachers would need to resign, be fired or get vaccinated, those opposed called Bouldin to help.
On the opposite side of these issues, many Union County Public Schools parents believe Moms for Liberty has too much influence over the local school board. The board’s decisions during the pandemic have actively harmed the broader community, said Krystyn Smith, the founder of SOS Union County.
“The reality is that we are all parents that are motivated by being involved in our school system,” Smith said. “Members of Moms for Liberty are our neighbors, their children attend some of our schools, we likely shop at many of the same grocery stores and frequent the same restaurants. They are just as much a part of the broader community of Union County as our members are.”
Smith’s group — a large bipartisan network — began as an answer to Moms for Liberty and in response to school board members’ refusal to mandate masks to start the school year.
Moms for Liberty is considered a right-leaning group even though it, too, purports to be nonpartisan. Bouldin is registered in North Carolina as unaffiliated, and says she’s independent when it comes to partisan politics.
Nationally, many people affiliated with Moms for Liberty chapters are considered brash and disrespectful. At a school board meeting in Florida last fall, for example, The Washington Post reported that a group “snickered and jeered their way though a board member’s defense of the district’s mask mandate,” and got kicked out of the room. But the founders of Moms for Liberty told a Tampa television station that “they denounce any inappropriate behavior by members.”
Bouldin says she does, too.
“People don’t understand, I never, ever want to hurt anyone,” she said. “I love people. I will listen to everyone, no matter their opinions.”
While leaders and parents on both sides of the mask debate — the first of many political battle lines drawn over school policy — say they value civility, tempers have flared across the state and country as these groups clash.
Added Smith: “We have to believe it is possible for all of us to come together and compromise for the benefit of our community.”
In school districts across North Carolina, as The (Raleigh) News and Observer reported last fall, “Most any time a board meets now, there are arguments and protests.” Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would launch federal investigations into threats made against school employees, teachers and board members — a move widely interpreted as a shot against conservative or Republican parents.
In many communities, for well over a year, school board meetings have hosted showdowns over COVID rules and more. In Union County, many students, parents and even doctors advocating for the school board to restore a mask mandate last year said they were afraid of possible harassment.
As far as “new normals” go, this seems to be one of them.
Moms for Liberty
In Union County, Bouldin’s group had good chances of success.
They bill their message as pro-parent choice. Others call it anti-mask. Either way, it was positively received last year by most of the school board members, eight of nine of whom are Republican.
Those who wanted Union County to keep mask rules in place fought back hard, but didn’t get far.
“I’ve been where some of these parents have been,” Bouldin said. “I’ve been scared. I’ve lost sleep worrying if my kids were going to die from COVID. I understand what they’re going through. I hate politics. I hate that we are all so divided. I’m a mom who doesn’t know what she’s doing but is just trying to do the right thing for my kids.”
Many parents accused several Union County school board members of being members of Moms for Liberty, which they said would run afoul of rules for elected leaders (but it’s unclear that it would). In any event, Bouldin says it’s not true. She showed the Observer a roster of about 100 members in Union County and none were names of school board members.
Unlike larger, more formal political action groups, parent-driven organizations like Moms for Liberty locally aren’t making campaign donations and only last week began collecting member dues.
“I am just one of the hundreds of thousands of moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, etc. who are standing up and speaking up for our children,” she said. “I honestly don’t think I was a real adult until doing what I am doing now. It has challenged and stretched me.”
It’s also reduced her to tears.
The vitriol she’s received from parents with views that oppose hers is, at times, unbearable. Two weeks ago, she took her son to neighborhood tennis lessons, and an opponent who saw her there later wrote on SOS Union County’s Facebook page: “I finally saw that crazy troll in the flesh.”
Bouldin said she sometimes fights back with snarky comments.
She doesn’t know why, though, because “there is zero winning in that game.”
“I dream of the day when I can just walk away,” she said. “I hate social media. Have to save the country first …”
For ‘freedom’?
Patrick Norris moved to Union County in 2016. He’s a parent of three children and is vocal about the way “pandemic politics” has split the community.
“Last time I checked you can’t vote to make a pandemic end,” Norris said. “... But as it got further along, it became more of a fight about ‘no one tells me and my kid what to do,’ which is the exact opposite message kids should be learning from authority figures — teachers.”
Norris doesn’t know what or who influenced the school board during the pandemic. But, he said, something certainly made an impact.
“The fact that the majority of public school board members in one of the largest school districts in North Carolina could willfully ignore scientific data and public health recommendations and laws during a global pandemic and be proud of the fact that they put teachers and students at risk is hard to reconcile,” Norris said.
“These are the leaders guiding my children and an entire generation of children in Union County? For what? For ‘freedom?’ To simply wear a mask? I don’t know if they were influenced by a group like Moms for Liberty or if the national decline of civil political discourse just emboldened them (and their supporters) to come out of hiding.”
Chair of the Union County school board Melissa Merrell (who is also running for a county government board seat this year) says she has seen parent uprising in the district before. It was, actually, her own motivation to get involved.
About seven years ago, during a remake of school assignments, Merrell’s two sons were separated into two different clusters and would never get to attend the same school together. Parents begged her to run for a school board seat. She won in 2014 and was re-elected in 2018.
While there was a huge divide between parents and the school board and administration in 2014, the divide today between parents is very different, Merrell said.
“In 2014, the parents were united and worked together for the students,” she said. “During COVID-19, there has been a tremendous number of national issues and divisions with states handling COVID-19 differently from state to state.”
Merrell said schools with active parent groups have always performed much higher than average and new parents getting involved on either side of the aisle will benefit the district, keeping the checks and balances.
“I value parents getting involved and being part of the solution, not division,” she said.
Richard Daunt is a parent of two boys in Union County schools. His family moved to the area in October 2020. He stood on his own before any involvement with Moms for Liberty by creating his own Facebook group called Free Union County in January 2021. He says he was the first parent to speak publicly at a UCPS board meeting against masks and COVID-19 measures in April of 2021.
“I am not surprised that parent-driven political groups have popped up,” Daunt said. “I am more surprised that it took so long, considering how outrageously elected officials have behaved.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
