GARDINER — When Sage Sculli’s school district contemplated opening a health center, she liked the idea.

The clinic at Gardiner Area High School would help under-resourced students without health insurance. Plus, in her capacity as the student representative on the school board, she’d asked around; her peers thought it was a good idea, too. 

A group of conservative Mainers did not. They believed the center would provide gender-affirming care behind the backs of parents, and they began organizing against it. 

A local right-wing news outlet posted video clips of Sculli’s school board testimony, saying she lacked the maturity to advocate for the clinic. Activists filed a public records request for copies of her text messages. One conservative parent contacted Dartmouth College, where Sculli had applied, hoping to get her deferral letter. 

“That’s how far these people are willing to go,” Sculli said in a recent interview.

Justin Basinger, the father of another student, saw the behavior of these parents and figured he could help stop it. 

As clips of raucous school board meetings started to go viral, he began attending and speaking out in support of Sculli and the school health center. 

“I was like, ‘I know this kid,’” Basinger said. “This kid could be my kid.” 

Basinger worried what the harassment would lead to and connected with Sculli’s mom, Jennifer Sculli, on a progressive Facebook page. They decided to form a group to counter what was going on in the district. 

After months of discussion, Basinger and Jennifer Sculli, along with a few others, created Gardiner Regional Education Advocacy Team, a political action committee, otherwise known as GREAT. The group’s aim is to support all students — a stance they say is in direct contrast to the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric from conservative parents’ organizations that are growing in Maine.  

An investigation published in November by the Kennebec Journal/Centralmaine.com found that conservative donors, some of whom have ties to Christian nationalist organizations, have been funneling money into parents’ rights organizations in Maine in an attempt to reform education at the local level. 

They’re stepping in at a charged time for Maine schools. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump are waging a legal battle over a Trump executive order to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. At least five school districts have gone around Mills and changed their policies to mirror Trump’s order. 

Parents’ rights groups have massive and influential online megaphones that their opponents, including the Scullis, have said make them feel like the targets of harassment. Some have filed for protection orders.

Groups of parents like GREAT are organizing to push back against their conservative counterparts. They style themselves not as “pro-parent” but as “pro-student,” or “pro-education.” They don’t appear to have the same national backing as parents’ rights groups, but at least six such groups now exist in Maine, and they’re becoming a factor in local school board elections. 

In the local November races, a GREAT-endorsed candidate won a seat on the Gardiner-area school board. Another lost her race to a parental rights backer. 

FROM INDIANA TO MAINE 

Four years ago, Alvin Lui showed up at a school board meeting in Carmel, Indiana. He came in hot. 

“All of you worship at the altar of social and emotional learning. We hear you talk about this all of the time… How come I never hear you talking about parental choice?” he asked, clad in an American flag hat and matching T-shirt.

He advocated against students wearing masks at school, saying that teachers should “find a different profession” if they disagree. 

A California native and a newcomer to the community, Lui created Unify Carmel, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in May 2021 and set out to “restore academic excellence” in the Carmel Clay School District. 

The nonprofit was connected to a wealthy national conservative activist, tax records show. He spread the anti-woke gospel with gusto. Unify Carmel’s Facebook page included  hundreds of anti-diversity missives in 2021. Lui posted photos of teachers and board members who supported the measures he criticized. 

It’s a similar routine that Lui has copied in recent years to gain prominence in Maine. His newest parents’ rights group, Courage is a Habit, routinely blasts its political opponents to his tens of thousands of followers. In a post earlier this year, Lui’s group called Basinger a “transgender cultist jerkoff.” Basinger got death threats afterward and saw his address posted online, his partner, Emma Doxsee, said at a school board meeting.

But just like some Gardiner parents are starting to do now, parents in Indiana took action against Lui.

Nicki McNally started Support Carmel Clay Schools, a political action committee, which became a resource to help candidates on the pro-student side run a campaign to get elected to the school board. The goal was to find representatives who would promote policies for all students and their backgrounds. 

Jennifer Cashin, who now leads the group, said  the organization doesn’t have a liberal agenda. It has endorsed independents, Democrats and Republicans; Cashin herself is a Republican. But it was also an undeniable counterweight to Lui’s conservative activism. (Lui did not respond to requests for comment.) 

Two of the three candidates that the Support Clay County Schools PAC backed in the 2022 election won seats on the board, Cashin said. 

“The organization grew to a point where people trust that if we endorse a candidate, they are the pro-education choice,” she said. 

Several months after he burst onto the scene, Lui stopped posting on Facebook and filing taxes under Unify Carmel. He rebranded, and moved his focus to Maine.

‘WE’RE REGULAR MAINE PARENTS’ 

Parents’ rights activists say their primary goal is not disruption, it’s holding school officials accountable. 

The real problem is not parents asking questions, Allen Sarvinas, the leader of the Maine chapter of the group Parents Rights in Education, wrote in a recent email newsletter — it’s school boards and superintendents spending taxpayer dollars to “avoid answering basic questions” from Maine parents.

“We’re regular Maine parents, grandparents and taxpayers who can’t afford high-priced lobbyists or six-figure PR campaigns,” wrote Sarvinas, referring to staff unions and the school system at large. 

“Any support we receive pales in comparison to the millions funneled into teachers’ unions and progressive nonprofits that aggressively target compelled minors while separated from their parents,” Sarvinas wrote in his newsletter. “If a few concerned Mainers want to help level the playing field, we embrace it.”

The self-styled pro-education parents describe themselves the same way, but unlike the parents’ rights groups, they say, they don’t have big national backers.

When Allison Caros Long, a teacher in Oxford Hills, heard about the parental rights organizations and their penchant for meeting interruptions and online name calling, she tried to find organizers who were fighting back and standing up for students and teachers. 

Long said she couldn’t find anything. 

So she connected with two other women to start the nonprofit Support Maine Public Schools in March 2023.

The group has not yet posted its tax filings online, but Long said that fundraising is one of her biggest challenges.  She said they rely on small dollar donations from the community and don’t have any major supporters. 

In Gardiner, GREAT estimates it raised $700 for its two school board campaigns this year. (GREAT does not have to file campaign finance reports because it is in a municipality that has fewer than 15,000 residents, per Maine law.)  

Cashin, the Indiana activist, said that fundraising picture mirrors her own.  

“They are generally community-based PACs,” Cashin said. “Therefore, fundraising is a lot harder. Everything is run by volunteers.” Without the same level of financial backing as their opponents, she said everything was more difficult. 

Whether the parents’ rights groups are backed by genuine grassroots activism, wealthy donors or a mixture of both, something needs to change, other parents say.

The goal is not to rid the districts  of parental rights organizations, but for communities to be supportive of their public schools — and to make that support  known, said Long. The group encourages all community members to show up to school board meetings and share their perspective as a taxpayer in the district. 

Support Maine Public Schools has now connected with allies in at least 10 school districts, including Gardiner’s. 

“With a lot of these people and extremists, they are not going to waste their time in a community well-organized against them,” Long said. “Where a team is organized and makes it well known at a school board meeting, the extremists die down.”