Last spring, when the odds seemed far longer, Bob Cousineau, a social studies teacher at Pennridge High School, predicted that whatever happened in his embattled district would become a national “case study” one way or another. It would either create “the blueprint” for outside political interests to enact a complete takeover of local public schools, he said, or “the blueprint for how to stand up to it.”
For much of the past two years, Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—one of Philadelphia’s suburban swing counties—has served as an experiment in how far conservatives can pull public schools right.
Until this past November, its nine school board members had all been elected as Republicans, including a five-member majority reportedly affiliated with the activist group Moms for Liberty. Policies introduced by the board and district administrators in recent years have been sweeping: Two separate groups focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues were shut down; LGBTQ+ “Pride” rainbows were banned alongside other “advocacy” symbols; curriculum was repeatedly changed or culled to remove purportedly partisan topics; and more than a dozen library books—most related to race, gender, or sexuality—were reportedly “shadow-banned” by officials unwilling to wait for a formal review. Anti-trans policies were passed, school staff were ordered not to use “terms related to LGBTQ,” and a full year of social studies was cut from graduation requirements to make room for supposedly more patriotic instruction.
All of this reached a boiling point last April, when Pennridge hired a brand-new consultancy firm called Vermilion Education. The company, according to its website, is intended to help school board members keep their districts “ideology-free,” but critics say it is meant to transform public school districts along the lines of the right-wing Hillsdale College. At the Moms for Liberty annual conference in July, Vermilion founder Jordan Adams said that districts like Pennridge, where conservatives had gained control of school boards, faced a “do or die kind of moment” to enact so many new changes, so swiftly, that their opponents wouldn’t be able to resist. “If we don’t make the most of this chance,” he said, “we’re not going to get another one.”
“It hit us like a ton of bricks,” said Laura Foster, a local mother who helped create the progressive advocacy group the Ridge Network to fight the right-wing dominance of Pennridge’s schools. “They systematically changed policies in the school…so if there’s racism happening, you can’t do anything about it; if there’s homophobia, you can’t do anything about it. Just these methodical, step-by-step plays.”
That’s how things seemed in Pennridge until November’s school board election, when all five open seats were won by Democrats—a stunning turnaround in a district with a more than 3:2 Republican advantage. A week later, another page in an emerging playbook for fighting back was more quietly revealed, when a group of Pennridge community members charged that the policies Pennridge had adopted weren’t just partisan, but violated civil rights law, in a federal complaint that could have implications far beyond Bucks County.
When the Pennridge board passed a last-minute motion to hire Vermilion Education last April, the company was virtually unheard of apart from a controversy that had just roiled Sarasota, Florida. There, another school board had unsuccessfully attempted to contract it to review curricula, teacher trainings, union contracts, and more.
But if Adams and Vermilion were unknown quantities, for many in Pennridge, what they seemed to represent was not.
Before officially launching Vermilion in March, Adams had worked for his alma mater, Hillsdale—a private Christian college in Michigan dedicated to “classical” education, hard-right political advocacy, and spreading its education model nationwide. Its “1776 Curriculum” for grades K-12 has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony. Hillsdale boasts a national network of affiliated charter schools, and one of its former professors helped revise South Dakota’s social studies standards along the lines of the 1776 Curriculum. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a slate of hard-right board members at the public New College of Florida, with the goal of transforming it into a “little Hillsdale” of the South.
A Hillsdale employee until early 2023, Adams worked on its charter program and to promote the college’s 1776 Curriculum. He’d also been enlisted by Florida’s Department of Education to review math textbooks for “prohibited topics” like critical race theory, and by South Dakota to train teachers on the new social studies standards.
In Sarasota, after public outcry over Adams’s proposed contract with the district, two conservative board members broke rank and blocked it. The following week, after Pennridge hired Vermilion instead, Sarasota board chair Bridget Ziegler—a Moms for Liberty cofounder—lamented on Facebook that Vermilion’s inaugural “‘WOKE’ Audit” should have been with them. “We could have and should have led on this.”
