PA: Pennridge Right Wing Looks To Pack Audience At Board Meeting

“Our end goal is that every single kid who leaves Pennridge loves this country and understands our constitution,” said Pennridge board member Ricki Chaikin back in April. But it turns out that installing a Christian nationalist curriculum created by a guy with no qualifications to create curriculum of any sort--well, a few folks are pushing back. And so right wingers have put out a request to pack tomorrow night's board meeting with "talented clappers." 

If you're just catching up on this story, let me bring you up to speed on the players.

Vermilion Education LLC

Vermilion as a consulting service that's just fresh off the edu-biz bush (about eight months old), so fresh that it appears to be just one guy. The address on its first contract proposal was a single family dwelling in a residential neighborhood in Hillsdale, Michigan. 

The one guy is Jordan Adams. Adams is a Hillsdale grad ('13), which means he was a Hillsdale student when they were launching their Barney charter schools initiative, and eventually became their Associate Director of Instructional Resources, supposedly teaching at charters for a year or two (though I can't find confirmation of that). I'll let you draw your own conclusion about his fitness for the role:

“I mostly focus on the history and Latin curricula, figuring out how things are taught in a fourth-grade or eleventh-grade classroom,” said Adams. He looks forward to experimenting with more accessible resources for teachers: “When you’re a first-year teacher, you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of what you’re supposed to be teaching. You don’t have time to sit down and read a long text about teaching. But maybe if there’s a short video that is clearly titled and easy to access, you might conceivably watch it while you’re making dinner.”

Gee, if there were only some place a first year teacher could get the education and preparation needed to be ready for that first day. But Adams' ideas about the first day are going to come back to haunt us.

Adams's original undergrad plan was to work at a think tank, then he went to grad school for a Masters of Humanities. One more educational amateur rediscovering the wheel. But apparently reinvented it well enough to move up to interim director of curriculum for the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, a job he was holding back in October of 2022.

Adams was part of the crew that screened the Florida math textbooks that DeSantis accused of being too indoctrinatey. 

Mentions of Adans have been scrubbed from the Hillsdale College website, but given how hard he's working promote their curriculum, I'd guess that the scrubbing is less about disowning him and more about covering his tracks. Because Adams has shown quite the tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth about what his goals are.

Vermilion's First Attempt To Land A Gig

Adams first attempt to get a gig was launched in Sarasota County, Florida, where Bridget Ziegler, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty, is school board president. So it should have been a very friendly environment in which to get his educational dewokifying services a first hire.

Adams made a couple of fumbles, not the least of which was sending Ziegler his real pitch without realizing it would become public record. So his promises to be an extension of the same right wing movement that got her elected with the intent of reshaping public education. He even offered to use his position to spy for her. He would audit the district's programs and screen for signs of staff and materials that weren't of the correct ideology. He would sit in on teacher interviews!

His mission was clear--root out and eradicate the wokeness from every corner of the district. His qualifications? Educationally non-existent, but ideologically right in line. The proposed contract, vague and open-ended, with odd features like Adams reporting directly and only to Ziegler. And all of it proposed with a very, very brief timeline presumably so that people couldn't go digging around too much.

But WTXL went digging anyway. And folks started noticing how shady it all looked. Protests were mounted. And in a surprise twist, the board voted 3-2 against the contract, with some deciding that, political leanings aside, it was a lot of money to pay for a guy with no actual qualifications.

Adams would have to look elsewhere for his first paying customer.

Welcome To Pennridge

If you want to find a home for right-wing education ideas north of the Mason-Dixon line, Bucks County PA is a fine place to go shopping. 

Pennridge School District is located in the Southeast, just north of Philly, in Bucks County. Their board has been pretty relentless in pursuing repressive and reactionary policies. They have trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they blew up DEI policies (even as they demonstrated why they needed such policies in place). And they are considering Hillsdale's ideological, biased and not very great 1776 Curriculum (Hillsdale is presided over by Larry Arrn, the guy that Donald Trump appointed to create an anti-1619 curriculum). So it was just the place to hire Vermilion.

By the end of April, Pennridge was hiring Adams on the promise that every kid in the district needed to learn to love this country and over the objections of staff and community members. 

By June, the wheels were already coming off, with the board essentially using Adams to replace in-house curriculum experts and comments, all negative, pushing a meeting to wee hours of the morning. His proposals included teaching Ancient Near East to first graders, to which some asked where one even finds age level materials for the topic.

“The question is why one man with limited experience is being entrusted to make educational decisions for the students in a district that he is not even a part of,” said Gordienko. “I implore you to please reexamine the decision to employ Mr. Adams and look at what you have right here in front of you.”

Adams had not worked with the staff, and one board member pointed out that the school board is required to ensure that employees charged with developing curriculum have appropriate qualifications, which includes five years of teaching and a principal or supervisory certification. Does Adams have those qualifications, he asked. No, Adams does not.

Despite his lack of qualifications, experience, or track record (when Pennridge hired him in April, he told them they were the first, and there are no signs that he's landed a second gig anywhere), Adams appeared at the Moms For Liberty conference on July 1 (his 65th day of employmety on his first consulting job) presenting a session entitled "The First 100 Days: Getting Flipped School Boards To Take Action." The Bucks County Beacon obtained audio, and hoo boy. 

While Adams was still claiming to be a non-partisan, non-ideological consultant, he was in Philadelphia delivering his template for how to manage the ideological takeover of a school district's operation. He was, he said, "a fox in the henhouse." His strategy advice involved flooding the zone, paralyze the district with constant requests for information, and basically roll over the educators who work in the district because they are to be treated as the enemy to your righteous crusade to install christianist nationalist education-ish stuff. 

So where are they now?

Maddie Hanna has been following the district for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her latest update from last Monday is not pretty.  Adams has his new social studies program, and remember his thoughts about the first day? Turns out it's policy, and the teachers at Pennridge are warning that they have not had the time to prep to teach all new units for the school year. 

“To be honest, I can feel a little panic setting in,” Melinda McCormick, a fifth-grade teacher, told the board at a meeting last Monday. McCormick said she’d never taught some of the topics in the new course — which includes a focus on the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln — and had she known of the changes earlier, “I would have spent many hours over the summer building my own background knowledge.”

Meanwhile, Adams has made Hillsdale's "1776 Curriculum" as a "required" resource for teachers. Plenty has been written about the inadequacies of the program, but this sums it up well:

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told The Inquirer the Hillsdale curriculum “fundamentally distorts modern American history into a crusade of righteous conservative patriots against heretical big-government liberals.”

Hillsdale’s curriculum for third to fifth graders refers to Jamestown’s “original experiment with a form of communism,” which “helped produce a disastrous first year and a half for the fledgling settlement."

That upset was the subject of last Monday's board committees meeting; the next full meeting will be tomorrow (August 28), and the supporters for Adams redesign of the district curriculum are getting ready. The following was sent out Friday from Hope for PA, one of Bucks County's many rightwing groups:

Yes, that's real. Note: "You do not have to be a resident" 

I am not sure what "untalented clappers" would look like (they insist in clapping on 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4?) but I imagine they might welcome them, too. The important lesson here is that the next time you see coverage showing a noisy and enthusiastic crowd at a board meeting, it may not have anything to do with what the actual residents actually think.

Also, if I were a Pennridge district resident who was tired of this nonsense putting ideological purity over actual educational concerns, I might get myself to that meeting tomorrow night. Because this may be Adams' first job, but if he shows he can successfully install christianist nationalism in a school district, it probably won't be his last, and it would be a shame if this particular grift is inflicted on the taxpayers and students of other districts.