Wall of Shame: For Gwinnett County School Board, Bad Just Got Worse with Tik Tok Tarece
With the help of radical Georgia activists like Stacey Abrams, Gwinnett County School Board underwent a takeover by the Democratic party in 2020. The culmination of this takeover occurred with a vote last week, with Democrats winning 3-2 in favor of the appointment of TikTok Tarece as the new chair of the board. Gwinnett County is the largest school district in Georgia with nearly 180,000 students and a $2.40 billion annual budget.
Tarece Johnson came onto BEST’s radar in the spring of 2020 when she led the efforts to fire the long-standing and very accomplished Gwinnett County Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks, who was resistant to the board’s radical agenda. TikTok Tarece and her cohorts were successful in their efforts to push Superintendent Wilbanks into retirement in order to bring into a once conservative North Atlanta community a new superintendent from Washington state with west coast politics. TikTok Tarece is the name given to the board member by local parents because of her apparent obsession with posting her chants and rants decrying America as racist on the popular social media app TikTok.
Gwinnett County parents are to be commended for not backing down throughout this leftist takeover of their schools. Throughout the last year and half, they have been dedicated advocates for reopening schools, ending mask mandates, and keeping the radical teaching of CRT, Comprehensive Sex Ed, and Gender Identity out of schools. Because of the laundry list of issues plaguing this district, parents have been bravely flocking to the school board meetings and hosting rallies.
Despite the concerns of these parents, the school board voted last summer to limit citizens’ input at the monthly meetings by capping the total number of speakers at 30 with three minutes each or 45 with two minutes each.The board’s new rules aimed at censorship also include limiting speakers to one time every three months, having only one speaker per topic, and requiring requests to speak to be submitted ahead of meetings. The board’s rationale for these anti-parent changes is that the meetings were going on too long. Imagine the parents’ horror at this fake excuse.
The truth of the matter is that the board majority is tied tightly to the National School Board Associations’ coordinated efforts to investigate any outspoken and nonconforming parent as a “domestic terrorist.” In the recent, shameful NSBA request to the Biden Administration for DOJ intervention, Gwinnett County parents were named specifically for their refusal to wear masks during board meetings last summer. Yes, refusal to wear a mask made the list of criteria for Merrick Garland to unleash the FBI on parents.
With this in mind and all the forces acting against parents, it’s not so hard to see how someone as radical as TikTok Tarece make it onto the Gwinnett County School Board school board unchallenged. Unfortunately, the fact is that pre-2020, most communities were uninterested in and overlooked school board elections. In 2022 and beyond, we should let this failure be a stark lesson for us all. School board elections need to be taken seriously by the Republican Party and, most importantly, by parents. Don’t overlook them just because they are often technically nonpartisan elections.The radical Left is working hard to get their minions like Tik Tok Tarece elected.
In 2022 and beyond, we have to work overtime to take back school board seats and become the board majority. It is imperative that we succeed for the sake of our children’s future.
