Tricia Doebler, who was vice chair of the Bucks County Moms for Liberty until March, saw this new rule as a sign the district was getting “back to academic excellence.” She and other local parents declared their support at board meetings while wearing Moms for Liberty shirts.
“I don’t think that they would want to see a pro-life poster in the classroom or a thin blue line sign,” Doebler said in an interview. “I could make the argument that my child would feel much safer — being the child of a police officer — walking into a classroom seeing a thin blue line flag knowing that that teacher supported police officers. So I think the neutrality policy protects our classrooms from the outside noise that has gotten a lot louder in the last three years.
But Ben Busick, who graduated from the Central Bucks district this month and is nonbinary, said the new policy enabled bullying of LGBTQ students, many of whom have spoken at board meetings about being called slurs without consequences. “The policy doesn’t say to treat LGBT students worse,” Busick said, “but it allows students to act that way because it forces teachers into neutrality and it thrusts the students right into vulnerability without any sense of safety.”
"It makes it really, really difficult to have a substantive learning environment when you’re in the middle of this cultural war."The backlash to the new policy went beyond the district. Fifty-two school board members from 25 Pennsylvania districts condemned the Central Bucks board’s conservative majority in a