Weeks after a heated debate over the possibility of starting a high school chapter of deeply conservative Turning Point USA, a Black Virginia school board vice chairman has been censured for “unbecoming” conduct after a board meeting.
Prince William County School Board member Tracy L. Blake is accused of being “aggressive” and bullying another board member, Erica Tredinnick, who is also Black. Tredinnick, who supports the students’ right to start a chapter, alleges that Blake cursed at her and stepped in her personal space following a board meeting in early October. Blake does not support a student chapter.
The board’s Oct. 18 decision to censure Blake comes as political tensions continue across the country. Schools and colleges are caught in a political crossfire about free speech and the legacy of Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed last month while speaking at a Utah college campus.
The Prince William school district is nearly 19% Black, with the majority of the district identifying as minority, according to the district’s website.
Prince William County School Board member Tracy L. Blake is accused of being “aggressive” toward another board member. (Courtesy of Prince William County Public Schools)
Patriot High School, where students want to start the TPUSA chapter, is 13% Black, with 46% of the population identifying as white, according to the school’s demographics.
The students initially had difficulty starting the chapter because they have not been able to find a faculty sponsor, according to the Prince William Times.
There are more than 1,000 Turning Point USA high school chapters, which are called Club America, across the country, according to the organization. The TPUSA Students site, which is separate from the original Turning Point website, says it exists to educate young people on “limited government, free markets, and freedom.”
There are about 36 Club America chapters in the Virginia region, according to an interactive map on the Club America website. The Patriot High School location is shown on the map.
While censure is typically used in legislative bodies such as Congress and local political organizations to publicly condemn a member’s actions, more K-12 boards are using it to condemn the actions of board members.
In an email to Capital B, Prince William County Public Schools said the Turning Point USA chapter would be considered a non-school-sponsored club, which is protected under the Equal Access Act, which makes it unlawful to prohibit “any students who wish to conduct a meeting on non-instructional time on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meeting.”
The district said Thursday that the club has started and will meet this week.
Capital B also reached out multiple times to the school board members, Blake and Tredinnick, for comment, but has not heard back.
What exactly is censure?
Censure is an official rebuke of the behavior of a public official. Censure is not censorship, though the words share etymological roots.
Censure does not remove or take away the actions of a person in office.
After the Prince William County School Board voted 6-2 to censure Blake, another board member, Loree Y. Williams, who voted against the measure, said she wanted the public to know she disagreed with the decision, citing that it did not align with past incidents where the board voted whether to censure.
The school board has other disciplinary steps it can take prior to censure, such as verbal or written warnings.
While censure is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, it has been used as a form of punishment dating back to 1811, according to the U.S. Senate’s website. Some of the actions include reading confidential documents and the inappropriate use of campaign funds.
Censure may not be mentioned in the Constitution, but it is mentioned in some school board bylaws. Recently, schools and higher education institutions have utilized censure as a form of punishment.
Orange Unified School District in California has a censure policy in its bylaws for when members violate the law or school board policy, according to the district, but it cannot be used against a member’s First Amendment rights.
“To protect the overriding principle of freedom of speech, the Board of Education shall not impose ‘censure’ on any of its members for the exercise of his or her First Amendment rights, no matter how distasteful the expression was to the District and Board of Education,” the policy states.
This week, an Illinois school board censured Naperville District 203 School Board member Melissa Kelley Black for the second time this calendar year for “unprofessional behavior” regarding posting confidential information about teacher negotiations on her social media account, according to the Chicago Tribune.
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