VIRGINIA – Statewide nonprofits Red Wine & Blue and We the People For Education are launching a multi-city tour across Virginia starting Wednesday, October 4. Other partner organizations include Vote Mama, MomsRising, NextGen, and National Women’s Political Caucus VA.
The 6 stops on the “Parents, Not Politics” tour taking place throughout October include:
Roanoke County – October 4
Front Royal – October 5
Henrico/Chesterfield – October 12
Leesburg – October 14
Prince William County – October 16
Spotsylvania/Stafford – October 19
Each “Parents Not Politics” event will feature candid and critical conversations between school board members and candidates, parents, and students about the ongoing threat of extremism on local school boards and how these efforts to push a radical, far-right agenda harms our children and undermines public education.
Each stop will also offer Red Wine & Blue’s famed Troublemaker Trainings to give parents the tools and organizing network they need to make a measurable difference in their own school districts.
Parents, Not Politics will offer substantive discussions that bring communities together, a sharp contrast to Gov. Youngkin’s “Parents Matter” tour, which only served to highlight extreme political rhetoric and pit parents against educators.
“Mainstream parents do not want to be told how to raise their children by Glenn Youngkin or any other extremist politician in Richmond,” said Penny Blue, the Red Wine & Blue Virginia Program Director. “The stakes for public education and students in this election are clear. At the end of the day, Virginia parents want the freedom to parent and to work with their children’s teachers, principals and local school boards to help prepare their children for 2050—not be dragged back to 1950.”
“Our public schools are successful when teachers, parents, students and community members comes together to embrace common-sense solutions,” said Tiffany Van Der Hyde, the executive director of We the People for Education. “This tour is an opportunity to not only push back against the extremism we have seen trickling down from the Governor’s Office all the way to our own neighborhoods, but to show families across Virginia that there is a better way forward, and it starts by electing effective, pro-public education candidates to our school boards.”
The events will also address the ongoing efforts to impede our student’s freedom to learn and to feel safe, including banning books, attacking our most marginalized students, demonizing teachers, librarians and other educators, stoking fear in parents, dividing communities with extremist, dangerous rhetoric, and spreading damaging misinformation.
Red Wine & Blue is an empowered community of half a million diverse women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. They train and connect women across the country with a network of half a million suburban women of all political backgrounds – including many who have never been political before – to organize in their communities and address the growing threats of extremism to public education, reproductive freedom, and democracy.
We the People for Education is a Virginia-based nonprofit focused on recruiting, training and supporting common-sense school board leaders. By empowering reasonable, pro-public education community members to push back against divisiveness and extremism, we aim to bring teachers, parents, students and communities together to champion proven solutions to the real challenges our schools face. Learn more about our work and get involved at wethepeopleforeducation.org.