Virginia school board member Ray Stier defended missing meetings during the troop deployment
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., reprimanded the school board in Richmond, Michigan, after some of its members tried to remove a conservative colleague for missing meetings during a military deployment to the Middle East.
Ray Stier, who received an American flag and a copy of the Congressional Record from McClain on Thursday in recognition of his work, had been deployed, attending board meetings remotely, but eventually lost visual access.
It was then that the board said that he should be removed from his position, citing the “injustice” caused by his absence.
“One of the board members was talking on social media, putting false information about me and my wife and things that are not true, which ended up with me resigning and causing others to reach the district to call me to be reinstated,” said Stier.
The moment is the latest in a spat between Republicans and school boards over policies that, in their view, are policing schools against diversity of thought and accountability.
“I think education is very important and very important,” McClain told Fox News Digital.
“And teachers and administrators need to teach children how to think, not what to think. It’s time that administrators begin to answer for their actions. Good actions and bad actions.”
McClain’s meeting with Stier comes after a congressional hearing last week in which he briefed Virginia’s superintendent on student privacy policies, investigating whether those policies were being applied equally to transgender students.
“The victims received a 10-day suspension and the woman who made the film was suspended for one day,” McClain said, referring to an incident at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County where students were ordered to film in a locker room.
“How does that sound?”
In Stier’s case, McClain asked if the board targeted Stier because of his overseas assignment.
Stier clashed with the board after hearing that some of the district’s bathroom policies would allow fourth-graders to use the same bathroom as transgender eighth-graders.
“Before he filled the seat, the seat had been open for two months,” McClain noted. So that logical argument makes no sense to me; it doesn’t really hold much water.”
For his part, Stier believes his case will once again focus on the importance of the school board and its membership.
“My goal is to continue being a public advocate, one of the good things that I think has come out of this is that it has been looked at so much that some members of the public were not aware of the changes that can be made public,” said Stier.
