OCEAN CITY – Two slates of three candidates each are vying for the three open seats on the Board of Education, with the issues of parental rights and local control once again prominent in the race.

The three incumbents are all seeking reelection but are split between the opposing slates.

On one slate, school board President Kevin Barnes has allied with two non-members, Jennifer Cawley-Black and Jennifer Dwyer, in trying to unseat conservative parents rights advocates Elizabeth Nicoletti and Catherine Panico, who in turn have paired off with previous board member Robin Shaffer in seeking to oust Barnes.

The nine-member board has three additional non-voting members as representatives of Upper Township. Both Upper Township and Sea Isle City send their students to Ocean City, with Sea Isle as a non-operating district and Upper Township running its own pre-K to 8 district that uses Ocean City for its high school.

Barnes, who has repeatedly resisted the intrusion of politics into the activities of the school board, and his running mates oppose the actions of some parental rights advocates who challenge school policies with respect to controversial health curriculum topics and the rights of students to privacy on transgender issues.

He was recently instrumental in closing down an attempt to have a new vote on Policy 5756, which allows schools to use the chosen name and pronoun of transgender students without parental consent. The policy, based on state guidance, was affirmed in a school board vote in March in which Panico and Nicoletti supported repealing it. In May, when another attempt to repeal the policy was made, Barnes said the board would not reconsider the March vote.

One of the major issues raised by Policy 5756 is that, in protecting a student’s choice of preferred name and pronouns, it does not require parental consent and expressly prevents the district from notifying the parents or guardians without permission of the student. That puts the debate squarely at the center of the parents rights controversy that has roiled the board since 2022.

Panico, Nicoletti and Shaffer ran together successfully in 2022, when Panico and Nicoletti won full terms and Shaffer gained a one-year term on an unexpired seat. A year later Shaffer lost his bid for a full term.

The threesome had the endorsement of the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty in 2022 and expects to receive it again this year. Moms for Liberty is a parents rights advocacy organization best known for challenging the inclusion of LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory in curriculums. The group also supports other conservative education issues, including concerns about how climate change is depicted.

Although the school board elections in Ocean City are nonpartisan, Schaffer has been quoted as saying he is a strong supporter of gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli. Ciattarelli’s campaign promises a parents bill of rights, although the details of what would be included are not fully known yet.

Another major area of difference between the two slates concerns views of the school board’s role in the management of education. While Barnes and his slate take the position that the school board supports teachers and administrators who actually run the school system and deal with the curriculum, the other slate sees a stronger, more intrusive role for the school board that ensures the content of the curriculum and flexibility to participate in its continuing formation as responsive to the values of parents.

Contact the reporter, Vince Conti, at vconti@cmcherald.com