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During the last Community Education Council elections in 2023, Manhattan parent Joseph Wallace was barely aware of the existence of his local parent council — much less who served on it or what happened during meetings.
That changed over the next two years as the council in Manhattan’s District 2, which runs from the lower tip of the borough to the Upper East Side, dove headlong into the culture wars consuming school boards across the country.
In early 2024, two council members spoke at a Manhattan town hall for the right-wing national parent group Moms for Liberty. Several months later, the council passed a resolution calling on the city Education Department to reconsider its policy allowing transgender girls to join girls sports teams, sparking months of sustained protest and media attention.
Both efforts — surprising for a parent group in deep blue Manhattan — were spurred by council members linked to the influential and polarizing local education advocacy group Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, or PLACE, whose co-founder Maud Maron is a current member of the council and is running for re-election.
“What has upset me most is I thought it was kind of this innocuous council, and it turns out people are waging culture wars,” said Wallace, a parent at P.S. 51 in Hell’s Kitchen.
PLACE – which launched in 2019 to defend selective admissions policies and whose leaders have embraced efforts to rid schools of “gender ideology” and critical race theory – maintains the group is apolitical and interested primarily in rigorous education. But in New York City, as in districts across the country, national partisan political fights have increasingly made their way into local education debates, sharpening divides between parents.
Now, with a new CEC election cycle underway through May 13, there are signs of a growing backlash against what some parents see as an alarming rightward shift in the city’s education councils, spurred by PLACE’s success in propelling its preferred candidates into seats in 2021 and 2023.
In District 2, Wallace is part of an energetic movement to unseat PLACE candidates, with two organizing groups springing up this election cycle. Other efforts to counter PLACE-backed candidates have emerged in Brooklyn and Queens, and the progressive advocacy group Alliance for Quality Education endorsed candidates for the first time. Even PLACE seems to be feeling the shifting winds — making the surprise move not to endorse Maron, the parent leader who put the group on the map.
Maron’s response to being left off the group’s list: “Trans activists scare a lot of people into taking cowardly positions. Appeasement never works and I don’t scare so easily,” she wrote in an email.
Across the city, 1,346 candidates have tossed their hats in the ring for council seats, up from 1,107 in 2023, according to the Education Department. And parent leaders in multiple districts told Chalkbeat they’re seeing more energy and interest than ever before in this year’s CEC elections — propelled both by local concerns and urgent fears over the Trump administration’s efforts to target transgender and immigrant students, and efforts to cut federal funding for high-poverty schools.
“In this political climate, it’s very easy to feel powerless over a lot of things, and I just felt like this was something I don’t have to feel powerless over,” said Leila Colbert, a District 2 candidate.
Obstacles to voter turnout remain
It remains to be seen how effective or widespread the effort to challenge PLACE-backed candidates will be. CEC elections have notoriously low-turnout. In 2023, only 2% of eligible parents voted. Wealthier areas, like District 2, where parents have the savvy and wherewithal to navigate the voting process tend to see higher voter participation.
There are Community Education Councils for each of New York City’s 32 local districts, as well as four citywide councils, representing high schools, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities.
The councils are largely advisory but have the power to approve zoning decisions and can serve as a public platform and point of access to decisionmakers.
Councils in some districts, particularly in more conservative areas like western Queens and southern Brooklyn, are almost entirely composed of PLACE-backed candidates and opposition groups are supporting few challengers.
But the local anti-PLACE movement is getting a boost from the same political energy that has powered backlashes against conservative school board candidates in other parts of the country and the recent groundswell of progressive candidates entering local races to push back against Trump.
“We’ve been seeing it over the last really year-plus, and there’s reason to suspect that it will continue to snowball in the upcoming batch of CEC elections… especially in CEC 2,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers College.
Amid that backlash, PLACE leaders are making a concerted effort to pull back from hot-button political issues. PLACE co-president Yiatin Chu said the decision not to endorse Maron, who is also running as a Republican for Manhattan District Attorney, was driven by wanting to reduce some of the “distractions” that created dysfunction in the District 2 council.
“With so much noise and culture wars on the national stage and in the city, it becomes distractions for what we’re trying to do,” Chu said. “Once you start veering into other issues … it’s not helpful for our advocacy.”
Maron, who was removed from the council by former schools Chancellor David Banks in 2024 for misconduct but reinstated after she sued the city, defended her “proven track record of protecting merit-based academics in NYC public schools and supporting District 2 families.”
“Improving the math curriculum does not conflict with addressing the harms of hormonal and surgical interventions, misleadingly called ‘gender-affirming care,’ or standing up for female student athletes’ rights to same sex sports,” she added, referring to medical treatment for transgender youth backed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Other former PLACE leaders running for re-election also sought to distance themselves from Maron and the issues and groups she has embraced.
Craig Slutzkin, CEC 2 president and a former PLACE officer who is among the primary targets of the anti-PLACE organizing in District 2, wrote in an open letter that he has “never been a member of the MAGA movement” and is “not affiliated with Moms for Liberty.”
PLACE is “very, very narrowly focused on rigorous education” and “want[s] nothing to do” with the transgender sports issue, said Deborah Alexander, a candidate for the Citywide Council on High Schools, and a former long-time PLACE officer. “Personally, I would not remain in PLACE if that’s what PLACE was about,” she added, noting she has transgender and nonbinary family members.
Some critics have also questioned why many of PLACE’s former officers, including Alexander and Slutzkin, don’t mention their PLACE affiliation in official CEC candidate bios. Both Slutzkin and Alexander said they consider their PLACE advocacy separate from their CEC roles. Alexander, who is running as a Bronx representative to the Citywide Council on High Schools, added that she doesn’t think “the constituency of the Bronx has any idea who PLACE is particularly. Our reach doesn’t really go there much as much as we’ve tried.”
PLACE’s efforts to create distance from the transgender sports resolution — which was purely advisory and swiftly rejected by the Education Department — ring hollow to many critics.
“I think they’re trying to change the optics but I don’t think much has changed in the hearts and minds of PLACE,” said Gavin Healy, a current District 2 council member who voted against the transgender sports resolution.
PLACE is still endorsing six District 2 CEC members, including Slutzkin, who voted with Maron in support of the transgender sports resolution, along with the other council member who spoke at the Moms for Liberty event.
A new opposition emerges in District 2
Megan Madison, a children’s book author, said she first became aware of District 2’s CEC when one of its PLACE-endorsed members challenged the inclusion of a book she wrote about race in a central Education Department curriculum.
But she stepped up her involvement after the council passed its transgender sports resolution in March 2024, sensing an opportunity to tap into growing energy around defending transgender rights.
A group that called itself the “Aunties” began flooding council meetings, sometimes with hundreds of members, and accompanied by well-known figures like actor Elliot Page. Protesters speak during public comment, wave colorful banners, and sometimes drown out council members with chants and songs.
Over time, the protests morphed into a more organized effort to unseat Maron and other PLACE-backed candidates. Madison, who is not a public school parent, was shocked at the low levels of engagement and turnout in the last CEC election and saw room to bring in new voters.
The group has amassed a listserv in the thousands and got 60 volunteers to canvas and post flyers, Madison said. In recent weeks, another grassroots group called Families for Change NYC emerged to challenge PLACE-backed candidates. The group, which describes itself as a loose coalition of more than 75 parents and community members seeking candidates who represent the views of “ordinary parents,” has not disclosed the names of its members out of fear of harassment — a decision that sparked criticism from PLACE co-president Chu.
As the campaigning in the district has picked up, so has the dysfunction in the District 2 council. The body is often unable to pass resolutions, roiled by partisan splits, council members shouting over each other, and accusations that the protests have turned into harassment. Some members left meetings early, sparking accusations that they are trying to prevent votes.
The problems caught the attention of Congress members Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman, who, along with nine state and local elected officials, penned a letter last month urging the city Education Department to crack down on behavior that “violates the public trust, and disregards the basic principles of good governance and transparency.”
Slutzkin, the council president, said there is no mechanism to prevent members from leaving early, and that the elected officials’ letter contained multiple falsehoods.
He’s been appalled by some of the campaign tactics of PLACE opponents, including plastering dozens of flyers with a picture of his face around his child’s school, Slutzkin said. The Education Department office overseeing the elections sent a message last week saying that flyers “that disparage candidates, and which are placed near schools … represent a serious erosion of the fairness and integrity of the election process.”
Madison said the Aunties have tried to steer clear of personal attacks, but being on a council means being “public about your politics and therefore accountable to the public.”
Beyond the results of the election, Madison sees the publicity the group has generated — along with PLACE’s decision not to endorse Maron — as a sign that “we’re winning, little by little.”
District 2 campaign echoes citywide
While the energy of the PLACE opposition is concentrated in District 2, it has also reverberated in other parts of the city.
In District 30 in Jackson Heights, Queens, a group of parents called “D30 Parents Protecting Trans Children” organized to endorse t a slate of candidates, motivated by what happened in District 2 and fears about the federal efforts to target transgender kids, said Hallie Iiannoli, one of the leaders.
One of the current members of the District 30 council who was endorsed by PLACE in 2023 and again this year asked PLACE to remove her from their list because she didn’t want to be associated with the District 2 resolution on transgender kids and sports.
“I know they’re strong on Gifted and Talented, which I’m strong on too. What I don’t believe in is being against trans [children],” said the council member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she didn’t want to speak publicly about endorsements.
In Brooklyn’s District 15, a long-running group called D15 Parents for Middle School Equity endorsed a slate of PLACE challengers for the second time, including in the Citywide Council for High Schools, or CCHS, which has become a stronghold for PLACE-backed candidates in recent elections.
Reyhan Mehran, the group’s founder, said she’s seen increased engagement during this election cycle, driven by the “outrageousness of what happened in CEC 2,” but is skeptical that there will be any major changes in the voting outcomes.
Julia Watson, a spokesperson for Alliance for Quality Education, said in an email the group decided to endorse this year “because of the harm we’ve seen in the past couple years when there are people in office that do not have all the kids’ best interest in mind.”
Debbie Kross, a former PLACE officer and current president of the CCHS, said the idea of running to unseat PLACE candidates because of concerns about what happened in District 2 or in an effort to push back against the Trump administration is both wrongheaded and naive.
“They’re just running out of spite,” she said.
“If the hope of these people is they’re gonna run and they’re gonna fight Trump, I mean, good luck,” she added. “Because we don’t have any of that power.”
But Madison, the organizer in District 2, said that while it’s true the CECs have limited power, diminishing their importance “has functioned to decrease engagement.”
PLACE itself has built influence and political power through its success in CEC elections, she added. “I think it does matter.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.