FILE PHOTO - Central Okanagan school district superintendent Kevin Kaardal (left) and former school board chair Moyra Baxter are seen in this undated file photo.

(JOHN MCDONALD / iNFOnews.ca)

Parents have been concerned about how their children are educated probably ever since there were schools.

But the tone of the debate has deteriorated since the COVID pandemic to the point where the Vernon School District has banned the public from its meetings after a December meeting was halted during an anti-SOGI rant.

READ MORE: IN VIDEO: Vernon school board meeting disrupted and shut down by protesters

At the board's meeting last night, Jan. 25, the public could only speak through Zoom. No protesters did so.

The decision to cut off in-person attendance is something former Central Okanagan school board chair Moyra Baxter doesn’t support.

She went through similar protests during COVID where she actually got death threats and may have been the most harassed school board chair in BC at the time.

READ MORE: Kelowna school board chair may be the most harassed in B.C. by anti-vaxers

Baxter first became a school trustee in 1996 and before that was heavily involved in parents groups. She served as chair from 2006 until she chose not to run for re-election in 2022.

She recalls a board meeting held prior to first getting elected that had to be held at the Martin Education Centre because so many people were upset about plans to bring sex education into schools.

“That got very heated and people stood up and we all thought: ‘Oh my goodness. That’s unbelievable,'” she said. “Compared to these people (protesters in Vernon), they were pretty, in a way, tame.”

The current protests are against the provincial Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity or SOGI provisions that “helps educators make schools inclusive and safe for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities," according to the SOGI website.

The BC Human Rights Code was changed in 2016 to recognize sexual orientation and gender identity, and the strategy was rolled out in schools in 2018.

That led to a packed school board meeting where, Baxter was told, opponents were bussed in.

“People wanted to speak about it,” she said. “I was chairing that meeting and allowed them all to speak and was respectful towards them. We heard everything they all had to say.

“The speakers were civil. Obviously, there were people who would start clapping. I was very, very adamant that we will not have any applause one way or the other. We do not applaud people. We do not boo people. People were quite respectful. We were careful to lay down the rules right from the beginning.”

The tone of protests changed during the pandemic when people were upset by vaccine and mask mandates in schools.

Baxter even got harassed by the so-called queen of Canada, a cult leader named Romana Didulo.

“She sent registered mail to me and the superintendent telling us to report immediately to the nearest penitentiary, actually saying we should be executed,” Baxter said. “It was a pretty weird time when you were getting this sort of stuff all the time.”

At that time, board meetings were held over Zoom because of COVID safe distancing rules. During one meeting, 1,000 people signed in, which was the limit to what Zoom could handle.

“We did allow people to speak,” Baxter said. “We did go through a certain number who put their hands up who wanted to speak. We extended the meeting and extended the meeting. It had gone on for about 2.5 hours and then you started getting the abuse. In the end, I had to shut the meeting down when we started getting foul language.”

The school district also hired a security company because people were getting disruptive outside the meeting room.

“It just was, the people had an attitude that this was their right,” Baxter said. “I think it was a similar thing to what I saw in that video (of the anti-SOGI protest) in Vernon. The person speaking said that, if you walk out of here, you will be deemed to have resigned your positions.”

It's a change she finds hard to explain but recognizes some of the same people in the anti-SOGI movement as being the anti-vaccine, anti-mask campaigners of just a couple of years ago.

“We see this all over the world,” Baxter said. “We see strange things happening. It does seem to be a changed world. One hopes that these people aren’t dangerous.”

Still, she doesn’t agree with the Vernon School Board closing its meetings to the public, limiting their attendance to Zoom.

“My understanding is, school boards are expected to hold public meetings and only exclude people if they feel a really good reason for that,” Baxter said. “It seems to me, if you’re not allowing anyone to come, you’re in fact banning everyone. To say no public can actually attend in person, is that the answer? I would say that’s a very drastic step to take.”

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