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Meg Bryce, the late conservative justice's daughter, said she was being discriminated against because of her family's name.
In another Election Day victory over right-wing forces, a progressive mother of an LGBTQ+ child has beaten the daughter of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a Virginia school board race.
LGBTQ-supportive mom Allison Spillman defeated Meg Bryce by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent for an open at-large seat on the Albemarle County School Board, local newspaper The Daily Progress reports. The county includes Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. It’s a strongly liberal area, even though white supremacists chose Charlottesville for a rally site in 2017.
Spillman has five children in the Albemarle County public schools, including one her campaign website describes as “a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community.” Bryce, Scalia’s daughter, has four children, all of whom attend private schools. She took them out of the public schools because she opposed steps the district took during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some voters expressed concern during the campaign that Bryce would impose far-right policies, such as banning books and quashing LGBTQ+ content, and would seek to divert funding to private schools and homeschooling.
“That’s just not how public education should be,” voter Tom David told The Daily Progresson Election Day.
In Virginia, school board races are nonpartisan, but Bryce’s opponents tied her to the Republican Party and the Scalia name. The local Republican Party even endorsed her, but it took an online post about the endorsement down at her request. Spillman, however, was happy to have the Democratic Party’s backing.
“It’s a strategy that embraces a fact in Albemarle: The county elects Democrats,” The Daily Progress reports. “To be labeled a Republican in the deep-blue county can be the kiss of death.”
Bryce denied that she would try to ban books and was focused on raising academic achievement in the public schools. She said she was being discriminated against because of her family connections.
Scalia, who died in 2016 after 30 years on the Supreme Court, was one of the most conservative justices in history, a reliable opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and abortion rights and an equally reliable supporter of gun rights. He opposed marriage equality and had said if the court believed LGBTQ+ people should be protected against discrimination, it could just as well protect child molesters.
At her victory party Tuesday night, Spillman told the crowd, “Our county is not going to stand for that extremist bullshit,” for which she received cheers, The Daily Progress reports.
She also told Charlottesville’s CBS affiliate, “I’m excited to get to work the county and make sure are kids are safe to learn and our teachers are safe to teach. I want to make sure the processes are working and so kind of get my hands dirty and get in and see how I can make our system run efficiently, effectively so the maximum amount of resources are in the classroom and with our teachers so our students can thrive and succeed.”
Her key issues include fostering inclusive schools, supporting collective bargaining for faculty and staff, making sure students have mental health resources, and, like her opponent, raising academic achievement.
For her part, Bryce told the station, “My hope from the beginning was to run a campaign that educated people on our school system. I think that we’ve been kind of like flying under the radar and people still assume that we’re the best district in the region, and we’re not. And so I think I’ve shed light on that.”
Pictured, from left: Meg Bryce and Allison Spillman
