Howard County is a reliably blue jurisdiction, a place where Joe Biden outdistanced Donald Trump by more than 40 percentage points in 2022 and now-Gov. Wes Moore trounced MAGA acolyte Dan Cox with nearly 70% of the vote last year. Democrats swept the State House races, County Executive and all but one County Council seat.
It is a county where protestors swamped a recent Moms for Liberty meeting in a public library, demonstrating disgust with a group whose members were sharing organizational tips for how to remove books from schools.
Nonetheless, Moms for Liberty is carving a foothold in Howard County. An early backer of the group’s Howard County chapter is seeking a spot on the Howard County Board of Education, her chances bolstered by past election successes and strong name recognition.
Trent Kittleman is a former state delegate whose career includes stints as Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a term on the county’s Republican Central Committee and an unsuccessful run for County Executive in 2010. She is the widow of former State Sen. Robert Kittleman, and stepmother of former Howard County Executive Alan Kittleman – both known for their moderate views.
At age 78, and after a re-election defeat for delegate in 2022, Kittleman is now a candidate for school board representing County District 5 in western Howard County, the most conservative area in the county.
As the primary election draws closer, Kittleman has been distancing herself from Moms for Liberty. Her campaign website does not list her affiliation with the organization.
Lisa Geraghty, chair of the Howard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said Kittleman “asked to be taken off the rolls when she decided to run for school board.”
“I don’t think she wants to be associated with Moms for Liberty,” she said. “It’s a hot button problem and she doesn’t want to be associated with it. But her palm card is everything we believe.”
Kittleman has argued that grades should be “based on merit, not equity” and that Howard’s school system should “end equity-based redistricting and focus on building communities around schools.” She also calls for greater parental rights and removing “identity politics and political ideologies from the school system.”
And although Howard school officials say they do not teach Critical Race Theory, a graduate school theory that holds that racism is built into the system’s laws and rules, Kittleman insists that what she calls the “genteelisms” educators use and in policy documents have “enshrined” CRT in the schools.
She points in newsletter articles she wrote during her time in the House of Delegates to phrases educators use, such as “interrupting racism,” “cultural proficiency/relevance,” “critical ethnic studies,” and “diversity and inclusion” as evidence that the theory is being taught.
Kelly Klinefelter Lee, a teacher and president of the Howard Progressive Project, a liberal group, called it “shocking” and “alarming” to “think about Moms for Liberty and what it stands for in Howard County. Its values are retrograde.”
In an interview, Kittleman says she became interested in Moms for Liberty when she left the General Assembly in 2022 and was looking to get involved in education advocacy.
“I was going to start a chapter,” she recalled. “I fell in love with all the people. I thought they were reasonable and rational. But then I saw they were being called a terrorist group. You can’t get associated with that.”
Since its founding in 2021, Moms for Liberty has surged in popularity among some and generated anger from others for its efforts to elect right-wing school board candidates, to target references to race and LGBTQ+ identity in classrooms around the nation, and to have books removed from school libraries.
The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty as an anti-government extremist group in June 2023, arguing it uses parents’ rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ+ students. Moms for Liberty leaders argue the efforts to fund and endorse candidates in school board races show it is not anti-government.
Kittleman said that she supports school choice and complained that county leaders are “not supporting our schools” but rather “supporting teachers’ unions.”
“The failure of Baltimore City schools is the failure of the radical left, the liberal left, kowtowing to the unions,” Kittleman said.
Geraghty, the local group president, said her chapter hasn’t endorsed candidates in the May 14 primary but will get involved in the November General Election.
Klinefelter Lee, the progressive group president, said she is not surprised Kittleman “plays down” her Moms for Liberty connection.
“The name Moms for Liberty is not popular in Howard County,” Klinefelter Lee says. “She’s a savvy pol and she will not be advertising their [potential] endorsement.”
Kittleman is one of three candidates for the school board seat that shares boundaries with the district with the only Republican on the County Council. School board races are technically non-partisan, but many educated voters and those involved in education affairs typically have a clear understanding of the ideology of those running.
Kittleman’s opponents in the May 5 primary are focusing on school budgets, maintenance, and a chaotic start to the 2023 school year – not culture war issues. Thousands of Howard County public school students were stuck without a school bus ride to school because a California tech company hired to solve transportation problems failed to provide enough buses to cover all the routes.
Speaking about the school bus crisis at the start of the year, candidate Andrea Chamblee said the school system administration “got hoodwinked by hard pressure salespeople.” Chamblee, whose mother taught in Howard County schools and who worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said “somebody believed hype from a bus company. I spent my career not believing the hype.”
As a professional government administrator, “you look at systems for tracking mistakes and if you don’t see any systems, you know they don’t know how to do it. I know how to audit vendors, make sure they are held accountable and it’s a place where I can add value.”
Chamblee grew up in Howard County and moved back after her husband, John McNamara, was killed in the June 2018 shooting at the Capital Gazette newspapers in Annapolis. She also talks about school safety—“my nieces and nephews hate shooter drills; they end up in tears because of thinking what happened to John”—and the maintenance of Howard’s aging school buildings.
“They might look good from the outside,” she says. “But we’ve put off maintaining, much less repair things. We have HVAC problems, masonry problems, paving which can be dangerous for our kids, windows, roofs, emergency generators. It’s quite a list.”
The third candidate in the race, Catherine (Cat) Carter, a long-time education advocate, says she sees “things that are broken and I want to fix them.”
She worries, she says, about a decline in school spending as part of the county budget. It dropped from an average of 58 percent of the county budget in 2009 to 54 percent in 2022 and is now down to 52.5 percent.
“We are down by a significant amount our spending on schools,” she says. “So, the question I’m asking is: What’s going on? Why did the spending drop?”
Kittleman filed to run for the school board seat last June. Chamblee and Carter filed within a week of each other in January.
“Everybody else was standing on the sidelines waiting to see who else would get in,” said Chamblee, who filed to run January 16. “I thought, I have the experience, I should get involved.”
Carter, who filed to run a week after Chamblee, said people began asking her in October to get in the school board race. She said yes in November, but “didn’t hear back” from anyone. Then she heard “someone else was running,” she recalled, and wondered if she should be a third person and finally settled on “they need me.”
“I see things broken and I want to fix them. And I have a long history of doing that,” she said. “And I have skin in the game,” she added referring to her five children, four of them in Howard County schools. She conceded it’s “going to be a hard race” against a Moms for Liberty opponent in the most conservative district in the county. But she said she wasn’t worried that she and Chamblee would split the more liberal voters, paving the way for Kittleman. The two top vote getters in the non-partisan May 5 primary go up against each other in November.
Repulsive, both spiritually and physically.