Every year it seems to get worse with the State Board of Education as they manufacture their own power and then interfere with local elected school boards. In 2023 they attempted to force Carroll County to adopt the State Framework for Health and Sex Education through coercion.
This past summer the State Board and State Superintendent Carey Wright chose to meddle in Somerset County’s hiring policies. The elected school board in Somerset moved to fire their Superintendent for just cause. Using local legislators on the Administrative Executive Legislative Regulations board, the State Superintendent made an unprecedented move to allow any Maryland State Superintendent and the State Board to impose a stay in that firing. They did this by creating a rule that gives MSDE and the State Superintendent an indefinite period of time to stay any decision by a local school board that someone disagrees with.
In that action, Wright and MSDE threatened to take the funding for the system and also remove elected school board members.
Eventually, Somerset County was able to fire the Superintendent and hire an interim Superintendent, David Bromwell. Somerset County won the battle in the end, but only after much controversy, division and upheaval in the county.
Not able to help themselves, the State Board is at it again, this time going after Harford County.
It all starts with a book called FLAMER. The book, supposedly about a young boy coming to terms with his homosexuality, is filled with graphic depictions of sexual acts and suicide ideation. In one chapter, a group of 9th grade boys playing a game where they ejaculate into a bottle. The loser has to drink the semen in the bottle. Other sections show implied sexual acts, masturbation and self-harm. In short, it’s what many parents would call pornography. The graphics below are from the book. They are not appropriate for children.
Here is the report from WJZ on the State Board’s actions:
Maryland Board of Education reverses Harford County schools’ decision to ban book – CBS Baltimore
FLAMER is one of the books that has had many challenges nationwide due to the pornographic nature of its content. Parents in Michigan, Virginia and other states read passages from the book at local Board of Education meetings and, in many cases, were removed from the meetings. Some of the passages presented are shared in the stories below:
Parent Removed After Reading Explicit FCPS Library Book
What is often overlooked in the review of this book is the illustration of suicide and how kids can commit suicide effectively:
Doesn’t matter if the main character of the book is gay or straight, the suicide illustration and the graphic sexual content should make this a book not to be promoted in public school libraries.
When parents in Harford County Public Schools in Maryland discovered the book on the shelves in their school libraries, they asked their Board of Education to remove it. After many parent testimonies at school board meetings regarding the graphic sexuality and suicide ideation, the Harford County Board of Education met and voted to remove the book from school district shelves.
Someone complained and appealed the decision to the Maryland State Board of Education who then told Harford County to return the book to school libraries. Those who favor the book being on the shelves say it helps adolescents who are confronting their sexuality and need to know “they are seen.” They also demanded that the Harford County Public Schools get more public input when deciding these issues and come up with a different book evaluation process.
Can’t imagine that the majority of parents in Harford County organized to defend pornographic books in the schools? You can’t imagine it because it is not what happened. The protest to keep this book in Harford County Public Schools was NOT by parents who want their child to be able to access this book at school. It was by the Harford County Education Association, the teacher’s union.
How did they even get involved?
The first event in this saga is the signing of the FREEDOM TO READ ACT, signed by Governor Wes Moore in April of 2024. The FREEDOM TO READ ACT protects school librarians from having to remove books from libraries because members of the public find them inappropriate for children or that the books go against “partisan, ideological, or religious objections.” Many have renamed it the FREEDOM TO READ PORN ACT. It was created to stop people from challenging books in school libraries regardless of how disgusting, depraved, and damaging to children those books might be. Of course, the extreme left Maryland General Assembly passed the Act.
In May of 2024, after years of parents coming to the Board of Education with complaints about sexually explicit materials in libraries, the Harford County Board of Education passed a procedure called “Evaluation and Selection of School Library Materials” to maintain an objective way to review materials in county schools. There were complaints that the procedure had too many loopholes and that the county committee was stacked against removing books, no matter how offensive, from the schools. FLAMER, a book specifically cited as grossly inappropriate, was kept on the shelves even after review.
The parent who initially complained about the book appealed to the Harford County Board of Education to overturn the committee’s decision and remove FLAMER. On June 26, 2025 The Board held an appeal hearing and overruled the book committee and Superintendent Bulson and removed FLAMER from the schools. Information about the reversal was released in July.
Immediately, the Harford County Education Association, (Teacher’s Union) gathered all their allies and stepped in to protest the removal of the book for months on end. Another group in the effort was a group called, TOGETHER WE WILL. Here is their website: Together We Will―Harford County/Upper Chesapeake is a 501(c)(3) which receives funding from Harford County government grants, local community foundations, and private donors. *We could find no State or Federal financial statements regarding this group.
Here is the Harford County Education Association bragging about their influence on this issue:
SIDE NOTE: We have a question for all members of the Harford County Education Association, the teacher’s union. Is this what you envisioned your dues would be spent on? On average, it costs approximately $344 an hour for a union lawyer to file such an appeal. How many hours do you think it took to draft this appeal? That’s money that is NOT going to advocate for teachers but to appeal a social issue that the unions should have no standing in.
You may want to ask about this at your next union meeting.
And, no doubt the Harford County Board of Education had to pay their lawyer to oppose the appeal. Board lawyers probably charge close to the amount per hour for the union to file the appeal. This is money that will NOT go to classrooms.
In October of 2025, Upper Chesapeake Bay Pride, in conjunction with the local American Association of University Women, (Home – AAUW : Empowering Women Since 1881) hosted the author of FLAMER Mike Curato for a speaking engagement during the so called “Banned Books Week”. Here is the UCBP website: Home – Upper Chesapeake Bay Pride Foundation. This was hosted to help the teacher’s union action.
The Harford County Education Association appealed to the Maryland State Board of Education for the book to be reinstated. After deliberation, the State Board notified the Harford County Board of Education that the book must be placed on the school library shelves again, going against the decision of local elected officials.
Here is the eleven page decision they made:
Doesn’t the State Board have more important things to worry about? Poor state test scores? Ghost students and the money wasted on them? Violence in schools?
Moms for Liberty Harford County issued this statement on the reversal: “Moms for Liberty Harford County is deeply disappointed by the Maryland State Board of Education’s decision to override our local school board and force the return of “Flamer” to our library shelves.”
On November 5, 2025, County Executive Bob Cassilly called in to WBAL radio regarding the MD State BOE’s decision. (This is well worth the listen.)
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19RAwbNwuN/A clear overreach by the State Board of Ed. Again.
A clear “test case” for the damaging FREEDOM TO READ ACT.
As Cassilly states, it’s pornography over progress. As WBAL host C4 says, the decision by the State Board was arbitrary.
It seems that if you are an elected school board in a county, anything you do can be undone by the unelected State Board of Education and the unelected Maryland State Superintendent. It also seems that the State Board of Education feels compelled to spend their time defending the idea that children in schools should be exposed to graphically sexual reading materials in school libraries. Never mind that State test scores are tanking, violence is increasing in schools, and the Blueprint is bankrupting counties.
It also seems that the Maryland State Board of Education, the State Superintendent, many Maryland state delegates and senators, and the Governor are deep in the pockets of the state and local teacher’s unions. Money talks and parents take a back seat.
One wonders which local school board decision will be overturned by the State Board of Education next. It seems they incline toward canceling decisions in counties that lean more conservative, Carroll, Calvert, Somerset, and now Harford. As Bob Cassilly says, the Maryland General Assembly has created a “shadow bureaucracy.”
We’ve asked many times, if the appointed State Board of Education can overturn any decision by local elected school boards, why do we have locally elected school boards at all?
Maybe we’d better not give the State any ideas.
Additional Information:
Harford County Board of Education member Mark Korn released this statement as representative of his personal opinion:
Apparently, no live public testimony will be allowed, only written.
-Jan Greenhawk
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