SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — Public comment at the Sarasota school board meeting took a turn and board member Tom Edwards walked out.
“I walked out for the protection of children,” he said.
During the meeting, the public commenter, Sally Nista, said, “Tom Edwards is who he is. What Tom stands for and what Tom wants to do to our children in this school district is what a majority want.”
This got the crowd riled up. Finally, board chair Bridget Ziegler was able to ask people to calm down and respect the speakers. Finally, Edwards got up and walked out.
“They claim that I harm children, but they harm children accusing me of being a groomer and a pedophile,” he said.
In that meeting, Nista did not come right out and call him a pedophile or say he was grooming kids. However, she referenced a woman named Melissa Bakondy and her comments from the March 7 meeting.
Bakondy said, during that meeting, “I find it ironic that Mr. Edwards does not want to allow parents to walk their children into school. But it is perfectly acceptable that Mr. Edwards, a gay liquor salesman and supporter of LGBTQ grooming events like queer con, can go into our schools, read to our children and post their pictures on his Facebook page.”
Bakonda accused Edwards of breaking the law by voting to keep the mask mandate in place for Sarasota schools and accused him of being a “woke” board member.
Edwards said he had had enough, so he walked out of the March 21 meeting.
When asked, “why not stay and explain why those accusations were hurtful and offensive,” he said: “I did that because Bridget would not stop the meeting. The only way to stop the meeting was to stand up and stand against that hateful talk.”
ABC Action News talked to a lawyer about this. While what the women said to Edwards may be viewed as hateful and “not nice,” they are protected under the first amendment. It’s free speech.
“Hate speech would have to cross the line of actually threatening harm and that’s a tough one,” said Brendan Beery
Beery is a constitutional law professor at WMU Cooley Law School.
“I tell my students all the time 99.9% of speech is protected speech.”
After Edwards walked out of Tuesday’s meeting, Ziegler called a short recess. Once things calmed down, she restarted the meeting. Edwards did not come back, but he has no plans of stepping down from the school board.
“I’m passionate about public education. I’m passionate that we have an A-rated school district with quality educators,” he said.
We reached out to other school board members and have not heard back. We also called the district, but since this is a school board issue, they referred us back to the board.
