York County News

Veronica Gemma’s last Central York School District board meeting is today.

Gemma said she first got the idea to run for the school board when her ninth-grader was given a sexually explicit book to read as part of schoolwork.

That initial dismay turned into a passion for giving voice to other concurred parents in the district.

As Gemma began to investigate the school district’s curriculum, her caution over materials in the local schools turned into a community effort.

“One of the books said whiteness is bad,” Gemma told York County News.

At the end of that book, she said the fourth graders are asked to sign a contract to sign away their whiteness.

She said other books that are in the district’s curriculum, such as A is for Anarchist and How to Raise an Anarchist, also gave her pause.

Gemma mounted a successful school board campaign and made waves early when she questioned proposed resource materials to be implemented in the classroom.

“It was all based on equity, anti-racism, teaching tolerance standards,” she said. “And I started asking hard questions in a public meeting to expose what they were doing to the public, and it blew up from there.”

Gemma said she immediately began to receive backlash.

“My life changed from there. I asked what they're using to teach ... the benchmarks... . Because I knew what they were using. I knew with the book they were developing a diversity resource list of materials to be implemented into the classroom for a critical race theory anti-racism curriculum that the superintendent was developing with the diversity committee without broad knowledge or board approval.”

Gemma said leftwing educators came after her.  

“It was a nightmare. It was a media frenzy. They were calling me a racist."

Gemma said when it came time for re-election the teachers' union came out against her in force.

She said the attacks were vile.

“I'm running for the board my second term and they slammed me,” she said. “They went after me, accused me of banning Martin Luther King books, Rosa Parks books, any book that has, you know, black after black characters because of that diversity booklet that we voted down. Then they twisted the facts. They only told half the story and they just went after me.”

She said she was smeared by what she said was an organized attempt by those entrenched in the district to frame her as an extremist.

The controversy was noted in the press with the York Dispatch called out by one activist as providing “partisan” support to Democrat school board members.

As part of efforts by teachers to politically undermine her, Gemma said a list of book ban list developed for the school district was manipulated to include popular titles celebrating diversity.  

“I'm calling for an internal investigation into this book ban situation,” she said. "Because we have proved that teachers inside our district edited the book list and took off all the raunchy books and put on books like Hidden Figures, really great books. So it made it look like we banned all of these wonderful books and, you know, we looked like Nazis or whatever, and we did.”

The region voted heavily for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election but the Central York School School District has been a leftwing stronghold.

The tight school board race that drew attention from international media resulted in the election of two GOP members and two Democrat members to four-year terms as well as two additional two-year seats going to GOP members.

Gemma came in last after what she said was a statewide effort against her.

“They spent $40,000,” Gemma said. “Our governor, the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, paid for these mailings. Nobody spends $40,000 on a school board election; $7,000 is the average bill for school board elections. That's how hard they came after (me).”

Despite losing her re-election bid, she said she is going to continue to use her platform.

“I'm completely fine with it all because I'll just use my voice in another arena,” she said. “I've built a wonderful network of people who support me, um, state representatives, the GOP and the local GOP chair.”  

The new chapter for Gemma starts at today's board meeting, which is her last.

“The rest of the story I feel like needs to be told,” Gemma said.