Control of Florida’s Sarasota County Schools Board will flip to a Democratic majority following recent election wins and the fact that Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler — who was implicated in a 2023 rape scandal alleged by the woman she and her husband had threesomes with — will step down from the board on November 17, 2026, when her final term ends. She did not run for re-election.
Ziegler was first elected to the board in 2014 with the support of anti-LGBTQ+ Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). She co-founded Moms for Liberty, a so-called parents’ rights group that has been designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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During Ziegler’s tenure, the board voted last year to remove references to race, sexuality and disability from its anti-bullying rules. It also pledged to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to help deport undocumented students in county schools. In May 2024, she and the board’s conservative majority voted to reject new federal protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in last Tuesday’s school board elections, with candidates Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry winning their races. A third Democratic-backed candidate, Jimmy Glover, won the most votes against his two Republican-backed opponents, but because he didn’t win more than 50% of the votes, he’ll compete again in a runoff election this November. If he wins, the entire school board will be Democratically-backed.
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“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” Tennimon told The Washington Post.
Mayberry added, “I think that [vpters] realized how destructive those divisive policies really were. What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with.”
In late 2023, Ziegler admitted to having bisexual threesomes with her husband, who was chairman of the state Republican party at the time, and a woman who later accused him of rape in Ziegler’s absence.
Police eventually cleared her husband of the rape charges. However, Ziegler was widely criticized for hpocrisy since the organization she co-founded, Moms for Liberty, opposes LGBTQ+ content and inclusive policies in public schools. She later lost her position at the conservative Leadership Institute, and her husband was voted out of his Republican party chairmanship.
Following the scandal, students, parents, and community members called for Ziegler to resign from the school board. One local youth activist, Zander Moricz, told her during a board meeting, “You deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman.”
“[You] change our district lines for political gain, remove books from schools, target trans and queer children, erase Black history, and elevate your political career – all while sending your children to private schools because you don’t believe in the public school system that you’ve been leading,” Moricz added.
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