In a leaked web meeting, school board candidates doubled-down on anti-trans rhetoric.

Elected school board members and candidates in Arizona are using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric as a political platform for upcoming school board elections with the help of a Turning Point USA advisor.

On a recent private webcast obtained by LOOKOUT, members of a conservative Judeo-Christian advocacy organization laid out bogus claims about Peoria Unified School District counselors and educators attempting to change students’ genders, and discussed their strategies to oppose inclusive education practices.

The information shared throughout the near 90-minute meeting is incorrect. The presenters—which included Peoria Governing Board member Heather Rooks, Higley Unified School District Governing Board vice president Anna Van Hoek, and Deer Valley Unified School District (DVUSD) Governing Board candidate Tiffany Hawkins—used examples from misleading documents and rhetoric based on debunked science.

“It greatly impacts everybody in our district: teachers, parents, the community members, students,” said Craig Beckman, a DVUSD parent who ran for Governing Board in 2022. Beckman called the members of the group “Christian-fascist” and claimed that they were trying to replace counselors with public resource officers.

The webcast was organized by Arizona Women of Action, a local organizing group that has been recruiting parents to run for school board and mentoring current governing members in anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience through monthly virtual meetings since January this year.

Tamra Farah, who is the network’s director and on the Turning Point USA advisory council, claimed it has reached nearly 100 people through twelve different calls. Turning Point USA is a Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hate group based in Arizona.

Last week, Farah propped up two current school board members and one school board candidate to explain to attendees—potentially parents or guardians—how to obtain internal documents, such as student files and emails sent between staff from school districts to attack LGBTQ+-affirming faculty and support plans for students who identify as trans or gender nonconforming.

An editor from LOOKOUT attempted to register, but was denied entry. The video was later leaked by an attendee.

“They are being trained to bring any kind of progress to a screeching halt, to overwhelm the district [administrations] with public records requests,” said Jeanne Casteen, a former teacher and executive director of Secular Arizona. Casteen said that the cost effects of parents intervening in schools’ administrative protocol can add up, noting public records requests fees and additional staff attorney rates.

Arizona Women of Action’s Political Action Committee endorsed Hawkins in the 2024 DVUSD Governing Board race.

“I can only assume that their goal is to bankrupt their public schools because they’re big fans of all these privatization measures,” Casteen said.

Farah singled out Peoria counselors and educators on the far-right hyperlocal website AZ Free News. On the website, she accused them of being an alleged threat to students when they expressed interest in the LGBTQ+ education advocacy group GLSEN’s Arizona Library Program, which provides queer-centered literature to K-12 schools for free.

According to GLSEN’s 2021 Arizona School Climate Survey, “only 28% of Arizona students said they had access to LGBTQ-related library resources at school and only 14% were taught positive representations of LGBTQ+ people, history or events.”

Before this fall, Farah promoted a similar non-factual statement that gender identity is an ideology in a column for the conservative website Townhall.com, previously published by The Heritage Foundation.

LOOKOUT reached out to Farah via email. She responded back, making false claims that schools are grooming other people’s kids.

Rooks doubled down on the same claim live in the webcast. That anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is a pattern continued from the incumbent’s 2022 campaign.

Rooks, who sued the district about a year ago after being told not to recite scripture during a board meeting, cast one of two votes last Thursday that ended a federal mental health grant funding the employment of three campus social workers, reported 12News.

LOOKOUT additionally reached out to Rooks, Van Hoek and Hawkins. None of them responded for comment.