TRENTON, N.J. – Assemblyman Erik Peterson is demanding the state Senate reject Gov. Phil Murphy’s nominee for the New Jersey State Board of Education, Mary Bennett.
Bennett, whose nomination stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee in January after she failed to disclose her connection to a school desegregation activist organization, is slated again for a hearing Thursday. She is one of three nominees hand-picked by the governor to replace board members Mary Elizabeth Gazi, Mary Beth Berry and Andrew Mulvihill, who voted against Sen. Vin Gopal’s unpopular sex education standards in 2020. Those standards went into effect during the last school year.
“Mary Bennett is a social justice warrior who will rubber stamp Governor Murphy’s and Democrats’ radical education policies to sexualize children and strip women of their rights to personal safety and equal access to sports,” Peterson (R-Hunterdon) said. “Bennett thinks New Jersey is 1950s Alabama and is determined to bus children all over the State of New Jersey in the name of social justice. The governor should only appoint parents who sole focus is ensuring that our children are taught reading, writing , arithmetic and science and that parents, not Governor Murphy and the NJEA, have a GOD given right to instill their values in their children without Governor Murphy’s interference. I appeal to my colleagues in the Senate to vote for education not Murphy indoctrination and vote no on Bennett.”
Bennett will replace Gazi, who with Berry, Mulvihill and Jack Fornao, wrote a letter to acting Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan expressing their concerns that the sexual education standards were so controversial that parents would opt out their children, forcing those students to miss “important and less controversial topics that would benefit” them.
The standards, last updated in 2014, mandate that fifth graders learn about masturbation. Eighth graders must differentiate between vaginal, anal and oral sex, and identify long-term contraception and so-called safe sex methods.
Bennett, a former Newark school principal and English teacher backed by the NAACP and NJEA, is an educational consultant for the Seton Hall University Academy for Urban Transformation, which appears to be part of the law school’s Center for Social Justice. She sits on the board of The New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, a nonprofit social justice organization that has filed a desegregation lawsuit against the state Board of Education.
“That bastion of conservative values, The New York Times, just published an article about America’s abysmal math test scores post-government lockdown. We rank 28 out of 37 countries ranked. So to combat that, Governor Murphy appoints activists like Mary Bennett who are more concerned with ensuring kindergarteners know they can be boys or girls or neither or both,” Peterson said. “We’re churning out students who can’t read or add, but can tell you their preferred pronouns for each day of the week and how to put a condom on a banana. Shameful!”
Gov. Murphy’s lockdowns forced public school closures for the second half of the school year in 2020, and the following academic year. The New Jersey Student Learning Assessment scores showed precipitous drops in math and English test scores—well below pre-lockdown levels—for last year.
“Mary Bennett is not a serious candidate for the real problems our students face,” Peterson said.
Bennett would finish out Gazi’s term, which expires June 20, 2024.