A Black superintendent’s email to parents after the killing of George Floyd engulfed a small, predominantly white Maryland community in a yearlong firestorm.
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Gordana Schifanelli is a lawyer married to a former Army special forces officer, and what’s more, she grew up in a Communist household in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. All of which makes for a powerful opponent in what has shaped up as a battle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore between forces of wokeness in Queen Anne’s County Public Schools and some concerned parents.
“It’s totalitarian, what they’re doing, so I know it,” she said. “I was in the middle of a NATO bombing and barely survived. Now you want to tell me I’m a racist? Whatever.”
The battle began in June, when Superintendent Andrea M. Kane sent a letter to parents filled with attaboys for environmental improvements in the schools and news about the coronavirus, which had forced them all to close. Sandwiched in between, however, was a lengthy screed about systemic racism, the righteousness of Black Lives Matter and the frightening news that the schools in that sleepy community were infested with racism.