Member Newsletter
I wanted to catch you up on some new news about Clarice Schillinger, the anti-woke mom activist at the heart of a lot of school board pressure campaigns in Pennsylvania, especially in Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia. On Sunday I flagged this totally over-the-top story about how Schillinger, her then-boyfriend and her mom had all been charged with beating the crap out of various teenagers they’d served alcohol to at a boozy birthday party she threw for her seventeen-year-old daughter. Schillinger allegedly punched one sixteen year old in the face three times as he and his friends were trying to leave the party and Schillinger was ordering them to stay. There are reportedly at least two cell phone videos of the assaults, one of which shows Schillinger lunging toward a group of teens and having to be restrained as the teens flee the home.
Now it turns out it wasn’t the first time cops had been called out to one of Schillinger’s teen keggers.
A week earlier, on September 24th, police were called for another party/disturbance and roughly 20 teens scattered when police drove up. According to the affidavit, Schillinger was “intoxicated and uncooperative” when police questioned her. The parties took place at a home Schillinger had rented in Doylestown after moving from nearby Horsham.
So this is all a fun story, except for the several teens who were punched in the face by Schillinger and her boyfriend and her mom. But is there more here? TPM Reader HS notes that the Central Bucks County School Board has been a flashpoint for activism, starting with backlash against COVID mitigation policies and expanding out into the broader culture war against “wokeness” that we associate with Moms for Liberty. Moms for Liberty claimed big wins in Bucks County in the 2021 school board elections and the GOP majority on the Central Bucks County School Board made news nationwide with various book bans and other “anti-woke” policies. Those wins were funded in part by Bucks County venture capitalist Paul Martino who contributed at least half a million dollars toward state school board races in the 2021 cycle. His main vehicle for that giving was Back to School PA, a PAC run by Clarice Schillinger, which spent at least $600,000 on Pennsylvania school board races in that cycle.
Schillinger and Martino were focused on defending those school board majorities and expanding their battle nationwide, according to articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Schillinger told the paper the PAC “plans to invest in the races across the U.S. where the public school unions are backing candidates.” They were also closely focused on defending Republicans’ 6-to-3 majority on the Central Bucks County School Board. As it happened, Democrats won all the contested seats in 2023 and took control of the board, part of a backlash against the previous board’s “anti-woke” policies.
What HS notes is that Schillinger’s Kegger-Gone-Wild happened overnight on September 29th, about six weeks before the election. We only found out about it when the story broke in the Bucks County Courier Times on December 28th. Charges were filed in late October, only a week or so before the election. Was there some big effort to keep the story out of the news before the election? Given Schillinger’s centrality to school board politics in Pennsylvania, the story would have been fairly embarrassing and possibly harmful to Republicans’ chances in a number of school board elections across the state — one assumes especially in Doylestown, the big town in the Central Bucks School District.
I tried to poke around to see if I could find out more. When the story first broke Schillinger protested her innocence and blamed the whole story on an “angry ex-boyfriend,” the one at the party. She also told the paper the charges had been dropped, which was false. The paper said the affidavit didn’t rely on any information from the boyfriend but did concede that ex-boyfriend Shan Wilson “did contact the USA Today Network about the incident.” So it does seem like he eventually dropped a dime on Schillinger, presumably because of some disgruntlement tied to their breakup. I also had some difficulty getting solid information about how involved Schillinger had been in the campaign in the final weeks. When Martino was asked about the charges he acted like nothing had really come of their efforts. But they were telling a very different story last spring.
If anyone has more information, I’m all ears.
[Ed.Note: This post originally stated that Aarati Martino, wife of school board activism funder Paul Martino, lost her Central Bucks County school board seat in the 2023 election. That was incorrect. Martino was a candidate to serve on the board and lost her election but she wasn’t an incumbent.]