Warwick Board of Education member Lynn Lillian is discovered to have leaked confidential correspondences between parents and the Board of Education to local Progressive activists. These activists then used this information to publicly ridicule and attack specific parents in the district via social media. Both the parents’ names and the subject matter of their letters were provided to the Progressive activists by Lynn Lillian. The revelation of this breach of ethics begins with an inadvertent admission by Lillian’s friend, Susan Miller.
Who is Susan Miller?
In a recent edition of both the Warwick Dispatch and the Warwick Advertiser, local Yoga instructor Susan Miller submitted a letter. It begins “Our recent national elections are behind us, but sadly our divisiveness is not. Every week in letters to the editor and on social media there is anger, misinformation, fear, name calling and polarization. People no longer see community members, friends, neighbors or even relatives. They see adversaries.” Susan Miller has a keen insight and is 100% accurate.
Susan Miller, however, has been one of the most notorious purveyors of such “name-calling and polarization” in our town.
For quite some time, Susan Miller’s Facebook posts have been loaded with direct smears against Warwick parents who did not want Critical Race Theory in the Warwick school district (a district in which she has no children). She has publicly labeled such parents as “White Supremacists,” “racists,” and “agitators.” On her social media posts, citizens of Warwick with whom she does not agree are referred to as “low IQ” people, and “freaks.”
Aside from the name-calling and invective of Ms. Miller’s posts, a few are noteworthy for other reasons. In February of this year, on a Facebook post, Miller revealed that she was in close contact with “progressive” School Board member Lynn Lillian who was running for re-election to the Board of Education. In the post Miller states “Lynn tells me that they all support the work the district is doing regarding equity” (“Equity” does not mean the equality of opportunity. It has been revealed to be the racialization of school policy, where standards are dismantled in the name of “fairness” and “racial justice.”) Miller then goes on to reveal more specific information with which Lillian has provided her regarding items on the next Board of Education meeting agenda.
Critical Race Theory in the Warwick Schools
What becomes clear is that Lynn Lillian was campaigning, through Miller, on her “progressive” agenda for the Warwick schools. She was reaching out to Warwick’s Progressive community in that election cycle to ensure they were aware that she was pushing for “meaningful change.” This change, many parents came to discover, was the attempted introduction of the “Culturally Responsive Sustaining (CRS) education framework,” one of many titles for Critical Race Theory-based platforms.
This last election, parents of all races and backgrounds stood up to the divisiveness of CRT at the ballot box. This divisiveness was not brought on by parents but rather by ideologues in local Boards of Education and by those in highest levels of State and Federal government. It was recently revealed by the Wall Street Journal on November 16, 2021 that the White House and Department of Justice had weaponized the FBI against concerned parents, based on a letter from the President of the National School Boards Association. The revelation included the fact that the FBI had engaged counter-terrorism assets to label and track parents at school board meetings whose views, not actions, are determined to be “threatening.” This hostility towards parents, by Board of Education ideologues, was also seen here in Warwick.
Lynn Lillian’s Leak
In August of this year, Susan Miller made a stunning claim in another post. Miller stated “I also learned that (identity of a Warwick parent) wrote to the School Board to compare the mask mandate to the Nuremberg trials.” The implications of what Miller says here are disturbing and reveal a significant ethical breach. First, Susan Miller had been given information on correspondences which parents had addressed specifically and only to the Warwick Board of Education members and the Superintendent (ten people in total). Second, Miller then used that leaked information to attack and smear a specific Warwick parent on social media.
Susan Miller has made it very clear that her friend Lynn Lillian is her source inside the Board of Education. It is also true that Lynn Lillian has used Susan Miller’s reach on Facebook to get information out on her political campaign. However, it was not until August of this year that Lynn Lillian was discovered to have been using Susan Miller to attack parents directly. Lillian clearly leaked private correspondences and parents’ names to Miller, which she knew Miller would use in the way that she consistently has: to attack and defame.
All parents assume, when they write to the Board and the Superintendent about their thoughts and concerns regarding their children, that they are doing so under a condition of confidentiality. This was not a public letter. This was not the type of Letter To The Editor or social media post that Susan Miller prefers to publicly parade her hypocrisies. This was one of many letters from concerned parents, who, in these times, are deeply worried about issues ranging from the children’s health, their mental well-being and academic standards. By any measure, Lynn Lillian has breached the trust implicit in serving as a member of the Board of Education with behaviors that are deeply unethical, if not outright malicious.
Lynn Lillian Profiting Off Students
Lynn Lillian is currently involved in another controversy. A complaint has been lodged with the Office of School Personnel Review and Accountability (OSPRA) against Lillian for using her position in the Warwick Board of Education to solicit customers (students) for her for-profit college admissions business. Lillian advertises her position on the Board of Education in order to attract these customers. Lillian’s service offers testing strategies, financial-aid coaching and scholarship essay assistance. The fee for her service, as one parent disclosed to us, was upwards of five thousand dollars. Whether it is a conflict of interest for an elected Board of Education member to financially benefit off of the students they serve is a real and pressing legal question. A ruling by OSPRA on this Conflict of Interest charge against Lillian is pending.
Lynn Lillian’s Activism
In Susan Miller’s Facebook post from February, she also revealed that Lynn Lillian is co-founder of the local Indivisible chapter. The group’s website asserts: through Climate Change and wealth inequality “runs a connecting thread of Racial Justice.” On “racial justice,” a question arises: Has Lynn Lillian offered her college admissions services free of charge or at reduced rates to under-privileged children in under-served neighborhoods? Or does Lillian only profit off the Warwick students who can pay the thousands of dollars she charges, while doing nothing of substance towards real “racial justice?” Furthermore, Lillian’s indivisiblehudsonvalley.org website trafficks in the charges that Warwick has a racism problem. These are the very charges that Warwick voters came out in an overwhelming majority to condemn on November 2nd in the Town Council and Warwick Justice races.
Most Warwick parents would regard the Board of Education as an inappropriate place for far-Left political activists. Many Warwick tax-payers may also conclude that the Board of Education is no place for an elected official to financially benefit from their position. But, most importantly, nearly all citizens of our town can agree that it is deeply unethical for a Warwick Board of Education official to purposefully leak information in order to attack the parents they are elected to serve.
For more information or to submit a story to our anonymous, citizen journalist program, contact us: thewarwickwatch@gmail.com
kparsons@wvcsd.org, egagliano@wvcsd.org, sdavis@wvcsd.org, bfanos@wvcsd.org, jwgarcia@wvcsd.org, dginley@wvcsd.org, rhowe@wvcsd.org, llillian@wvcsd.org, dmasefield@wvcsd.org, dleach@wvcsd.org