Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona assigned National School Board Association president Viola Garcia to the National Assessment Governing Board a few days after she wrote the letter, to which the group later apologized.
Emails from the team showed it matched with the White House on the letter's release, which resulted in the formation of an FBI-DOJ task force charged with reviewing alleged domestic terrorist threats against school board representatives.
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Garcia's employment to the board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress, mainly referred to as the Nation's Report Card, came two days after the association's letter was sent to the DOJ on Sept. 29 and created national controversy and just before Attorney General Merrick Garland set up the task force on Oct. 4.
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The governing board includes 26 bipartisan members and is tasked with building the nation's report card criteria, including selecting the assessed subjects, and content, and setting student performance achievement levels.
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The education department press release does not cite Garcia's post as the association's president, referring to her only as "a local school board member."
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In a congressional hearing last week, Garland confirmed that the letter was behind the task force's creation and defended the White House's referral of the letter to the DOJ, calling it "appropriate."
The association apologized for the letter Friday, following significant public criticism and increased attention following Garland's testimony.
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A parent activist and former school board member who has trained hundreds of concerned parents across the country to run for school board themselves tells Fox News that parents will not accept the National School Board Association's "disingenuous" apology after it compared parents to domestic terrorists in the letter to the Biden administration. She predicted that the NSBA letter would only energize concerned parents.
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"It's really disingenuous, it's a little too late for that," Laura Zorc, director of education reform at Building Education for Students Together (BEST), told Fox News in an interview on Saturday. "It's almost as if it's a forced apology."
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NSBA sent the letter on September 29, suggesting that school boards face "physical threats" due to resistance to COVID-19 policies and critical race theory. The letter claimed that some unruly parent protests may be "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism."
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Yet on Friday – after the Department of Justice had issued a memorandum apparently based on the letter – NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
"On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter," the NSBA said, noting that "there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter." At school board meetings in Fairfax County, Virginia, parents have worn t-shirts declaring, "Parents are not domestic terrorists."
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