Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SHAWNNA BOLICK: Linda McMahon Can Help Make Our Schools Safer

Administrator of the Small Business Administration meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Jan. 31, 2019. (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

When President-elect Donald Trump named Linda McMahon as the next secretary of Education, he said McMahon “will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families” via a statement issued on Truth Social.

During Trump’s first term, McMahon led the Small Business Administration (SBA), where she favored pragmatic pro-growth policies that emphasized merit-based job opportunities and reducing government intervention in business practices with a nod towards no forced diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

With the selection of McMahon as education secretary, states should demand this administration make true educational freedom attainable, protect our female athletes by returning “girls only” to their sports teams and hold our public schools accountable against child predators.

States like Arizona eagerly await this changing of the guard to truly help protect women. While an enraged Michelle Obama spewed hate-filled propaganda in the last few weeks leading up to the November election by suggesting “women will become collateral damage” if Trump was to return to the White House, thankfully, voters did not buy that. 

McMahon understands the importance of bringing education back to the states where it belongs and into the hands of parents, not government bureaucrats relying on zip codes to fill school buildings. While McMahon led the America First Works (AFW), the organization’s main goal was to achieve universal school choice across the country. Over the last several years, the school-choice movement has seen a dozen states achieve this status, but it cannot stop there. McMahon’s leadership role at the helm of AFW illustrates that she adamantly supports competition among our schools, including charter schools, private-school tuition scholarships, education savings accounts and homeschooling. Above all, McMahon believes supporting all educational options will lead to better outcomes for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

McMahon’s appointment couldn’t have come at a better time. Future Secretary McMahon could halt the Biden administration’s attack on women by rolling back its faulty rulemaking that was forcing publicly funded schools to allow transgender men to participate in women’s only sports by threatening to defund their Title IX funding if they refused. Hopefully, this war on women can end on Trump’s first day back in the White House. Women’s only sports face near extinction if we don’t prohibit biological men from competing in women’s sports. It is truly unfair for biological girls to have to compete with biological males in sports. Not only do males have bigger muscles than females, but males have the advantage of testosterone that no amount of training or talent can enable biological female athletes to overcome.

Safety in our sports is not the only area this next administration needs to lead. All children should feel safe on their school’s campus. Sexual abuse cases in our public schools continue to generate headlines. Even though teachers and school-district employees are mandatory reporters, they don’t always appropriately record allegations of sexual abuse.

The Trump administration needs to step up in protecting the safety of our kids by requiring all public-school districts and charter-school districts to record all sexual abuse allegations and share these written reports with its state education department. The Department of Education should centrally house a database documenting sexual abuse allegations in our schools so that when district and charter schools are conducting background checks on future employees, they can consult this much needed resource. The teachers’ unions will push back against this proposal. We should all agree, all students should be free from predators, especially in their individual learning environments. Each year public schools report their campuses’ crime data to the Office of Civil Rights under the Department of Education. Schools should be committed to keeping our kids safe and want to be held accountable by reporting any sexual abuse allegations.

Sen. Shawnna Bolick has served in the Arizona Legislature since 2019.  She served four years in the Arizona House until 2022. In July 2023, she was appointed to the State Senate, District 2, to fill a vacancy. Bolick has signed onto an amicus brief supporting both Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and Arizona’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act. She has sponsored or cosponsored legislation pertaining to weeding out sexual predators in our public schools.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.