What are the criteria used by the group Moms Demand Action to endorse a political candidate as having "gun sense?" Does it make sense to spend over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to bring guns into our schools? To shut down the concerned families, educators, criminologists, sociologists, and gun violence researchers who repeatedly tell you that this is a bad idea, that more guns make schools less safe, not safer? To insist on spending all that money on all those guns just because your friends ask you to? Because this is what the latest Moms Demand Action "gun sense" candidate, Jill Fischman stood for in 2018.

In 2018, Jill was president of the Bloomfield Board of Education when the Board tried to budget $550,000 to install armed guards in our elementary schools and preschool. Jill didn't just support this decision. She was the architect behind it.

I can almost forgive Moms Demand for forgetting about this. So much has happened in the past seven years. We've lived through a pandemic and two hostile takeovers of the federal government. Locally, parts of our town saw historic flooding. It's been a lot. But I remember. I was one of the concerned parents who spoke out against the armed guards. Criminologist and Bloomfield Council Candidate Dr. Satenik Margaryan, a few dozen other brilliant and committed neighbors, and I helped cofound Bloomfield Families for Sensible Safety, a local activist group that presented research to the Board of Education to try to persuade them to do the right thing for our kids. We put our lives on hold for six months that year to try to stop Jill. For me, I spent a lot of those six months trying to understand why she was doing what she was doing.

Looking back, I was an idiot. Jill’s reasons were right in front of my face, but I couldn’t believe it. When I first heard about the plan to install the guards on Facebook, I did exactly what everyone now knows not to do. I engaged the trolls. "Why do you want to do this?" I asked neighbors, members of the school board, the superintendent, and the mayor at the time (who was then publicly proclaiming himself to be a progressive Bernie Sanders supporter). When they couldn't give me good answers, I showed them the information that Satenik, others, and I had gathered. I thought the problem was that these seemingly good people just didn’t know the truth, but if we told them the truth, they would change their minds.

I wasn’t totally wrong. Some did change their minds. Not Jill. A few Board of Education members thanked us for bringing them research they could use to push back against the decision. They confided in us that Jill, as Board President, had not shared the budget with them until shortly before they were expected to vote on it. They had voted for the armed guards without fully understanding, and they felt duped.

Bloomfield Families for Sensible Safety got the attention of local news media. We solicited hundreds of signatures for our petition to stop the guards. We picketed outside Board meetings and filled the meetings with community members who were shocked that such a proposal could happen in a town as safe as ours. Our pressure worked. The schools postponed the decision at first, and held meetings that summer to get community feedback. There were two meetings: a public meeting, and a private, closed door stakeholder meeting.

It was at the closed door meeting that the truth finally came out. We were told that in the winter of 2018, a small group of parents and Home and School Association (HSA) officers reached out to their friend Jill Fischman to ask for armed guards to be installed in the schools. This was backed up by official Board emails obtained by an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request. It was shocking how many emails were exchanged between Jill and two or three parents who used their friendship with her and their HSA positions to pull sway. Publicly, they had claimed the reason was to deter school shootings. But we had shown them data proving that armed guards do not prevent or stop school shootings. In private, they revealed that what they were actually afraid of was new neighbors coming to the schools to pick up their children.

Publicly, we showed how armed guards would make the schools less safe, particularly for children of color, children with disabilities, and children who are not neurotypical. We pointed to research showing that armed guards contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline for Black children. Publicly, they questioned the school-to-prison pipeline altogether. Privately, a white mother, one of the friends who asked Jill for the guards, elaborated on this, saying she did not believe in the school-to-prison pipeline because she had grown up in Philadelphia and all the police were her friends.

Publicly, we had pointed out data showing that the crime rate in Bloomfield is very low. Privately, they told us that they worried about spillover crime from East Orange and Newark.

What I learned that summer was that when facts and logic can’t change someone’s mind, it’s because there is something more menacing at play. Systemic racism and implicit bias were behind the attempt to install armed guards in our schools. Satenik and I spoke out about this, telling the Board that the armed guards were just a symptom, that racism was the disease we needed to address.

In the end, better angels appeared to enough Board members to reverse the decision. The Superintendent offered the community an apology. Jill did not apologize. She stood behind the armed guards to the end. At a Board meeting on September 11, 2018, she even used the anniversary of 9/11 to try to justify their actions. Maybe she thought a good guy with a gun could have kept the towers up?

We have seen positive changes in our schools since this time, some willingness to address, repair, and change, thanks to newer leadership on the Board. If Jill has altered her position on guns as a result, then I am happy to hear it. I welcome her to the fold and I hope she has brought her friends along with her. There are difficult times ahead of us in this country, and we are going to have to form coalitions with those we disagree with on some issues to make alliances on bigger issues. But for the same reason, we need to be perfectly clear about our values. We don’t have time for politicians like Jill who will say whatever it takes to get elected. We need leaders, like Satenik Margaryan, who have an actual track record of supporting the truth, uncovering institutional racism, and fighting to keep guns out of our schools. Moms Demand got it wrong. Satenik Margaryan and her slate (Tracey Toler-Phillips and Stefanie Santiago) are the only gun sense candidates for Bloomfield.

Melissa De Fino