Courtesy of Sarah Leonardi.
- A Florida school board member is facing death threats after chaperoning a field trip to a restaurant.
- Sarah Leonardi took an elementary school class to LGBTQ-friendly Rosie's Bar and Grill last week.
- Since then, Leonardi has been targeted with vulgar and disturbing abuse online after last week's visit.
Florida school board member Sarah Leonardi found a letter from Grand Rapids, Michigan, in her mailbox on Wednesday.
Curious, she opened it; it was a standard piece of printer paper. A screenshot of an innocuous tweet she posted last week was blown up to fill two-thirds of the paper.
Underneath, the stranger who found her home address had written a warning: "Degenerates like you should be in jail."
The Broward County Public Schools school board official says she's faced death threats as well as disturbing and vulgar harassment after chaperoning a field trip to a popular LGBTQ-friendly community restaurant.
Leonardi last week accompanied students from Wilton Manors Elementary School to Rosie's Bar and Grill, which has hosted the students on field trips for a handful of years.
The trip is organized to help students learn more about interacting with their community and local businesses, Leonardi told Insider.
Parents signed a permission slip, and students even got their own special kids menu to order from which didn't include any of the restaurant's innuendo-laded menu names.
-School Board Member Sarah Leonardi (@bcpsleonardi) October 27, 2021
But after Leonardi posted some photos of the trip to Twitter on October 27 saying the students had a "fun walk over" and "learned a lot about our community," she said she immediately received harsh backlash.
Leonardi said in the past week she's received abusive and threatening phone calls, text messages, and emails.
Some abuse has been graphic and sexist, urging her to kill herself or threatening sexual violence. Others are death threats. One person accused her of being a pedophile.
"Take my kid to a gay bar you will have to answer to Mr 9mm," one user wrote on social media.
Sarah Leonardi
Leonardi said the harassers seem to think she took the students to the restaurant without their parents' permission.
"They all characterized it as if I had taken children without parental consent to a gay bar to, like, indoctrinate them with an LGBTQ agenda," she told Insider.
School board meetings across the country have become the battlegrounds of culture war issues like critical race theory, vaccine requirements, and mask mandates.
Meanwhile, education officials have been the subjects of abuse, harassment, and threats as tensions boil over at a national stage.
Leonardi said backlash hasn't been from community members, who she said have been rallying around her, the school, and the restaurant.
Instead, the abuse has come from people outside the community - apparently angry because they baselessly think Leonardi is trying to push an agenda.
Leonardi said she's reported the threatening messages and vulgar harassment to the school district's safety and security department. Broward County Public Schools did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Leonardi said she has friends who are school board members across Florida who have experienced their own harassment and abuse.
She said the abuse she's endured is just a "microcosm" of what's been happening around the country.
"I believe these are a lot of fake moral crises that are meant to distract from the day-to-day business of public education," she said. "So far, it's working."
Leonardi is nine-months pregnant, which only adds an additional layer of anxiety and stress, she said.
"I can't believe I'm bringing a child into all of this," she said.
Leonardi said she loves public education and always wanted to be a teacher; she couldn't imagine herself doing anything else.
But now, she wonders.
"At this point, I don't know that it's worth putting my family through all of this," she said.