After clashing with school board members last year, Pennridge student is running to unseat them

Last year, then-Pennridge High School senior Anna Sophie Tinneny clashed with the school board as a leader of an unauthorized school club to protest gun violence and a subsequent viral protest after 225 student protesters were given detention.

This year, the 18-year-old Tinneny isn’t just fighting the school board. She’s running to join it.

“It’s not revenge -- that’s not what it’s about,” said Tinneny, referring to her run in the May primary for one of five available seats on the nine-member board. But she said that after the turmoil over the gun-violence walkout, “I realized maybe these [incumbents] aren’t the best people to be making decisions on the community and our children’s education.”

Tinneny’s campaign, helped by Sean Jenkins, another recent Pennridge grad and leader of the protest that became known as the Pennridge 225, puts her at the forefront of young people rising from the resurgence of activism over issues such as gun violence and climate change and now looking toward electoral politics.

Amanda Litman, a cofounder of a group called Run for Something launched on the same day Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in January 2017, said organizers have been stunned by the more than 1,000 young candidates who have emerged from the project, with roughly one-quarter of them under the age of 25.

Litman noted that a number of the Run for Something candidates have cited the gun-safety issue — either energized by the March for Our Lives movement that arose from the February 2018 high school mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., or those who experienced gun violence personally or through a family member.

The current crop of candidates nationwide includes 19-year-old Matthew Gifford of Waukesha, Wis., a March for Our Lives activist running for school board, and Aaron Chess, a 21-year-old candidate for Peoria, Ill., city council who lost his sister to a shooting.

“Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and different people around the country running for city council at 18, 19 years old,” said Tinneny, who is also an ambassador for a youth voter initiative called Eighteen x 18. “It’s really a movement. I felt empowered.”

The future political science major is already getting an education in both the promise and perils of elective politics.

Right now, she’s living with a family on a farm in Ecuador in a study-abroad program during a “gap year” before she attends college. If she wins the May primary, she’d have to juggle the fall campaign with her studies at a nearby university, though she’s not sure where yet. She’ll be back in April to focus full time on the campaign.

She feels strongly that young people need a voice in the school district. “I wasn’t in high school 20, 30 years ago,” Tinneny said, comparing herself with the current incumbents. “I was in high school last year,” as she cited “being able to have that first-person perspective” on classroom issues.

Few students — or first-time school board candidates — can cite as dramatic a final year of high school as Tinneny and Jenkins had in 2018. Defying administrators and a school board vote, as organizers at Pennridge during last March’s National School Walkout they led their classmates to leave campus and stage a protest for stricter gun laws in the weeks after the Parkland shooting.

After the walkout, the school ordered 225 students to attend Saturday detention. A viral video of several dozen students staging what they called “a modern sit-in” by locking arms and holding signs with the names of Parkland victims has been viewed more than 3.4 million times.

The controversy was also a crash course in local politics for Tinneny, Jenkins, and the rest of the Pennridge 225. A number of the student activists had pleaded with the school board for permission to conduct the walkout, only to be rebuffed by Republican members who cited safety concerns but also expressed ideological differences.

One incumbent, Joan Cullen, later on Twitter cited “the truly radical, anti-police, anti-U.S. govt. nature” of the school walkout and retweeted a fellow conservative who called the students “misinformed Marxist truant peers.” Last June, Cullen’s close ally on the board, Megan Banis-Clemens, was installed as board president after her predecessor, Christine Yardley — who’d supported the walkout — resigned.

Banis-Clemens and Cullen are seeking reelection with three other incumbents. There are six challengers. All are cross-filed with both parties. Tinneny is a registered Republican while Jenkins is a Democrat. “She comes from a Republican family,” said her mother, Heather McCarron, noting that Pennridge is “Trump country.”

Student activists, for their part, vowed after their detentions to turn their focus to registering young voters in the Pennridge district, which sprawls across several townships in Upper Bucks County.

Tinneny, who served a one-day in-school detention for organizing the viral protest, said school officials subsequently monitored and occasionally asked about her Twitter posts, which she suspects “was clearly directed by the school board.”

“I wasn’t very super politically active before all of this,” she said. “This has opened my eyes to a whole different world.”

Initially, Jenkins planned to join Tinneny as a candidate, but as they prepared to run they realized that running two separate campaigns might muddy the waters with a slate of candidates called One Pennridge that is also hoping to oust some of the GOP incumbents who sparred with the gun-walkout activists.

“I didn’t want too many names on the ballot to scramble the vote,” said Jenkins, a freshman at Temple University studying political science and business. He said he also backs the One Pennridge candidates.

The school safety issue that got Tinneny and Jenkins active in the first place also still looms over Pennridge. On Monday, the Pennridge board voted to hire two armed police officers to patrol its schools. On Twitter, Pennridge 225 wrote: “This will not keep us safe.”

But when Tinneny speaks of her campaign, she focuses — like other young people running for office in the current climate — largely on the more fundamental need for generational change. “I feel like I owed it to my past self and also the kids that are still there, at Pennridge,” she said of her campaign. “I owed it to them.”