Politics

GOP-backed School Board candidate 'a hundred percent' for parental choice

Alyssa Norman announces her candidacy for School Board.

By Bill Moss, Published: December 4, 2021

A young mom who is a registered nurse announced her candidacy for Henderson County School Board on Friday, declaring that masks and vaccines in schools should be a matter of parental choice and not board-imposed mandates.

Alyssa Norman and her husband, Jeff, have a 12-year-old daughter at Rugby Middle School and a 5-year-old son that they placed in Mud Creek Baptist Church school’s kindergarten because of the school mask mandate.
“For the past couple of years we’ve watched our children suffer,” she said. “They’ve suffered socially and emotionally and many of them are very behind academically. They’ve been put in the middle of a very ugly battle. It’s been back and forth and they’ve been given no say of their own.”
Norman, 30, is the daughter of Daniel Andreotta, the Henderson County commissioner who has joined colleagues in questioning mask mandates and quarantine policies in the public schools and voting to bar the health department from promoting the Covid-19 vaccine. Andreotta introduced his daughter.
A Hendersonville native who attended Apple Valley Middle School and graduated from North Henderson High School, Norman has been a registered nurse for eight years. She comes from a family of people who have worked in public service, she said, including as school teachers and law officers.
“As a parent I’m very concerned,” she said. “I feel like the wrong agenda is being pushed forward while parents are being pushed out. For the first time in my life, I’m seeing parents that are too uncomfortable to send their kids to school. I’ve seen teachers who feel like they’ve actually lost their opportunity to teach. As I’ve watched how this has unfolded in the last couple of years and been more in tune, I’ve had people ask me, ‘What are you going to do about it? You’re upset. What are you going to do?’”
Answer: Run for School Board.
Norman made the announcement at the Henderson County Republican Party headquarters with the party’s logo as a backdrop, signaling that adherence to a nonpartisan tone in the officially nonpartisan School Board election may be a thing of the past in the current hyperpartisan climate.
“It clearly is a nonpartisan race,” Norman said. “And clearly, the building we’re in and what I’m doing — it’s where I stand and my values, where I align, and I’m proud of that. I have no problem being associated with that.”
The first question from a supporter in the gathering of 25 people was about her position on the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
“I am not for any sort of CRT being pushed in,” she said. “I am absolutely against that.”
Asked how she would have voted when the School Board reinstated a mask mandate for K-6 children last month amid a spike in infections, she said she would have voted no.
“I am a hundred percent for parents choosing the choice of their children on any decision," she said, "whether that’s masks, vaccines, whether that’s extra curriculum that addresses racial or any sort of other questions or teaching. It’s a hundred percent the parents’ decision on whether they would want those things or not.”