Pennsbury School Board President To Contact FBI Over Threats

LEVITTOWN, PA — The president of the Pennsbury School Board of Directors said she will be in contact with the FBI after she and two other members of the board received death threats and other disturbing messages over email and text message in recent months.

Christine Toy-Dragoni said in a news release last week that she has received messages at her district-issued email address, in private messages over social media and messages on her phone that suggest that every woman in her family should be raped, that every man in her family should be seriously injured and that she should be murdered.

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In one email, the recipient of the email, which was redacted by the district, was told to “do the world a favor” by purchasing a gun and bullet and putting the gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. Another said that the recipient was "done" and needed to grow eyes in the back of her head in a message that included an expletive.

The threats and messages come amid recent controversy surrounding masking in schools as districts continue to limit the spread of the coronavirus in schools. Toy-Dragoni said in a statement that she and other Pennsbury School Board members have been singled out community members who have spoken out against the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Toy-Dragoni also said that her private information has been published online which has led to her invasion of privacy. The board president, along with two other board members, were to have held a news conference last week on Thursday to discuss the challenges the district has faced during the pandemic, but that news conference was canceled without a reason being given.

Toy-Dragoni issued a news release instead saying that the kind of threats that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland discussed earlier this year in regard to threats against school officials across the country was taking place within the Pennsbury district.

“If all of (the received messages) wasn’t disgusting enough, several e-mails my fellow board members have received are violently anti-Semitic,” she wrote in the news release. “Many messages, including the threat of rape against my family members and me, were anti-immigrant. Other messages were horrifically transphobic. Because of the grotesque and pervasive nature of these threats, my colleagues are rightfully fearful about speaking out publicly.”

The news of the threats come after four district residents filed a federal lawsuit that states that their first Amendment rights have been violated after they said their public comments at Pennsbury School Board of Directors meetings earlier this year had been cut.

The suit states that “Pennsbury’s board members and officials set out to censor citizens whose political views they despise.” Toy-Dragoni was named in the lawsuit as well as other board members and district administrators.

Like our Attorney General, I strongly believe that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under the Constitution,” the board president said in her statement last week. “But these threats of violence and sexual assault and these expressions of transphobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish hatred are certainly not protected under the Constitution and must be investigated by the FBI.”