A group to rival the Pa. School Boards Association? A conservative member has launched an alternative.

A conservative school board director has launched a new statewide organization that aims to train fellow board leaders to better advocate on hot-button education issues such as curriculum development, collective bargaining, and superintendent selection.

The Pennsylvania School Directors Coalition was started by Christina Brussalis, a school board member in suburban Pittsburgh.

Brussalis, whose role was first reported by Pittsburgh’s WESA, has previously said conservative school board members should have a “collective voice in Harrisburg” that rivals the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, a nonpartisan membership organization that has for the last 129 years trained board leaders of the state’s 500 school districts.

“We need to beat them to it,” Brussalis told conservative activists at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference last year, referring to PSBA efforts to establish parent groups. “We need to plant parents’ groups that are conservative and fighting for conservative values in every school across the state.”

The new group is coming onto the scene just a few months after hotly contested school board races in which Democrats won back power in numerous Philadelphia-area districts and reversed controversial conservative policies.

Here is how the coalition relates to other efforts by conservatives to shape public education in Pennsylvania:

On its website, which was launched in March, the coalition describes itself as “a much-needed resource for elected school directors throughout Pennsylvania,” helping board members promote “commonsense education policies” and improve student achievement. The language, while not describing any policies, is reminiscent of the conservative group Moms for Liberty’s calls for a “back-to-basics” approach to education.

The group’s website lists 10 upcoming “boot camp” trainings for members, on topics ranging from federal privacy law and collective bargaining to oversight of school curriculum. The latter has been a particularly hot topic for conservatives, who have accused public schools of seeking to “indoctrinate” students and sought to remove perceived liberal ideas from school curricula.

“We believe that all school directors, regardless of political viewpoint or ideology, will find PSDC a valuable partner,” the website says.

The website doesn’t describe the coalition as conservative, and it doesn’t include any information about who runs it.

A Pine-Richland school board director, Brussalis was elected in 2021 as part of Pine-Richland Kids First, a slate of Republican candidates that received money from Bucks County venture capitalist Paul Martino’s Back to School PA PAC. She previously worked in public relations.

During Brussalis’ tenure, the Pine-Richland board has killed a proposed equity policy and been the site of debate on library books considered to have sexually explicit passages that have been targeted by conservatives nationally.

Brussalis spoke at last year’s Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists. Participating in a panel moderated by Michael Geer, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Family Institute — a “religious freedom” lobbying group with a legal arm that helped Central Bucks implement restrictions on library books and transgender athletes — Brussalis said she and others had been working “to try to connect the conservative school board directors so that we can have a collective voice in Harrisburg.”

“There’s nothing that’s going to help me talk about conservative issues, in a conservative way, that’s coming out of PSBA,” Brussalis said, adding that “probably 90% of the time I don’t agree with what the Pennsylvania School Boards Association tells me.”

In an interview Monday, Brussalis declined to talk about her disagreements with PSBA.

“I just believe there’s no one organization or group that should have a monopoly on the ideas, or the solutions,” she said.

Mackenzie Christiana, a PSBA spokesperson, said the nonpartisan organization, which counts 499 of Pennsylvania’s 500 districts as members, was focused on “fostering an exceptional public education for every student and family in Pennsylvania.”

“This work is too important to be distracted by any individual or group attempting to impose their own myopic personal ideology into our local community schools,” she said.

Brussalis declined to say who else was on the coalition’s board, but said it included other school board members, as well as “those who are not.” She said she would not disclose names of the group’s other leaders until its nonprofit tax forms became public.

She also declined to say who was funding the group. “We have individual donors who support the concept and idea that with good governance we can improve,” she said.

On its website, the coalition lists among its services “model policy and policy review.” Asked whether her group was working with the Independence Law Center, the Pennsylvania Family Institute’s legal arm, Brussalis said that “we’re an independent organization.”

While Democrats in November swept a number of contentious school board elections around Philadelphia, school boards elsewhere in the state have signed new agreements with the law center. Advocates on the left say they remain concerned about school board “extremism,” and have organized in opposition.

Brussalis said her coalition’s current focus is providing training to school board members, though “we do hope to be able to provide model policy and other kinds of resources to school directors.”

In the meantime, the group is trying to grow a statewide presence. “If school directors like what we’re providing, they’ll keep coming back,” she said.