CRWNA SEPTEMBER MEETING REMINDER for Members and Guests

Conservative Republican Women

of North Atlanta

September Meeting

Monday, September 18, 2023

(3rd Monday of the month)

Snack & Social Time: 7:00 pm

Meeting: 7:15 pm - 9:00 pm

George Pierce Park Community Center

55 Buford Hwy, Suwanee, GA 30024

Holly Terei - Our Panel Moderator

We all know Holly as our CRWNA Program Director, but she also currently works as Georgia's grassroots coordinator for the American Federation for Children, educating, mobilizing and engaging the state on the issue of school choice. Her passion for educational freedom also plays a significant role as co-founder and Director of Teacher Coalition, with the newly-launched organization, Freedom in Education. Working closely with educators across the nation, Holly provides tangible solutions to the issues educators are facing, while highlighting the need for union alternatives and competitive markets for teachers via school choice.

Holly's background is in special needs advocacy, spending the last 10 years fighting for the rights, awareness and inclusion of special needs children, even authoring her own children's book and published curriculum. She is also more commonly known for her contributions to both national and local media, covering the issues of educational freedom and parental rights.

As a mom of 4 young children, 2 of which are special needs, Holly understands and is deeply passionate about the school choice movement and parental rights issues. She believes every child in Georgia should have access to a quality education and that every parent knows best what that education should look like.

Dr. Pat Daugherty retired from the University of Georgia in 2015 after serving as a student affairs administrator on several campuses for almost 40 years.

She is past president of Conservative Republican Women of Northeast Georgia (now Conservatives of Northeast Georgia) and is currently the editor of Eagle Forum's weekly online newsletter, Eagle Forum Insights. She has worked with a variety of national conservative organizations since 2008, and ran for the GA State Senate in 2016.

Right now she and other Oconee County activists are challenging the hundreds of sexually explicit children's books in the public library and in the Athens Regional Library System. Pat is an enthusiastic alumna of Clemson University, Ohio State University, and the University of Alabama (primarily Clemson), and her son is a detective with the Metro Nashville Police Department. He and his wife have three young sons.

Melissa Jackson is the President and Co-Founder of Freedom in Education, made the decision to leave her thriving career in Software Validation Consulting and Project Management 2.5 years ago to get involved in the grassroots efforts to advocate for an academic focus in K-12 schools and a respect for parents rights. This choice was driven by her personal experience witnessing her own children facing challenges arising from politically motivated agendas in public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing her project management and operational expertise, she established a robust infrastructure for a nationwide parent organization. Additionally, her leadership style played an important role in fostering a unified grassroots movement in her home state of Georgia.

Among her most treasured life experiences were the 14 years she spent as a stay-at-home mom with her 4 children who are now 24 through 16 years old. It is now time to prioritize the pursuit of constructive solutions for K-12 education. Solutions that aim to empower children within the public school system and those who transition away from it, ensuring their success and fostering their independence as productive citizens.

Judy Craft has a master’s degree in reading from Georgia State University and was an elementary school reading specialist. She has a lifelong love of reading, literature and education.

Her avocation since raising her family, is “Politics as it relates to the culture.” The issue of children’s access to sexually explicit books in our public libraries propelled her to join with another mother to start Citizens for Family Friendly Libraries in Gwinnett County back in 1995, so she has been working on this issue for decades.

She then served as the legislative aide to Senator Clint Day, has recruited candidates to run for office and helped with many campaigns.

Judy has been a leader in Civics and Moral Concerns Ministries in her church since 1995. She has produced candidate surveys and has also worked within the Republican party as a champion for family issues.

She co-founded Conservative Republican Women of North Atlanta in 1998. Most recently, Judy helped initiate a new grassroots coalition called Georgians for Family Friendly Libraries. Its purpose is to strategize against the onslaught of crude, sexually-explicit and age-inappropriate books our students are confronted with in both public libraries and school libraries. She and Ken now live in Cumming, GA.

Apryl Dukes-McDaniel is the Director of Research and Content and Co-Founder of Freedom in Education. She is a devoted wife, mother of 3, and a small business owner residing in Forsyth County. She holds a degree in Business Management & Marketing from North Carolina State Univ. with over 17 years of experience in leadership and creative design.

Apryl left Corporate America in 2011 to raise her children and launched her own photography business shortly after. As an avid researcher, she joined grassroots efforts in her community to preserve the God-given freedoms that were being jeopardized during the 2020 pandemic.

In pursuit of truth & transparency in education, Apryl has worked to expose indoctrination infiltrating K-12 schools over the past 3 years and educate parents on their rights to direct the upbringing of their children. On a mission to preserve the innocence of all children, she successfully led an effort to force school officials in Forsyth County to address the presence of sexually explicit material available to students in media centers which led to the creation of an in-house media center parental notification system for the county schools. Apryl advocates for keeping young minds safe in this digital age and believes education should equip students with the logic/reason to discern truth from falsehoods.