The state's proposed new science standards aren't on today's Board of Education agenda, as we far can tell. But a handful of influential Northeast Florida moms who are active in their PTOs and the Republican Party say that with the help of state Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, they’ve been given the green light to come to Tampa to tell the board they don’t like what they consider to be a dogmatic, all-or-nothing take on evolution.

"It's just evolution and that's it," Kim Kendall, a St. John’s County resident and self-described mom-who-won't-go-away, told The Gradebook. She said she and her group "want to make it clear we are not advocating creationism, or anything that's illegal by Supreme Court ruling. (But) there’s a lot of different scientific data out there showing different things … Science told us forever that the earth was flat."

Kendall said Wise, the chair of the Senate education appropriations committee, intervened to get her and the other moms some time before the BOE. She said she doesn’t represent any particular group, but a press release she sent out to dozens of media outlets (including Disney, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity) refers concerned citizens to the Florida Coalition for Academic Freedom, which credits the Center for Science and Culture, which is part of the Discovery Institute, which is the nation’s leading think tank for intelligent design.

- Ron Matus, state education reporter

For an update, click here.