More than 200 Fort Fairfield Middle High School students, staff and administrators filed into the school’s gym on April 8 for an anti-bullying assembly.

On stage, surrounded by neon tube lights, was the Icon Dance Team, a New York-based troupe that travels to schools around the U.S. dancing and singing to radio hits interspersed with messages about self-respect and standing up for others.

Parents were notified of the performance in advance, MSAD 20 Superintendent Melanie Blais said. No one contacted the district afterward to complain.

But six days later, on April 14, the conservative influencer Libs of TikTok blasted a series of posts about the performance — and its lead dancer — to its millions of social media followers and accused the district of “openly grooming” its students.

“This is what schools are pushing on your children using our tax dollars,” one caption reads. “SHUT THEM DOWN.”

Commenters tagged the U.S. Department of Justice and called Maine a “demonic” state. Some encouraged violence against one of the dancers.

District officials insist the performance focused only on encouraging positive self-esteem and counteracting bullying. And despite the recent furor on social media, they say local people have shared no concerns.

“The content of the program included messages about standing up for oneself and others, reporting bullying to trusted adults, encouraging students to set goals and to include peers who may be left out,” Blais said.

The issue concerned the group’s frontman, James Linehan, who is also a musician with the stage name J-Line. In his music career, Linehan bills himself as “your favorite gay pop star” and is currently on a tour called the “Dirty Pop Party,” where he performs alongside other LGBTQ artists.

Libs of TikTok, run by Chaya Raichik, a former Brooklyn real estate agent turned social media provocateur, pulled photos from Linehan’s music website, in which he is shirtless, and targeted his sexuality to argue that he was pushing sexually charged content on children.

The Icon Dance Team, which also goes by the names Echo Dance Team and Vital Dance Team, is a separate entity. The group, active since at least 2011, features Linehan and two backup dancers and has performed at more than 2,000 schools, according to its website.

Performances consist of 30 minutes of choreographed dancing and singing to songs about self-acceptance, followed by Linehan recounting how he was bullied in grade school and his journey to finding his life passions and respecting himself.

School officials reviewed the group’s website before scheduling the performance and found it aligned with the district’s anti-bullying goals, Blais said.

“The group was chosen based on strong recommendations from several other school districts where similar performances had been presented in the past,” Blais said. “Those districts described the assemblies as positive and energetic and praised their messages about self-esteem and anti-bullying.”

Hours of the group’s school performances posted by other districts online and reviewed by the Bangor Daily News do not include suggestive dancing and Linehan does not mention his sexuality.

This is not the first time the dance team has faced criticism, nor the first time Libs of TikTok has taken aim at Maine.

In the past year, the account amplified a school board debate over the harassment of transgender students in North Berwick and the election of a Bangor city councilor with a criminal record. The account was among the right-wing influencers that successfully campaigned to doom a 2024 bill before the Maine legislature that surrounded gender-affirming care.

Icon’s performances at schools in Utah, Ohio, Texas and Tennessee have come under scrutiny from parents who referred to Linehan’s music career and posts on his social media accounts.

A district in Missouri canceled two assemblies in 2023 after receiving complaints. Some of the criticism is linked to allegations that Linehan encouraged students at some performances to follow his Instagram, which is tied to his music career. Parents alleged it contained “inappropriate” content.

That Instagram page is now private. Blais said they raised the issue with the group ahead of the performance.

“That was not a part of the performance in any way and we clarified this with the company prior to their visit to our school,” she said.

Linehan did not respond to a request for comment.

Libs of TikTok has almost 7 million followers between X, Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, the platform founded by President Donald Trump.

Raichik, the account’s creator, has mingled with Trump and other right-wing politicians and activists at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida residence. Her posts, which can receive hundreds of thousands to millions of views, have helped shape anti-LGBTQ discourse in conservative circles and have been promoted by the likes of podcaster Joe Rogan and Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Center labels Raichik as an extremist.

But despite the assembly generating national outrage last week, in Fort Fairfield, the community appears unshaken.

“We’ve not received a single call or email from local community members that I am aware of,” Blais said. “We initially received a handful of calls from individuals who were clearly not affiliated with the school district in any way, but they were not interested in hearing what actually took place.”

FALMOUTH, Maine (WABI) – The now former commissioner of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has a new role.

Judy Camuso has been selected as the new president of Maine Audubon.

She will take over Andy Beahm’s position.

Beahm will be retiring next month.

Camuso will become the first woman to lead the environmental organization.

She became the first woman to become commissioner of the MDIFW back in 2019, a position she held for seven years.

TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.

Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.

Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.

“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”

Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.

“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”

Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.

A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.

As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.

East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.

In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.

The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.

After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.

“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.

Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.

At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.

“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”

Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.

“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.

“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.

Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.