August 2022 — Ed Reporter Monthly Email Edition

The April 1998 Education Reporter included a comprehensive questionnaire designed for distribution to candidates running for local school boards. Given the recent successful efforts by parents and concerned citizens to replace liberal school board members, now may be an opportune time to provide readers with an updated version of that questionnaire in a format they can download and use as they see fit.

Just this past May, conservative school board members were elected by fed-up voters to ten seats in school districts in and around Fort Worth, Texas. Three incumbents were replaced by candidates who were demanding transparency, an end to forced masking, and an end to the teaching of CRT. They were hardly the only examples, and these victories highlight the frustration parents feel at the refusal of the teachers’ unions, school boards, and school administrators to respond to their concerns.

Below is a model school board candidate questionnaire that can be used to query local candidates during this fall’s election cycle and into 2023.

For a printable copy, click here.

Last month, it appeared that the Miami-Dade School District Board, which governs the largest school district in Florida and the entire southeastern United States, would inject some sanity into the relentless push to sexualize schoolchildren.

On July 23, The Washington Stand reported that the Miami-Dade board voted five to four against the adoption of two new sex education textbooks that had been under scrutiny for months and which a number of parents found objectionable. But just a week later, the board reversed its decision and approved the textbooks.

According to Politico, parents submitted 278 petitions against the new materials, titled Comprehensive Health Skills, arguing that “the lessons extend beyond what schools should be educating students on [about] sex.” Issues cited include instruction on gender orientation, abortion, and emergency “Plan B” contraceptives, which some parents consider inappropriate. While the district denied the petitions, the board initially voted down the textbooks.

Politico reported that school board members who rejected the books criticized their peers for taking up the issue again “when the ink is still wet” on the decision. But board chair Perla Tabares Hantman, whose “flipped vote made the difference” in the ultimate approval of the books by the close five-to-four margin, claimed to have voted yes out of fear that rejecting the books could cause the school district to be in violation of state standards.

Board members who voted to approve the books pointed out that under Florida law parents can opt their children out of sex education lessons, and advised school district leaders “to blast that out to the community.” But many parents would prefer the “opt-in” choice for controversial curricula and activities because they often fly under the radar with no clue given as to what children are learning.

In yet another twist to this story, the August 23 primary election brought a change to the Miami-Dade School District Board. Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President Ed Martin reported that the board “saw a landmark shift from a leftist majority to a conservative [majority]”. Martin said: “These huge victories are due not only to concerned parents, but to the great help and organization of grassroots groups like the 1776 Project PAC and their team. Conservatives need to realize that if we’re going to save America and return to our root values of liberty, we’re going to have to do it from the ground up!”

Disguising LGBTQ advocacy

While many states have passed laws restricting or prohibiting ideological indoctrination in K-12 classrooms, public school districts have continued to include it anyway. The covert teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been the most highly publicized offense, but schools also hide gender identity and transgender propaganda under the banner of mental health and suicide prevention.

To avoid the overt “grooming” of students, which has led to parent protests at school board meetings, school staff are being taught through professional development workshops and seminars to disguise their sexualized teaching. Independent investigative journalist Joe Herring described one such event in an op ed published online by The Lion, a publication of the The Herzog Foundation, a charitable group “dedicated to the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education.” Herring wrote that the Lincoln, Nebraska Public Schools in early August required school counselors, nurses, social workers and other health-related personnel to attend a “mandatory professional staff development workshop” presented by “self-described transgender author and speaker Ryan Sallans.”

Billed as a presentation on “human growth and development,” Herring wrote that “the workshop was instead thinly veiled advocacy for LGBTQ and transgender lifestyles.” Sallans, a biological female, “clearly delineated the tone at the outset by describing a failure of school staff to ‘use a student’s preferred pronouns’ as ‘harassment.'”

According to Herring, a common theme of all Sallans’ presentations is that “transgenderism is just another of life’s circumstances to be respected, like race or ethnicity.” Indeed, LGBTQ activists have for years compared their lifestyle preferences to immutable racial traits.

Herring’s op ed also described a larger conference that was held in May in Nebraska with more than 500 educators in attendance. “Resiliency, Advocacy and Celebration was the theme for 2022,” Herring explained, “as keynote presenters and more than 30 breakout workshops framed hotly debated issues such as transgenderism, gender identity and LGBTQ activism as entirely normal phases of child development.”

Herring added that, at the August event, Sallans promised that transgender people and their supporters “are going to put Lincoln, Nebraska on the national stage for the trans community with all their efforts to help kids transition.”

As he pointed out, “what was billed as an exercise in raising awareness and promoting understanding quickly morphed into a clarion call for social/sexual upheaval among schoolchildren — paid for by taxpayers in the name of ‘mental health.'”

Libs of TikTok exposes pornography in school libraries

In at least one school district, parents are being denied access to school library catalogs and thus prevented from reviewing the books that are available to their children. Libs of TikTok reported on July 29 that through a FOIA request initiated by outraged parents, an email surfaced from South Carolina’s Richland School District Two officials “demanding [that] the library be locked.”

Libs of TikTok published the email, which was originally written last year by Amy Whitfield, Richland Two’s Lead Library Media Specialist and which resurfaced on June 13. The email reads in part: “Considering the current political climate and scrutiny of school library collections, Nancy Gregory, Richland Two’s Chief Academic Officer, has asked that we remove guest access to our library catalogs to prevent access by anyone outside of Richland Two who may have malicious intent in searching our library collections.”

One wonders if “malicious intent” refers to parents wishing to discover what their children are exposed to in order to protect them from objectionable and, in some cases, hard core pornographic content.

Libs of TikTok quoted parent and school board candidate McGee Moody, who said: “Schools are trying to push an agenda. They don’t want parents to know what’s going on in the classroom. When you block off a library, it tells me you have something to hide; there’s something you don’t want people to see, and that’s a huge red flag.”

The library lockdown did not prevent parents from accessing the catalog, however. Several of the district’s elementary schools use a different system to access library information online, and parents were able to view the catalog despite the district’s efforts to hide it.

Among their findings were 29 books for middle schoolers on gender identity, including stories about “transgender kids using opposite sex bathrooms, cross-dressing toddlers, and our “‘racist’ Founding Fathers.” High school offerings included outright pornography, such as Flamer, a book containing sexually explicit content.

Sadly, Richland District Two is hardly unique. Libs of TikTok tweeted that the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky, include in their libraries such pornographic books as Gender Queer and Lawn Boy. A parent who boldly read excerpts from these books at a school board meeting was shut down when board members objected to the “obscene” content. The parent pointed out that this was exactly her issue, but the board nonetheless cut off her microphone, a familiar tactic of school boards that prefer not to hear the truth about the pornography on their district library shelves. One board member labeled anyone who opposed the books “anti-LGBTQ” to deflect from the graphically obscene content.

Twitter responses to the post mostly condemned the books and the school board’s action in stifling the mother’s testimony. One user commented: “This isn’t the first time it’s happened during a public board meeting and it won’t be the last. Their defense usually ends up being ‘we didn’t know it was there.'” Another user said she tells her kids to “check out the book” and then “burn it.”

Oregon School District in hot water

The Salem-Keizer School District, which is the second-largest district in Oregon, was also exposed for having the pornographic Gender Queer in school libraries, and parents were outraged that this book was available to their kids.

As reported by Libs of TikTok, the district pretended to respond to parents’ concerns by forming a special committee to evaluate the book. Chosen to head the committee was Suzanne West, director of strategic initiatives for the district. West’s job description reads: “Crafting and developing strategies that support the district’s movement to become a more anti-racist and anti-oppressive school system.”

West and her committee complained that the pages containing pornographic depictions were taken out of context and “do not represent the intention of the book and only served as an illustration…” A logical question is “why is it even licit for the public-school system to provide underage students with graphic illustrations of sex acts?”

Perhaps more telling than anything is this statement by the committee: “It being a graphic novel makes the book more accessible to a variety of readers,” an obviously inadvertent admission that at least some if not most of the district’s middle and high school students have limited or non-existent reading skills. But fear not, students will be exposed to graphic sexual acts anyway through library books such as Gender Queer.

Despite the committee charade, the Salem-Keizer School District will keep this book in its libraries “to help be more inclusive and allow all students from the LGBTQ+ community to have a resource to refer to.” But as Libs of TikTok noted: “The individuals choosing to provide this book to children won’t even allow it to be read at a public hearing. How is a book considered too graphic for the public but deemed ‘inclusive’ for children? Why do they want what they’re teaching our children to be kept a secret? Why are parents routinely shut down when they voice their concerns?”

The answer to these questions is clearly that the progressive left aims to continue forcing its extreme agenda on education by labeling all who object as “bigots,” “transphobes,” “haters,” and “book banners.” Parents and concerned citizens need to push back by removing their children from public schools if possible, and to continue electing conservative, pro-family school board members as the opportunities arise. (See our School Board Member questionnaire in this issue of Education Reporter.

A critical element of the often-tragic stories that result from the exposure of youth to pornography is the psychological and physical damage it causes. While most adults would agree that pornography is especially harmful to children, many of these same adults sanction the teaching of explicit sex education in the schools, as well as the inclusion of pornographic books in school libraries.

An organization called Protect Young Eyes published a list in 2021 of five ways pornography attacks the developing brains of children and ultimately twists their views of sex, relationships, and other people. The article is titled 5 Ways Pornography Harms Children and Teens and describes in some detail its physical impacts on the developing brains of the young.

At the time of publication, 5 Ways asserted that “90 percent of children ages 8-16 have seen online pornography.” Since one of the last regions of the brain to fully develop is the prefrontal cortex, which the article describes as “the ‘brakes’ of the brain,” young people can easily sustain neurological damage from exposure to pornography due to their inability to fully control how they react to what they see. The prefrontal cortex is typically developed by age 25.

Following is a synopsis of the five ways pornography impacts children and teens according to Protect Young Eyes:

• Pornography harms a child’s precious brain. It actually changes neural pathways.
• Pornography harms a child’s view of sex. How it appears on the screen (or shown in books and magazines) is not how it is in real life.
• Pornography harms a child’s view of people. Porn diminishes the ability to see a real person.
• Pornography harms a child’s quality of life. Because it is a super-normal stimulus, kids can’t stop watching, which causes loss of sleep and time.
• Pornography causes children to harm other children. When young kids see pornography, they practice pornography on other children.

The article explains that the brains of young people are “hypersensitive to reward stimuli. Meaning behaviors can become habitual VERY quickly. Neurons in the different regions of the brain comprising the reward system communicate using dopamine … It enhances reward-related memories and creates emotional associations with rewards … It’s not the reward itself, but the expectation of a reward that most powerfully influences emotional reactions and memories.”

While young children most often encounter pornography by accident through the idle electronic devices of adults, such as a computer screen with images carelessly left in view, the results of exposure can quickly become disastrous. In these cases, it is the responsibility of parents and other adults in the child’s life to protect them from such digital dangers.

Many observers place the blame for problems children and teens experience with pornography squarely on the failure of parents to monitor internet access, and surely parents and adult caregivers have grave responsibility in this arena. One psychologist Education Reporter spoke with, who preferred not to be named, charged that unmonitored and unregulated use of electronic devices and screens were almost entirely at fault for the explosion of youthful addiction to porn, and most professionals would likely agree with his assessment.

But the blame must also rest with schools, particularly when parents object to explicit sex education, transgender indoctrination, and pornographic library books, yet the schools refuse to listen, or when they deliberately hide these activities. Although some public officials believe schools should displace parents when it comes to education, this is a fallacy, and these officials must be held accountable at election time.

The 5 Ways article does not limit its content to the dangers posed by pornography, but provides ways parents can safeguard their children through the use of digital protections, and offers additional advice parents may or may not wish to take.

California’s Oakland Unified School District teachers ditched phonics in 2015, resulting in the total failure of students to learn to read. Now they are reembracing phonics. On August 20, The Daily Wire reported that Oakland schools, which once had one of the most successful reading programs in California because it was phonics-based, lapsed into failure after abandoning it over fears that it smacked of “colonialism,” better known today as “white supremacy.” To the Oakland teachers, apparently nothing symbolized white supremacy more than teaching all children, including minority and low-income children, to read successfully so they can grow up to achieve the American Dream.

In the interests of social justice then, these teachers convinced the district to switch to “a whole language approach, and student reading rates plummeted.” Now, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Kareem Weaver admits he is “part of a nationwide movement fighting to bring back the phonics-based approach.” But as The Daily Wire pointed out, if Weaver and his colleagues had “looked at the data when ditching phonics in the name of social justice, he would have avoided implementing a system that makes children dumber and illiterate. Better yet, had he listened to conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, this entire ordeal would have never happened.” The Wire went on to discuss Phyllis’ First Reader, its effectiveness and its ease of use. (Click on the image to hear Phyllis’ 1995 interview about First Reader.) The real tragedy is how many children have needlessly been lost to illiteracy in the Oakland School District since 2015.

Florida’s new plan to recruit veterans could fill 9,500 open teaching positions in the state’s public-school system. As Governor Ron DeSantis explained in announcing the initiative: “Our veterans have a wealth of knowledge and experience they can bring to bear in the classroom, and with this innovative approach they will be able to do so for five years with a temporary certification as they work towards their degree.” The Hill reported that to be eligible, veterans must have at least four years of military service with an honorable or medical discharge. They do not need a four-year college degree, but must have earned a minimum of 60 college credits with at least a 2.5 grade point average and must pass a background check. The Florida teachers’ unions have decried the plan, charging that it “will not solve the biggest issues educators are facing — low pay and lack of respect.” They might have added that many teachers are weary of union bullying and being forced to teach CRT and other woke curricula. The liberal media have also trashed the initiative. Incredibly, after viciously attacking every positive move Governor DeSantis has made, MSNBC’s Joy Reid blogged that “taken together, these policies threaten to turn classrooms from centers of healthy education into centers of indoctrination.” But it’s difficult for her lies to stand in the face of parent uprisings, the overturning of liberal school boards, and the desperate flight of teachers from the public schools — all of which reveal the inconvenient truth.

Kindergartners in Portland, Oregon, will be taught gender identity lessons that “seek to turn the principles of academic queer theory into an identity-formation program for elementary school students.” As Christopher Rufo explained in a recent City Journal article: “The premise is simple: privileged white heterosexuals have created an oppressive gender system in order to dominate racial and sexual minorities.” Activists routinely present as fact the misleading notion that immutable racial or ethnic traits can be compared equally to sexual preferences. But this curriculum takes on an even more sinister tone because it suggests that indigenous peoples had different views of gender — like those of today’s woke liberals of course — than did the “white European people who brought their views of gender with them and forced them upon the people already living there.” This begs the question of whether there is any real evidence that indigenous peoples believed such lunacy. Rufo reveals that the brainwashing begins in kindergarten “with an anatomy lesson featuring graphic drawings of children’s genitalia. The lesson avoids the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ in favor of gender-neutral variants…” According to the curriculum, “some girls can have penises and some boys can have vulvas.” These lessons grow increasingly intense as grade levels go up, with first and second graders receiving indoctrination in “the key tenets of gender-identity theory.” By fifth grade, kids are asked to make commitments that effectively turn them into what Rufo calls “political activists for queer theory and the broader sexual revolution.” All we can hope for is that parents will revolt — which cannot come soon enough.