Tag Archives: School Boards

Bribing Schools To Accept Transgender Policies

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The problem with federal money is that it always comes with strings attached. Our local school boards no longer have the freedoms they once had because many of their decisions are determined by the federal Department of Education and linked to grants and funding. The Biden administration is using grants and funding in order to advance its radical agenda on child sexuality.

On Sunday, Just the News reported the following:

A new Biden administration rule forces schools to comply with progressive ideology on gender and sexuality or risk losing the federal aid for free and reduced-price school lunches.

Legal observers say this is just the first in a slew of new rules on the horizon tying federal education funding to far-left policies on gender and sexuality.

The school lunch funding controvesy began in May 2022, as The Center Square previously reported, with an announcement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which handles federal help for school lunches.

The USDA said at the time it would change its longstanding interpretation of Title IX, the law broadly governing discrimination protections in education. USDA said it would expand its previous prohibition against discriminating based on sex “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

School lunch funding goes through the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of USDA.

The article notes:

“This is a significant departure from what Title IX has always been interpreted to be,” Sarah Perry, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation and expert on this issue, told The Center Square.

With an ever-growing number of orientations and gender identities, and despite the political divide on the issue, schools will now be forced to comply on the complex and highly politicized gender and sexuality issue.

“This is no small change,” Perry said. “This is a significant interpretation to say that sex equals sexual orientation and gender identity when Title IX, we know, dates back to 1972 and the women’s liberation movement, and at the time there was an entire campaign by LGBTQ activists to be included in anti-discrimination law indicating that they themselves did not believe that they were protected in these particular contexts.”

Is there anyone is Congress who is willing to stand up to this? This is not a law–it’s a regulation. Does anyone in Congress have the courage to propose a law that will prevent this from happening?

When The Grass Roots Wakes Up

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The mama and papa bears who have children in public schools are rapidly waking up. The warped history of America being taught, the push toward creating transgender students, and the sexual assaults that have occurred due to ridiculous bathroom policies have awakened parents. The lockdowns of last year opened parents’ eyes to what their children were being taught. Now parents are standing up for their children’s right to a good education.

The New York Sun posted an article today about the backlash against the garbage being taught to our children in public schools.

The article reports:

Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week. They won some but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions. Where outside national groups, such as the 1776 Project PAC, stepped in with funding to help offset union power, the odds shifted and challengers did well.

The press portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but that’s only part of the truth. They were also struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions — about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum, and teacher contracts — protect teachers first. Never mind what’s best for pupils.

That needs to change. In Albuquerque, the winning candidate, Courtney Jackson, told a local newspaper, “the board of education should be the kids’ union,” not a puppet of the teachers’ union. Jackson decided to run after watching the board discuss when to end lockdowns. The discussion focused entirely on what teachers wanted, never addressing the childrens’ needs. “Their interests were not brought up once.”

In Guilford, Connecticut, a small seacoast town, the Guilford Education Association, representing teachers, ran the show. In a questionnaire for school board candidates, the union’s number one question asked candidates to pledge support for “collective bargaining rights.”

The article concludes:

Why the explosion in parental engagement this year? Parents sitting at the kitchen table listening to Zoom school saw what their children were being taught — and not taught. That’s what happened in Montclair, NJ.

In Montclair, the mayor, Sean Spiller, serves as president of the state’s largest teachers union but also appointed the school board — a blatant conflict of interest. The board negotiates the teachers’ contract. Last Tuesday, the town voted 70% to replace mayoral control with an elected board.

That’s an improvement, but electing the board won’t guarantee students become the priority. Not while teachers unions outgun local parents groups. Organizations like Moms for Liberty, now with chapters in 32 states, will make the difference.

Many school districts will elect board members sometime in the spring, instead of on Election Day. That’s by design to keep the public in the dark that an election is even happening and discourage turnout.

Parents and other concerned citizens have roughly half a year to gird for these upcoming contests. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told a news outlet that “Parents are going to right this ship, and this election was only the beginning.”

It’s dangerous to wake a mama bear.

We Are In Danger Of Losing Our Right To Free Speech

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Yesterday NewsMax reported that a group representing local school boards is asking the Biden administration to go after parents who protest the school board’s policies.

The article reports:

A group representing local public school boards is asking the Biden administration to invoke the Patriot Act and federal hate crimes legislation, among other measures, to go after parents who have aggressively opposed board policies and members who have adopted measures such as mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory curricula.

In the open letter addressed to President Joe Biden, the National School Boards Association asserts that ”education leaders are under an immediate threat.”

The request ”to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation” comes as reports of angry parents expressing opposition to COVID-19 policies and curriculum changes — particularly those tied to critical race theory — have become more frequent.

There is a problem with hate crime laws. You are making a judgement on a person’s thoughts–not solely on his actions. Unless you are a mind reader, your chances of being absolutely accurate in judging someone else’s actions is slim. The concept of hate crimes is simply a step toward embracing the idea of thought crimes–not a place we want to be.

There have been a few examples of parents acting inappropriately at school board meetings, but there are more examples of parents simply questioning the material that is being taught in our public schools. Education leaders are not under “an immediate threat” unless you consider anyone who disagrees with them a threat. The Virginia school board did not like it when a parent read some of the pornography found in the middle school library. The National School Boards Association representing the school boards is simply a group of people who would like to shut down the speech and/or activities of anyone who interferes with the tyranny that has appeared in some of our local school boards. School boards are elected officials and are supposed to answer to the voters. If is unfortunate if some of those voters have behaved inappropriately and they should be dealt with as individuals, but that is no excuse to accuse them of hate crimes or invoke the Patriot Act. Any elected official has to deal with a certain number of idiots, but that is no excuse to call down the power of the government on anyone who disagrees with them.