Parents in Texas and beyond won’t stand for schools undermining their values on race, sex
Here’s one thing we know about parents in 2022: They’ve had it. And not just with the pandemic and working from home.
It turns out they care about something even more pressing — their kids’ education. Thanks to government-forced shutdowns, in the last two years, some parents have finally seen what their kids are learning. And it wasn’t always just reading, writing and math.
In addition to the basics, some schools are leaning hard into critical race theory and expansive sex education that includes graphic sexual details and conversations about fluid gender identity. In states like Virginia, North Carolina — and even in parts of Texas — parents are realizing they’re not OK with this and they’re starting to speak up.
Teachers were instructed at a recent training at Walsh Middle School in the Round Rock Independent School District near Austin about how to correct a student if he or she uses another student’s “incorrect” pronouns. They were not only prompted to encourage fluid gender identity in school also directly told not to tell parents if a student tells them they identify as transgender or non-binary.
The instructions at this training are reminiscent of the sex-ed curriculum the nearby Austin ISD unanimously approved in 2020. That curriculum included sixth-graders being shown a video about sexual orientation and instructed to think of ways to “challenge homophobia,” such as “attending a pride rally” and “being an ally to someone who identifies as LGBT.” The curriculum also states that “sex assigned at birth is independent of gender identity.”
Some parents are already frustrated their children are receiving expansive sex education at school, but for the schools to encourage teachers to keep whatever they might learn about a child’s struggles, including gender identity, to themselves, is unethical and a breach of trust between parents and taxpayer-subsidized schools.
Carroll ISD schools have been roiled for years with battles over teaching critical race theory. True or not, it came about because parents made a stir. The definitions of CRT change from district to district and state to state, but the point about both CRT and gender identity education — or really any subject — remains the same: Parents should have a say in what their kids learn.
A parent in North Carolina, Brian Echeverria, who described himself as “biracial” and “bilingual,” attended a recent school board meeting and told them his concerns about CRT. He reminded board members that parents won’t just sit back and remain quiet if schools continue to teach curriculum with which they strongly disagree.
“In America, I can do anything I want and I teach that to my children,” he said. “And the person who teaches my little pecan-colored kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me. I think that’s the same for every parent. What the masks showed us is that the parents, the most powerful group of people in the country, that they’re taking back the wheel … CRT, all of that, the parents don’t want it. It’s a big fat lie.”
The left, the national media and often school administrators will get stuck on the specifics of sex-based curriculum, CRT or library books, and while that’s important, sometimes they miss the forest for the trees: School systems are not autonomous. They remain at the behest of the taxpayer, the city, the parents and people who live there.
This year, parents decided it was time to show up.
This story was originally published February 21, 2022 at 5:04 AM.
