RUTHFULLY YOURS

America is awash in kind, caring teachers, who want their students to acquire real skills and knowledge. Collectively, though, public schools too often are rigid bureaucracies that ignore individual children. Conservative parents would add that public schools push a hard Left agenda on students captive in their classrooms.

Some parents are starting to fight back. One set of parents, frustrated by public schools’ inflexibility when dealing with handicapped students, is fighting fire with fire by forming a union:

Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez said they were so appalled by the low standards of America’s public school teachers unions, they formed the National Parents Union (NPU), so families could have a greater say in their children’s education.

Rodrigues, a mother of three from Boston, and Marquez, a mother of one from Los Angeles, are no strangers to public-sector unions. Rodrigues worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), while Marquez grew up in a union household and worked for Green Dot Public Schools — a public charter organization.

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[Andy] Stern, who serves as SEIU’s president emeritus, spoke with Fox News and offered his total support.

“This is not about left or right. This is about what is right and wrong for our kids,” he said in an email. “For far too long, the conversation around education has often excluded the biggest and most important advocates for children, their parents. That must change. NPU is helping bring together parents who alone and on their own are often the powerless, but by organizing their voices through the National Parents Union can become the powerful. NPU will give parents the voice they deserve.”

Stern also warned Rodrigues and Marquez about going up against an opponant with vast financial resources and a lot to lose. Teachers unions are still recovering from a 2018 Supreme Court decision that eliminated mandatory financial dues, but they still continue to enjoy a sizeable war chest. The NEA and its state affiliates took in over $1.6 billion from 2017–2018, according to financial disclosure reports.

Given Rodrigues’s and Marquez’s union backgrounds, as well as SEIU’s support, and contrary to the SEIU president’s claims, this probably will be about “left or right.” However, anything that forces public schools to treat students as individuals, not metrics, should improve education.

Conservative parents have another problem: Public school too often use their control over students to indoctrinate them with Leftist ideology. Glenn Reynolds, a top conservative blogger, routinely quips that sending children to public schools is a form of child abuse.

As the schools get more extremely, parents are rising up at the grassroots level, many of them spurred by the aggressive intrusion of LGBTQ issues. In North Manchester, Indiana, one father is leading a parents’ revolt against school transgender policies:

North Manchester, Ind., a tiny conservative town that resides in a county that voted 72% for Donald Trump, is embroiled in the cultural battle of their lives. In December, parents of students at North Manchester Elementary found out that the school was allowing a biological boy to use the girls’ bathroom without notifying parents or passing any policy that was debated in a public meeting. As a result, multiple families pulled their children out of the school at the urging of Nate Gephart, a father turned activist who had finally had enough. The superintendent, Dr. Teresa Gremaux, claims that federal law under Title IX is forcing the school to allow a tiny minority of gender-confused children to invade the privacy of everyone else.

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PJ Media reached out to Gephart, who pulled four of his children out of the school and has begun homeschooling them in response to the school board’s lawless actions. “We had enough of the garbage,” he said. “It was toxic.” Gephart didn’t stop with his own children, but is leading a movement to remove 100 students from the school and cause a painful financial blow to the school’s federal funding.

“I’d say the ones that I know about, probably 12 to 15 [kids pulled out] right now and a couple of families are on the fence but that could jump into the twenties very shortly,” he said. “We are having a meeting soon…we have a lot of momentum here in this town.” Gephart started a website called ProtectingOurChildren.net, where videos of contentious board meetings are posted and you can watch the parents revolt and walk out, disgusted, after listening to an “expert” tell them that doctors “assign sex” at birth and are often wrong.

With all due respect to the myriad good teachers across America, it’s high time that parents remind the activist teachers that they are public servants, not public masters, and that they cannot use taxpayer money and children held hostage in classrooms to advance hard Left political and social agendas.