Our Schools are in Trouble

 

Are you done allowing your kindness to be weaponized against you and your family?

Or do we just need more SEL to further drill violent CRT and Trans Cult rhetoric into the minds of children in K-12?#NashvilleManifesto pic.twitter.com/m2NP12ncW1

— Courage Is A Habit (@CourageHabit) November 7, 2023

Local Schools are not Locally Governed

 

Over at Ozark Schools Support Team, you will find an analysis of the Missouri School Boards Association's (MSBA) Advocacy Positions for its upcoming annual conference on Nov. 3.

The Delegate Assembly Handbook is a revelation of third-party entity control, including the state and federal governments. The MSBA is a private, non-profit organization, yet it wields immense control over local school districts whose school boards are members of the Association.

The MSBA's advocacy positions push hard for more centralized control of schools. You will read such things as:

"Under Tax Credits on P. 4, the MSBA calls for the capping of "potential reductions of state revenue." They even support suspending "issuance of all tax credits until the statutory funding obligations of the state are met." What do you wanna bet the taxpayer would never see another tax credit implemented?"

And this:

"The MSBA's advocacy positions go on, P. 3. The organization supports giving school districts more options for "raising local revenue, including sales taxes." Yes, they now want a piece of the sales tax pie. I hope local elected officials are aware."

And this:

"In fact, the MSBA thinks school boards should have legal standing when tax abatement programs for residential building projects are considered, to the point that they may "participate in all phases of the process...[and] shall have veto power over their portion of any tax abatement project." 

Go read the shared notes here. You have to read it to believe it.

Social-Emotional Learning is Flat Out Indoctrination

 

By Gretchen Garrity

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, commonly known as DESE, is accepting public comment until September 15, 2023 on the proposed adoption of "K-12 Learning Standards, Glossary, and Student Indicators for Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) developed by the SEL work team."

SEL is being sold as a way to help students with self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. While these skills can seem beneficial and benign, they are really a model of indoctrination with the ultimate goal of directing and controlling the thoughts and behaviors of students.

Moms for Liberty has a helpful packet on SEL that sums it up: "The ultimate goal of SEL is to shift the values, beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews of students. The goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression."

Go here for a quick quiz that gets parents up to speed on SEL.

The site Courage is a Habit also has helpful information to explain via graphics what SEL is. The graphic below is an example of how student surveys--data collection--is the process method of  indoctrinating students through categorizing them by race and gender. Go here to download the full 3-page infographic.

How did Missouri get to the point of adopting SEL into schools statewide? According to Local Control Missouri, on "Tuesday, August 15th, Missouri State Board of Education approved to start the process of the Rule-Making change to add SEL (Social Emotional Learning) for K-12 mental health training."

And further, "It was snuck into the Ed Omnibus Bill of 2022 (SB 681/662) carried by the team of Senator Cindy O’Laughlin (R) and Senator Lauren Arthur (D). That progressive 2022 Ed Omnibus Bill had a lot snuck into it. And now they are coming after our kids with SEL with their new authority given to them under RSMo 170.307."

Missouri Republicans strike again to implement radical agendas along with their Democrat counterparts.

Below is a video class on "SEL101" that is very informative and eye-opening. The first speaker, Jennifer McWilliams, was fired for refusing to teach SEL in her small, rural Indiana school. Go here for more videos from McWilliams that expose  SEL. And go here for SEL information from another speaker, James Lindsay.

When educators use the language of Social-Emotional Learning, they mean something else than what most people understand the words to mean. In the tweet below, a teachers' union representative says the quiet parts out loud:

And now it’s on a new mechanism to enter the school through SEL.

Just listen to an AFT union presentation.

“…liberation is a collective goal…we share the common goal of standing up for justice and standing up against systems of oppression.” https://t.co/gtADCpPlDj pic.twitter.com/756ufEibcj

— Local Control MO (@LocalControl_MO) September 7, 2023

 The public comment page on the DESE website is several pages and somewhat tedious. It is important, however, that citizens speak against SEL by commenting. There is a lot of verbiage and edu-speak, but once you see the purpose behind SEL, the language of indoctrination becomes simple to decipher. Again, the comment period ends Sept. 15.

Your Vote Matters

 

By Gretchen Garrity

At the May 30, 2023 Ozark School Board meeting, a small but significant event occurred that illustrates the importance of electing the right people to serve on the board.

Although the sound and video quality is poor, the meeting can be seen below, and the issue begins at around the 38-minute mark, when the Missouri School Boards Association’s (MSBA)-recommended policy changes were next on the agenda.

According to the time-stamp notes on the recorded video, “Supt presents package of revised policies from the MSBA, explains that District staff reviews those policies then makes recommendation to board to approve them with suggestions...”

Per school board policy, agenda packets should be available four days in advance of the monthly meeting, but the packet was not available until late on the Friday before Memorial Day, a three-day weekend/holiday. This meant the board would need to look over their information packets during the holiday weekend in order to be ready for the Tuesday meeting start at 4 p.m.

Consequently, a small but important recommendation was nearly rubber-stamped by the school board. It involved what looked like minor changes in policy text, but these and other similar changes were sprinkled throughout several of the over twenty documents the school board needed to review.

The changes for policies included replacing pronouns like “he/she” to “they” or “their.” In one striking example of bending over backwards to exclude pronouns that indicate “he” or “she” was this below. The green text is the new change. The text to be replaced is in red with a strike through. Click on the image for better clarity.

 The first nine words of the above sentence includes the word “student” three times. The awkwardness of the sentence was apparently worth being able to exclude the pronouns “he” or “she.” Another example:

 A board member pointed out these were grammatically incorrect within the context of the policies. What may have accounted for the change? Board members discussed that it might be to save space or for a more nefarious reason. At any rate, Board Member Christina Tonsing was the only member who had noticed the revisions. To the board’s credit, they voted 7-0 to leave the original language in the policy handbook, which stopped gender pronoun language from being inserted.

To recap:

1) Board members were given access to the board packet late on a Friday of a three-day holiday weekend.

2) Administrative staff previously reviewed the packets before sharing with board members, and recommended that the MSBA changes be adopted into the Ozark School District policy handbook “with suggestions.”

    a) Either the staff members did not review the packets,

    b) The packets were reviewed and approved because administrative staff approved of all the changes, 

     c) Administrative staff did not notice the changes as problematic, or glossed over them.

3) One board member noticed the changes that smacked of a creeping gender ideology being inserted into the policy handbook, and mentioned it at the meeting.

4) The school board did the right thing when the issue was addressed.

Several things stand out:

1) Why is the Missouri School Boards Association sending packets to the administrative staff to review ahead of the meeting instead of to the Ozark School Board?

2) If the MSBA is sending recommended policy changes to the school board, how and why is the administrative staff getting access and reviewing them before the board?

3) How often has the school board simply taken the recommendations of the MSBA and the administrative staff as adequate and consequently rubber-stamped policy changes that are under their local purview?

One alert school board member was able to avert an insertion of, at best, poor grammar into the policy handbook. At worst, it was an attempt to begin inserting gender ideology into official documents.

Elections matter.

There are two seats on the Ozark School Board that are coming open in 2024. The deadline to file as a candidate is December of this year.