When the Covid-19 pandemic crisis hit, parents across the United States sat beside their kids’ while learning as the family living rooms and dining room tables became the children’s remote classrooms.
However, as the country is slowly going back to normal with most schools returning to in-person classes, many parents remain more heavily involved in the education process.
In the recent report published by Fox News, the mainstream media revealed that they have “spoken to parents around the country who are speaking before school boards and requesting to see curriculums, in some cases suing school districts or running for office themselves in an effort to strengthen their local education systems.”
For instance, a parent in Georgia called out Gwinnett County, home to the largest school district in the state after releasing a controversial syllabus that said AP classes will teach critical race theory and Marxism.
“What happened with COVID is that parents really woke up across the country and started paying attention,” parent Sheri Mitchell, said.
“We’ve known that critical race theory is being taught, but we didn’t know how to prove it. We’ve known the influence is there, but we haven’t been able to get our hands on things.” Mitchell added.
A father in California also blasted a school in the state for teaching his 8-year-old daughter about being transgender in third grade.
According Steve Schneider, his daughter, who attended Maple Elementary, was allegedy shown a video of a child reading a book about being transgender in January 2022.
“So every day coming home, there was a big discussion to be had. My daughter was forced to watch a video in her third grade classroom regarding being transgender. I was pretty upset. I didn’t understand why they would show this to my daughter. She’s 8 years old. She still believes in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.” Schneider lamented.
“My kid came out and said, ‘Hey, Dad, what’s transgender?’ I mean, how do you respond to that? Really, as a parent, it’s totally out of left field. I thought she would be talking about a new game she played on her tablet or something else going on. So I didn’t expect this conversation at all,” the worried dad added.
“There were kids on the playground that obviously heard about this, even though this was isolated to one class. Some of my kid’s friends were pressuring [my daughter] to shave her head and dress like a boy and do other things. It was pretty constant to the point where we took away my daughter’s tablet and said, ‘We don’t want to talk to friends after school right now,” he continued.
Amid the controversies, Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education explained how they discovered that parents are getting more worried about their kids at schools than before.
“When schools reopened last year for in-person education, we wondered whether parents would continue to stay engaged in education issues, or whether this movement would fizzle out. We quickly learned that parents were even more worried than before, because they no longer had a window into their children’s educations.” Neily explained.
