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January 28, 2023

Several years ago, my husband and I learned a valuable lesson when we visited San Diego: Ignorance is not an excuse. After returning to our car from a beach trip, we noticed that we’d been ticketed. We drove to the police station and discovered that we’d parked in a red curb zone.

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We hadn’t seen any No Parking signs, and the curbs weren’t red. However, there doesn’t have to be red paint to signify a restricted area; people are expected to know the rules. We weren’t excused from that ticket, and we were chided for not knowing the law, even as vacationers.

Twenty years later, American parents are suffering from what I call the Red Curb Syndrome. We do our best to stay informed, but we don’t always read school policy manuals or attend every board meeting. There are times when we may miss a new rule. Using taxpayer dollars nefariously and covertly to implement changes, public school officials have taken full advantage of parents’ busyness. 

It’s no surprise, therefore, that parents all over the country find ourselves battling Critical Race Theory and transgender bathroom policies that we didn’t even know existed. Parental ignorance is no excuse. Public education has taken a dangerous turn. Parents hoping to take back their schools must start by studying the leftist school playbook.

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Step One: Secretly Use Taxpayer Dollars to Subvert School Employees. School officials throughout the country have been caught on camera acknowledging efforts to train staff and to trick parents. My teenagers attend Olentangy Local School District, Ohio’s fourth largest public school system. With four high schools and 23,000 students, the district has become more like a government-run indoctrination station.

Unbeknownst to parents, school officials hired House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ brother, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, to lead a workshop in 2018 and hired him again to provide teacher professional development.

The district enlarged its DEI team, and Instagram posts from its members revealed the CRT mission to disrupt the district’s “Whiteness.” Classroom teachers began using social media to proselytize progressive values.

The DEI team addressed cheerleading advisors and developed a session which emphasized the importance of avoiding “implicit bias” in body language, hair styles, and grooming. Cheerleaders were instructed to examine their routines and to replace equality with equity.

To help staff understand how to affirm gender identity, a DEI employee secretly sent an internal email to faculty so that they could incorporate transgender guidelines, guidelines that were never shared with the community.

Step Two: Normalize Deviance and Make Parents Seem Like Bigots. Schools like OLSD have made daily exposure to CRT and gender identity a core strategy. Stellar teachers have been sacrificed because district leaders have taken federal money, adhered to the agendas attached to those dollars, and approved instructional practices and policies that turn kids away from the community’s conservative roots. In the name of equity, small groups of parents were informed last year that it might be time to eliminate or edit the district’s Advanced Placement classes. This year, OLSD’s DEI team approached high school social studies teachers with pressure to add AP African American Studies, a course that includes the Marxist topics of  “intersection of race and gender.”