LORI GIMELSHTEYN | July 27, 2024
The fight for our children’s future is on. In big cities and small towns across our great country, parents are signaling that they’ve had enough. Much to the chagrin of politicians and bureaucrats, we are organizing, and we are winning. We are transcending political, religious and cultural barriers that traditionally divide us, and we are reminding the radical ideologues in the education establishment that our children’s moral, medical and religious upbringing will not be hijacked.
I’ve been blessed to be a part of this crucial battle, and I hope that every American understands the stakes. My organization, the Colorado Parents Advocacy Network, fights every day to build the educational system our children truly deserve. We are parents, educators and volunteers fighting for classrooms where our kids can have a nonpolitical, safe and fulfilling educational experience.
We advocate for a return to the universal values that have long made America great. Our constitutional republic was designed so that every citizen would have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our founders envisioned a system that would equip every citizen with the capacity to understand their rights and liberties, to reckon with moral questions and to realize their dreams.
Tragically, in my home state of Colorado and in many other states, that vision has been set aside. In its place, a shamble has been erected. Instead of nourishing their young minds with reading, writing and arithmetic, our children are being poisoned with radical race, gender and political ideology. They are being taught to resent their neighbors, and to reject the moral values their parents have worked tirelessly to instill.
They are not, however, taught how to read or do math at an appropriate competency level, unlike their global peers. The 2022 NAEP Report Card found that only 34% of Colorado eighth graders are proficient at reading, while only 28% are proficient in math. Shortly after the release of this report, members of Colorado’s largest teachers union came together at their annual meeting and, instead of finding ways to do better, busied themselves issuing resolutions condemning capitalism.
Meanwhile, Denver schools have instituted a mandatory “Ethnic Studies’’ curriculum for ninth graders. Here, students learn how to set aside concepts like the American Dream and rugged individualism and embrace collectivism; where they explore “the gender spectrum;” and where they become acquainted with the philosophy of anti-racism through the work of unrepentant extremists like Angela Davis and Ibram X Kendi.
When your children’s minds aren’t under attack, their innocence is. In Poudre School District in Northern Colorado, a nonbinary “witch” who performs blood rituals in their spare time trains teachers to be “trusted adults” who will act to affirm a child’s gender identity if their parents refuse to. St. Vrain Valley schools issue a form to teachers to assess the status of parents’ knowledge of children’s gender identity, whether they support that identity and who can intervene on the child’s behalf if school bureaucrats decide they know better than the kid’s family.
This isn’t science fiction. It is, appallingly, the world we live in.
