View the public comments and noteworthy statements from the 8/18/2022 D158 School Board Meeting below.
1:16: Mother shares experiences with the buses running late. Her children are being picked up at 7:15am, but the bus unload time at Heineman is 7:15am and the family lives 15 minutes from school. She called the administration, which told her “Until we hire more bus drivers, your kids will be late to school every day.” She finds this unacceptable, as her children miss at least 50 minutes of school each week.
1:19: Mother discusses CRT (Critical Race Theory) being taught to children under the guise of SEL (Social Emotional Learning) and how the SEL program collects personal data about students and families, effectively creating social credit scores for them.
She points out that on the first day of school, some children were also asked to fill out a form listing their pronouns, and at Conley Elementary, young students were asked to sing a song with their choice of pronouns in it. “I encourage this district to do their job to educate our children in core subjects like math, science, and reading, and leave sexuality, SEL, and CRT out of the classroom.”
1:22 – Mother shares her experience of receiving a form to allow her child to access the Young Adult section of the school library. She asked the teacher for a list of books in this section to make an informed decision for her child, and she was told that there is not a list of titles.
She then asked how, without the school having a list of the YA titles, she can be assured that her child will not access these books if she denies access? She was told that each book has a bar code that will beep if it is YA. “I began to wonder if the library computer can distinguish the young adult books from the other books in the library, then why am I being told there is no such list?”
1:24 – Mother reads a group statement from the D158 Parent Union regarding non-standard pronouns and allowing children to identify as a myriad of genders, identities, or animals while at school. She points out that parents with older children who have since graduated from the district were not subjected to this nonsense and points out multiple “education trends” that were adopted by D158 and later discarded.
“None of this belongs in school. It’s just not the school’s role. Parents and students are being told to accept ideas and concepts that for many of us have little to no basis in the way we live our lives with our families, and also have little to no basis in the way you, yourselves were educated. What options are there for parents who do not want their children exposed to these ideologies? Has that even been considered?”
1:28 – Mother notes that she attended a Mandatory Reporter meeting today in which she was taught that anything told to a child under the guise of “having to be kept secret” is Grooming 101, yet the district is now asking children what they want to be called in school and being told that the school doesn’t have to tell your family.