This is a new tactic that Southern California schools are seeing and might be seen across the country soon.
Parents’ rights activists are showing up unannounced at schools and demanding to be seen in an effort to undermine the public’s trust in our education system.
Divisive and Dangerous
Nobody wants random people showing up at your kid’s school. Some of those random people might be parents. Some of them might be community members that don’t have any kids in school. It’s the job of the school to make sure they monitor who comes into the building. And they also make sure that even when it is parents who wanna be involved or ask questions, they do that in a way that doesn’t disrupt teaching and learning.
Schools have every right to make sure that when people come into the building, they’re making sure who the people are and they’re making sure to schedule appointments in ways that don’t disrupt the educational process.
Parents have a right to be involved in their children’s education. That’s always been the case. We have a right to ask what curriculum is being taught. We have a right to meet with our children’s teachers and we have a right to be involved and volunteer. Those are all rights that we have. We have a right to decision-making around the budget. All of those are rights that parents already have.
Saying that schools are limiting parent access, yes, their access does need to be limited. If there is any kind of crazy people walking in and demanding immediately to meet with teachers or immediately meet with principals who have a lot of work to do.
A Larger Tactic
This is all a part of a larger tactic to create fear and hysteria around our public education system to make parents afraid so that they pull their kids out of the public education system and homeschool or put their kids in charter schools or put their kids in private schools. It’s all a part of this larger initiative to dismantle our public education system.
We also need to name that this is about supremacy culture because this isn’t about all parents. This is about a very particular group of parents being able to walk into schools and make demands.
There’s an implicit belief that there are some people who pay taxes and then there are other people who they deem as freeloaders. And so they, therefore, have a right to dictate what everyone gets and that their needs should supersede everyone’s needs. Stay woke!