Parents don’t need to know

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – In a first-grade classroom in Mission Viejo, Calif., a little seven-year-old girl who suffers from severe ADHD, and while the Black Lives Matter chants were echoing throughout the land, decided to draw a picture for her friend. The girl, only referred to as “Jane” who uses art as her own form of therapy contained the words, in a little girl’s spelling, “Black Lives Mater.”

The drawing included figures representing children in all colors, but when she noticed that no color matched her friend’s, she added the words “any life” then gave the drawing to her friend.
A simple expression of love and tolerance, right?

Not according to the school principal. Jane was forced to apologize to her classmates for the picture and was banned from drawing in class. She thought she had done something bad and was afraid to tell her mother thinking she would be punished again.

It wasn’t until almost a year later when another parent mentioned the incident to Jane’s mother who then contacted the school which started rounds of rebuffs and avoidance by school officials. Mom was ridiculed as one of those “fringe” parents with views which the school did not agree.
Jane’s mom then got a lawyer.

In another Orange County district, the Los Alamitos Unified School District, several parents had sent their fifth grade, ten and eleven-year-old girls to a school-sponsored four-day science camp. When the girls returned home none were willing to speak about the camp, which was an annual event for the district.

Finally one of the girls started to talk. It seems that when they arrived at the camp they were met by counselors who were assigned to their respective barracks who began asking them which pronouns they used and identified “itself” (sorry only reference I have) as a “they” or “them.” When pressed by one of the girls who did not want to stay overnight with a boy counselor, all she got back was the “they, them” answer.

If that wasn’t disturbing enough for a fifth-grade girl, they were not allowed to have cell phones and were not permitted to use camp phones to call home. For the four days and three nights of the camp, they were isolated.

The experience was so disturbing to the girls that it took ten days for one of them to broach the subject with her parents. The parents then began their own investigation and found that the new group that was contracted by the school to host the camp had a reputation for promoting LGBTQ propaganda and had received low reviews on the Internet review site, Yelp, because of its sexual identity. A review of the camp’s web page confirmed some of the parents’ worst fears and they went to the school district.

“Were our daughters housed with boys or girls?” they asked. The answer from the school was that it was against the law to tell them — which of course is an out-and-out lie. Again, like Jane’s mother, these parents were being stonewalled.

Later, however, the district did try to reply. It told the parents that it was “pretty sure” the girls didn’t have boy counselors sleeping in their rooms.

And like Jane’s mother they found a lawyer. Ironically the same one that Jane’s mom did. His name is Alexander Haberbush from an organization called the Lex Rex Institute who was on our radio program last week.

Lex Rex is Latin for “The Law is King,” he told our audience, “because we are committed to holding government officials and anyone in government accountable to the law, our leaders are not king in this country, the law is king.”

Thus they seek to defend the individual rights of people especially in the areas of constitutional protections, religious liberty, free speech, Second Amendment rights, and issues of separation of powers.

Both of these cases fall into a pattern we’ve seen many times before in school — including college cases — that the institution either ignores the requests for information, provides non answers, or attacks the questioners.

The issue here, as we have seen across the nation is what Mr. Haberbush calls the “dismissive” attitude held by the school officials towards the parents.

“The real problem we see in this country right now is that school administrators have been held largely unaccountable for what they do. I deal with people in the government every day in the line of work I do, there is nobody who is more confident in their decisions and more confident that they will not have to account for what they do than school administrators,” he said.

So what is going on now in both these cases? In Jane’s case there is a statutory provision that a lawsuit against the state, or political sub-division, cannot be filed until the notifications have been served and the time for reply has expired. This week, as you read this, all the notification times required will have expired and a lawsuit will be filed. Stay tuned for this one — as you know, unless one side is willing to settle, these things can take a long time.

In the science camp case a suit is already in progress. The parents have fired the first volley by demanding copies of documents concerning the district’s communications with the camp organizers which they had requested under a Freedom of Information request and was duly ignored by the school.

The parents make the claim in their filing: “In order to ascertain the facts and circumstances of [camp] selection, information regarding their children’s wellbeing, and information regarding [the district’s] response to parental complaints, [parents] submitted several requests for records. [The district] has provided a few documents and records, claiming that these responses are complete. However, Plaintiffs have evidence to show that additional documents exist, but [the district] has refused to provide them.”

We’re waiting now.

“What’s important here is that the school inform parents and allow them the opportunity to opt out. When they don’t tell you of the kind of camp this is, the parents are robbed of this choice,” he told our radio audience.

I’ve referred to this radio program many times since it started in May of 2013. In the early days the few school cases we were able to deal with usually involved something as simple as a lunchroom staffer telling a kid it was against the law to pray before eating, or a teacher who wouldn’t allow a child to write about Jesus or draw His picture. In more recent years it has become apparent that for political and social reasons there are groups of school officials that seem intent on building a wall between children and their parents, thus the rash of new cases in which we find administrators promoting transition closets where little Johnny can change to become Mary for the school day before changing back at dismissal, and other school policies that are deliberately designed to keep parents out of their kids’ lives, and to substitute themselves in that role.

And it’s not just happening in California, it is all over. Back in 2013 we saw this as a coastal thing and worried that it would creep into the middle of the country. It has.

I give thanks every day that my little Goddaughter is in a Catholic school, but don’t assume that parochial schools are immune from this activity, nor are the schools in your community immune. It is all over and it affects our most precious treasure which we are obliged to protect. That is why organizations like Lex Rex and the numerous others that you have read about in this column deserve your support, both financial and with your prayers.

The child you save might be your own.

You can listen to the complete interview at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday morning at 9:30 CT on Faith on Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)