Loudoun County teacher Tanner Cross won a complete victory Tuesday over the most infamous school board in the country that provoked widespread pushback from parents with a radical, transgender bathroom policy. The school board had suspended Cross for criticizing the policy during a public comment period. But after the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed a District Court ruling reinstating the teacher, the school agreed to not punish him for his comments in a public forum, to remove any evidence of his suspension from his personnel file, and to pay $20,000 in attorney’s fees to Alliance Defending Freedom, who represented him.
The Loudoun County School Board has not cleared the legal woods yet. Other Loudoun County teachers are involved in a separate lawsuit because they believe the transgender bathroom policy threatens them as well. “When they put Tanner Cross on leave, I knew that that would put me in danger as well,” explained Monica Gill. But “it’s not just about my free speech rights, it’s also about these kids and the harm that the policy is doing to them.”
The transgender bathroom policy emboldened one male predator to don a skirt and assault at least two girls at different schools. Parents were outraged by the rogue school board’s attempted cover-up, and, in an attempt to dampen their fury, the DOJ colluded with the National School Boards Association to open a domestic terrorism investigation into parents. It almost seems as if Democrats want parents to have no say in how their children are educated.
Actually, that’s exactly what they want. When longtime Democrat establishment star and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said the quiet part out loud, Virginia voters handed him Democrats’ worst beatdown in a decade, shocking Democrats nationwide. If only they didn’t hate guns so much, they might have learned that you never get between a mama bear and her cubs.
Not that the radical Left has learned their lesson. Even after Loudoun County’s transgender policy directly led to sexual assaults, Gill lamented, “I’m not sure that it’s changing any of the school board’s mind about the policy.” Wisconsin parents sued a school district and withdrew their 12-year-old daughter because officials insisted on calling her by a male name and pronouns over her parents’ objections. A Connecticut school is teaching the principles of transgender ideology to impressionable kindergarteners under the opaque description “social emotional learning through equity lenses.” “Social emotional learning has been a red flag for family groups for a long time,” explained Meg Kilgannon, FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies, “because these are areas that are formed in children by parents and families.”
Kilgannon continued, “we send kids to school to learn ABCs and 123s, not to learn about equity initiatives and transgenderism.” But behold, that is what the new radicals who have seized control of education are teaching. Plummeting test scores should have been the warning sign. The Left even inserted a complete line-item for harmful indoctrination initiatives in the CARES Act. Parents are funding schools that are teaching their kids to become militant activists for the very Leftist causes that undermine the parents’ values. And when the indoctrination doesn’t take, they punish the student, like the Catholic teen in New Hampshire who was suspended from a football game for insisting in a text message that there were only two genders.
The Left knows they can shape America’s future by shaping the minds of our children. That’s why FRC Action is equipping parents to run for school board, as they are already doing successfully. You can register for FRC Action’s school board elections roundup on Friday, November 19 at frcaction.org/schoolboardelectionsreport.
Reprinted with permission, written by Joshua Arnold, American Family Research, Nov.17, 2021. www.frc.org
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