Salem-Keizer Public Schools - What Can People Do?
Someone is answering that question
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a learning depression. Everybody's kids have had learning loss or they’re suffering from some mental health effects. The words we know don’t mean the same things anymore; AP (advanced placement) classes are going bust (behind paywall); teachers have to watch their backs; punks are running wild in the halls, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the curriculum is unfit to teach and the books are unfit to read. And we sit watching our kids try to learn while some school board director or superintendent tells us that today we had a record number of teachers quit to be replaced with subs who have no degrees, acts of violence are higher than ever1, or that the feeling of belonging is historically low, as if all that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy!
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we go to the board meetings to ask questions, just to be run out by intimidating activists while the board looks the other way. We sit in our houses, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave our kids alone in their classrooms. Let my kids have math and history and their library books, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone." But they’re not going to leave your kids alone. They’re going to come for everything. They already are.
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone either.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. But I want you to take an active part in the democracy afforded directly to you.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a parent! This is MY CHILD! My opinion matters! I care about what they learn!"
So, I want you to say "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
A group of brave parents in the Salem-Keizer School District have decided to do something about this. They organized a group called Salem-Keizer Education First and they’re launching a recall of school board directors Osvaldo Avila, Ashley Carson-Cottingham, and Karina Guzman Ortiz, and they need your help.
If you’re interested in helping out, email them at skeducationfirst@gmail.com. I’m told a Website is coming soon, so stay tuned to this space for updates. Be ready to sign the petitions! And for heaven’s sake, and for the sake of the children, don’t forget to vote when this is on the ballot!
For those who may not know, that was an adaptation of a historic monologue made in a 1976 movie called “Network”. If you haven’t ever seen the movie, let alone the speech in question, take a couple of minutes to watch it below.
If it weren’t from 1976, it could be from today with everything crazy going on in our world. Economic depression, inflation, crime in the streets! Sound familiar? And if you’re at all like me, you oftentimes feel powerless. It feels too big. You don’t know how to handle it or even begin to address it.
Many parents feel that way, but some have started to take action, and more and more of them are doing it all across the country.
We need only look to a close neighbor in the Newberg School District to see that parents are sick and tired of their kids being used as political fodder for indoctrination in their taxpayer-funded public education. Parents groups successfully defeated a recall of some of their conservative board members, and relatively shortly thereafter, some of the progressive board members resigned.
Not very long after that, San Francisco successfully recalled three members of their Board of Education. Three of them… in San Francisco. Even the people in SF know how crazy these progressives are. I mean, come on, they keep re-electing Nancy Pelosi, but they recalled three progressive board members?
More recently, there has been a monumental shift in the makeup of school boards in places like Florida where five school boards just recently flipped to conservative majorities, even in Miami-Dade. For as much freedom as Ron DeSantis has brought to Florida, everyone knows Miami-Dade is not conservative. But their parents can see that this progressive Marxist thought reform agenda just isn’t working.
So, again, I call on anyone reading this within the school district of Salem-Keizer Public Schools, if you’re registered to vote (and with Motor Voter, if you have a driver’s license, you’re registered to vote), be ready to sign the petition. Talk to your friends and neighbors and ask them if they think the schools are doing a good job. Anyone paying any attention can tell you, they aren’t.
They’re more concerned with turning kids into activists than scientists, and into troublemakers than problem solvers. The administration spends its time, at the bequest of the school board leadership, conditioning you and your kids to agree with socialism by providing free meals to all students, unsolicited, because who would argue with free food for kids? But they want parents and in the future, the kids who are getting the food now, to expect their government overlords to provide everything for them. Just remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if the government is handing it out. But I digress…
If you’ve ever felt like there’s no hope, that there’s nothing you can do, this is something you can do to have a direct effect on the society you live in. Be ready to sign the petition. Get others ready to do the same.
Pass it on!
When comparing “Aggressive Behavior - Fighting, Assault - Physical, Harassment, Intimidation or Bullying, and Look-Alike Weapons” by incidents per year from 2015-2020 and the 2021-2022 school year