In case you thought Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe misspoke when he said this week that he doesn’t want parents involved in their children’s education, he made it clear in a follow-up interview that that is exactly what he meant.
When asked on Wednesday whether he thinks parents should have a say in the public school system’s curriculum, McAuliffe said: “Listen, we have a Board of Education working with the local school boards to determine the curriculum for our schools. You don’t want parents coming in in every different school jurisdiction saying this is what should be taught here, and this is what should be taught there.”
Terry McAuliffe doubles down against parents!
Q: “Do you think parents should have a say in the curriculum?”
McAuliffe: “You don’t want parents coming in in every different school jurisdiction!” pic.twitter.com/lX2VpN2R6V
— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) September 29, 2021
McAuliffe clearly believes the state knows better than parents what’s best for their children. He also wants to make sure parents who disagree are removed from the equation and stripped of ways to hold educators accountable. His message is clear: The government should have total control over children’s education — parental rights be damned.
To be clear, parents, also known as the taxpayers who fund the public school system, have every right to help their districts determine what should be taught in the classroom. Public school officials work for them — not the other way around.
Moreover, dozens of stories from concerned parents who found troubling material in their children’s curriculums over the past year and a half should serve as a reminder of how important it is for parents to be involved in the educational process. Just last week, a Virginia mother confronted her local school board after she found sexually explicit material in Fairfax High School’s library. The two books she found — Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe — include “pedophilia” and pornographic content, she said. One of the books “describes a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male,” she said. “The other book has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy.”
Also in Virginia, parents discovered earlier this year that Loudoun County spent nearly half a million dollars on an equity consultant who helped the school district develop a 22-page “Plan to Combat Systemic Racism.” Part of this plan included an “Equity Ambassador Program” that was open only to minority students. White students were barred from even applying to the program.
If McAuliffe had his way, these parents would have been dismissed and ignored and the schools would have continued to fill students’ heads with this garbage. For the sake of their children, Virginia’s voters must reject McAuliffe and his noxious educational policy.
