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As many as 20 elementary schools may be closed in Seattle beginning next year.
The reason?
The Seattle Public Schools (SPS) budget deficit has reached over $100 million.
This is not an isolated incident. It's happening across the country.
Be informed, not misled.
Sunday is Mother's Day. I'll be talking a little more about that on the radio this morning. Happy Mother's Day, moms.
Yesterday, I discussed our country's failing public education system and how it has become an indoctrination center rather than an educational institution.
How Seattle plans to solve their problem.
They say the first step for SPS to get ahead of this fiscal challenge is starting a school closure plan. SPS’ board of directors voted in agreement Wednesday to sign off on and move forward with Superintendent Brent Jones’ Well-Resourced Schools plan, which could close as many as 20 of the district’s 73 elementary schools.
Parents have expressed their anger over this decision. After all, it is the parents and their tax dollars that pay the bill for "public education."
The district says not closing these schools could mean cutting or eliminating preschool, reducing core staff, increasing class sizes, and curriculum reductions.
Many parents and teachers are unhappy with the proposal and voiced their opinions during Wednesday’s meeting.
“It’s not 20 schools, it’s 20 communities,” Ben Gitenstein, a parent of a student in the SPS district, told KIRO 7. “All the kids who thought they knew who their next year’s teacher would be. All the local mom-and-pop stores that sell ice cream to the kids after school, they’re all going to be seriously impacted."
“Closing neighborhood schools is really bad for neighborhoods and it’s really bad for all of us because, at the end of the day, the real problem here is enrollment,” Gitenstein continued.
According to KIRO 7, 29 elementary schools serve less than 300 students, and 20 schools have enrollment below 65%. The district has previously called these schools “under-enrolled.”
The Bellevue School Board also faced these same issues last year.
Significant pushback from parents over plans to shut down multiple elementary schools in a cost-saving measure caused the Bellevue school board to revise their plan, which would only shutter two schools.
They met yesterday to present their revised plan.
In presenting their plan of consolidation, etc., Bellevue Public Schools Interim superintendent Art Jarvis explained:
Over the past three years, student enrollment at Bellevue School District has declined by more than 1,500 students, and it doesn’t look like anything is likely to change that trend in the near future.
“In October 2022, it became clear that enrollment would not go back to pre-pandemic levels…the impact of the drop in enrollment will hit the district’s financial position in the 2023-2024 school year,” Jarvis said. “The magnitude of the situation serves as the rationale behind consolidation considerations.”
The district points to lower enrollment and, therefore, less education funding as the main reason why they have to consolidate the schools. Jarvis identified lower birth rates, higher housing costs, more educational options for families, including private schools, lower immigration levels, and families moving to more affordable areas as the main reasons for enrollment dropping.
All of these things may be part---a small part, of why parents are fleeing public education, but there are other issues that the media, most school boards, and so-called "progressives" refuse to address.
Heritage Foundation: "Parents are fed up with public schools."
Gone are the days of cheerily sending our children off to school and trusting public educators to prepare them for success by focusing on traditional pedagogy. Pesky fundamentals such as reading, writing, and arithmetic are being submerged under a tsunami of cultural Marxism.
Parents—once viewed as the natural authority figures in their children’s lives—now find themselves largely spectators: locked out, lied to, and gaslit in a national effort to secretly gender-transition children in public schools behind their parents’ backs. But parents are fighting back.
In at least 6,000 public schools across the country, children are being encouraged to inch toward fateful decisions with lifelong impact, all without their parent’s knowledge or consent.
"Could these clandestine transition policies and practices be the reason for the alarming spike in the number of high schoolers identifying as transgender?" they ask. " The U.S. saw a nearly five-fold increase in gender transition surgeries for teens from 2016 to 2019 alone. And a new report indicates that approximately 300,000 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 now identify as transgender."
Heritage says, "It is not surprising, then, that disenfranchised parents have finally had it. They are filing lawsuits from coast to coast to restore to parents what has always been rightfully theirs: the authority to parent their own children.
Key takeaways.
- They are filing lawsuits from coast to coast to restore to parents what has always been rightfully theirs: the authority to parent their own children.
- Supreme Court jurisprudence supports the notion that parents enjoy the fundamental constitutional right to direct the upbringing, health, and education of their child.
- Parental rights suits focusing on secret transition policies have also been filed in state courts in Wisconsin and California, among others.
The National Association of School Principals vocally backs these policies. It advises keeping parents in the dark about their children’s gender identities and calls on schools to remind parents that not supporting the rights of transgender students “runs contrary to the values of the school.”
Remember. Parental authority has always been rightfully recognized. The authority to parent their own children.
The family, after all, predates government and public education itself.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.