By Corinne Haynes, retired school teacher, grandmother of Peoria Unified students
Several years ago, I encountered a man named Walter Swan at his One Book Bookstore in Bisbee, Arizona. (Google him!) Copies of his book, “Me ‘n Henry,” filled the shelves in this small quaint shop. After an interesting conversation with Mr. Swan, he shared his “rules for life” and gave me the small poster hanging on the wall. Those rules hung in my classroom until the day I retired.
Coming across this poster, I was prompted to give the following lecture to our Peoria school board.
Many parents as well as teachers are concerned with the direction our education establishment is leading us. It’s time for parents to demand a change in direction and rescue their children from the indoctrination that has subtly crept into all curriculum subjects.
To the Peoria Unified school board: “The enemy is after the seed.” I heard that saying and my heart sank because that is exactly what is happening before our own eyes and it has taken us way too long to become aware of what our schools have become. For years, we, the Grassroot Grandmas, have been sounding the alarm as we watched the curriculum weaken, scores decline, expectations diluted and discipline often non-existent. Rigor has become a foreign concept in today’s education establishment.
We have approached this district and its administration over these years to give them our sage and experienced advice. Go back to the basics and teach what has been proven to work – Spaulding phonics, Saxon math, good classical literature, real science and a chronological history of America which fosters a love and respect for our great nation. Doing this, we said, would bring this district back to greatness.
Did you listen? No you didn’t. Who did you listen to? Money hungry teachers’ unions, woke corporations and any groups that could make money off us unwitting taxpayers, political parties who have no problem indoctrinating our children for their own benefit? I’ll tell you who you didn’t listen to – the Grassroot Grandmas and all those parents and grandparents out there whose sole purpose in life is fostering a promising future for our children.
When I taught not so long ago, three simple rules worked in my classroom: Always be kind. have a good attitude. Never give up. Most kids got the rules and the few that didn’t were usually remedied by a phone call home to mom or dad. We didn’t need to spend thousands of dollars on SEL programs and curriculum to teach our kids what was acceptable behavior or how to treat one another. They understood the Golden Rule. One of my many roles as a teacher was to emphasize the importance of positive self-talk and encourage them to be the best they could be. We let kids be kids! Today we seem to be hell bent on messing with our young kids’ minds and paying a lot of money to just confuse them.
Our kids are not racist nor do they see “equity” problems. They see everyone as having opportunities for the mere fact that they live in America. They know if they work hard, good things will happen. My grandson just graduated from high school with three friends that have been together since kindergarten. The four of them went on a senior trip together – one black, one Hispanic, one red-haired and freckled and Carter, my grandson. Never once have they questioned their friendship or loyalty to one another and no CRT curriculum will corrupt them or turn them into victims or adversaries.
Parents, it’s time to mobilize. We have been misled, lied to, or just simply ignored and it’s our kids who are paying the price. The data is now abundantly clear that closing down our schools and forcing children to wear masks was very detrimental to our children academically, socially, mentally and developmentally.
I am respectfully requesting an audit of our curriculum and resources to not only identify any programs that are biased, misleading, harmful or useless for our children, but also requesting the cost of these programs to we the taxpayers.
