The parental bill of rights, Senate Bill 496, passed the Kansas Senate 24-15 on March 22, sending it to the Kansas House for lawmakers to debate it.
In a commentary at The Daily Signal, education analyst Jonathan Butcher said the Kansas bill promotes transparency because parents can review classroom materials their children are given. That means a future state law would make it more difficult for “woke” teachers to indoctrinate innocent students with lessons, for example, about the “gender spectrum” and encourage them to choose pronouns such as “they.”
The bill also addresses race-based classroom lessons about “equity” and “white privilege” that are tied to Critical Race Theory, Butcher writes, by directly stating no one can be compelled to affirm an idea that violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“That strikes at critical race theory’s principle,” he explains, “that individuals are to affirm that they are guilty of oppression based not on his or her actions, but only on his or her race or ethnicity.”
At many public schools, when their race-based, anti-white lessons are uncovered, school leaders claim critics are opposing history lessons about the Civil Rights era. In reality, the tenets of Critical Race Theory are steeped in a Marxist-based philosophy about race and unjust society, not history about Jim Crow.
Brittany Jones of Kansas Family Voice tells AFN parents have watched their rights become “eroded” by their own public schools in recent years. In her state, she says, parents have witnessed school boards refuse to let them address their grievances because of the topic.
“And so we've seen parents across the country, but especially in Kansas,” she says, “who are asking for these protections."
Parents, in fact, are quite late to catching on to the Left's tactic of classroom secrecy that views parents as enemies of progress. Only in the last couple of years have some attentive and persistent parents forced school leaders to admit what they were attempting to hide. That is is why Florida's parental rights bill was called the "Don't Say Gay" bill, even by the media, to hide its true purpose.
On behalf of red-state Kansas, Butcher delivered a timely example in his commentary. A letter from an ACLU chapter informed a Kansas public school its school staff “should not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status or gender nonconforming presentation to others, including parents.”
Senate Bill 496, if passed into law, would mean the public school teachers would answer to parents and not ACLU attorneys.
