The Watertown Unified School District received the money from the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation.
In addition to promoting social emotional learning, or SEL, the district is to hire an SEL coordinator.
Michele Exner is Senior Advisor at Parents Defending Education.
She said in an interview with AFN that SEL is a new trend that has come up over the past few years, adding it is not good, despite how it may sound.
"It doesn't sound negative. The problem is it's really been used as a Trojan horse to inject all of the progressive ideologies into schools. Then doing that through training."
It's done with subtlety, but specific questions probe for sensitive information leaving children vulnerable.
“They’re using each service to ask, sometimes even invasive questions, trying to put in the gender/race ideology, and so basically everything is looked at through an ideological box, which, which is not good. It's not what we should be teaching children,” Exner said.
Exner said community and parental tips is how Parents Defending Education find out about many of the things they expose. This case is no different.
She explained she did some digging herself into if Watertown Unified School District is financially able to put more than a million dollars into this social-learning initiative.
She found that student performance is far below where it should be.
"So, it turns out that only 41% of the elementary school students in the school district tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and it's just 43% at or above that level for math. It’s even worse for middle school at 32% tested at or above the proficient level for reading and at 30% against the middle schoolers for math.”
Troubles throughout the district
At Watertown, the higher the grade, the worse the test scores.
“It’s 22% of high school students that tested out above proficient level for reading and 22% tested at or above the level for math. So now you're looking at only about one in five of the high school students in this district are proficient in math and reading."
She thinks parents should be "infuriated at how the school is misallocating their budget."
She also said parents need to pay attention to everything the kids bring home, that you have the power to make your voice heard and protect your kids from being subjected to some of this divisive material.
