In April of this year, NH Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut’s monthly report contained something more than the typical catalog of administrative happenings that one would otherwise likely encounter in such a forum.
Towards the end of the meeting—after a rather quotidian discussion of community surveys and summer camps—the Commissioner presented the Board with a 74-page packet which he labeled as demonstrating “curricular events taking place in schools that reveal a disconnect with standards alignment.”
Indeed, despite Mr. Edelblut’s politely understated synopsis (at least as it appeared in the minutes), the content does not fail to shock.
The packet exposes a veritable epidemic of intimidation, indoctrination, and academic coercion within the public school system. The Commissioner divided the evidence of these ‘disconnected curricular events’ into ten topics, each containing an alarming mixture of screenshots, scans, and surreptitious photos (some apparently having been taken by the victimized students themselves). I shall leave to the reader whether or not the lack of publicity evoked by these revelations is due to media bias.
We want to thank D. S. Dexter Tarbox, Jr. for this Op-Ed. Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
But since so little coverage does exist, I have lately taken it upon myself to conduct a complete review of the volume.
In each of the ‘ten topics’ there are instances of school activities that range from the ridiculous to the depraved; for instance, pages 31-32 depict a classroom poster espousing the benefits of socialism, while page 63 details a homework assignment requiring students to discuss their sexual orientation with an adult of their choosing.
For the sake of brevity, I will limit my observations below to those items which are uniquely egregious.
One early case relates the story of a woman whose sixth-grade child was made to participate in a “debate” about “a sexual relationship between two men” (p18). The child is described as being uncomfortable upon returning home when—due to his young age—he informed his parents that the debate was about “S-E-X.”
Lest you mistakenly think that the foregoing student’s youth was the baseline for this type of conduct, consider that in March 2022, a fourth-grade Life Sciences class informed parents that its material would be sourced from Amaze.org, a radical leftist organization providing children with information on sexual practices, accessing “sexual healthcare for minors,” and gender identity among other contentious topics (p20).
The Commissioner’s material contains extracts from Amaze.org, such as the quote “yes, there are totally more than two genders” (p22) and “you get to figure out which sexual identity best suits you and what that identity means. Some of these identities are gay, pansexual, lesbian, demisexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual and more” (p23).
Later in the packet, we encounter Amaze once again when students in an unidentified class were instructed to view their video entitled “Talking Sexual Orientation with Jane” (p63). In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. The assignment goes on to have children “write down [their] own definition of sexual orientation” and then discuss this definition with an adult of their choosing (including “a friend’s parent, someone at school, etc.”), describe it, and obtain the adult’s signature. What could go wrong?
But no cavalcade of woke academic exercises would be complete without worshipping at the temple of Critical Race Theory.
Pages 58-62 of the packet contain extracts from Tiffany Jewell’s controversial 2020 tract, brassily entitled ‘This Book Is Anti-Racist.’ Specifically, it highlights chapter 10, in which students are told that “[they] are attuned to microaggressions and are aware of their impact. [They] see the work institutions have put in over hundreds of years to maintain the structure of racism.” The chapter goes on to describe students by the collective term “folx,” and includes an activity surrounding the police unjustly assaulting an unarmed black man, which the reader should know “happens every day.”
One high school course includes lectures on “White Privilege/White Fragility” (p65) and “Becoming an Activist” (p68). What’s more, the answer key to a ‘Race Literacy Quiz’ appearing on page 73 identifies Thomas Jefferson as the fountainhead of American racism, given that his “new ideas of liberty and equality” necessitated the justification of race-based slavery. Clearly, not even the highest of civic ideals are free from CRT’s captious lens within our schools.
When Commissioner Edelblut was questioned about the State’s policy for responding to these incoming complaints, he elaborated a resolution process that would be initiated between the Department of Education and the offending schools. He further offered that the Department would work to inform parents about the opt-out nature of certain programs.
Let us hope that this process is a robust one.
