After parents in Glendale, California, protested a scheduled “Pride Day” at their local elementary school, the Southern California chapter of the violent extremist group Antifa called for progressives to stand up to “hate groups” at a school board meeting Tuesday night.
In late May, Glenoaks Elementary School planned and announced a “Pride Day” for students to study LGBTQ+ activists, celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, and sign LGBTQ+ “pledge cards.”
In response, dozens of parents kept their kids home from school last Friday. One Glenoaks Elementary teacher told The Epoch Times that over 60% of all students were absent.
Parents in the Glendale Unified School District also hung banners and signs with statements such as “Hey GUSD, Leave My Kids Alone” over freeways and outside homes in response to the elementary school’s celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or “queer” individuals.
One parent of students at Glenoaks Elementary, asking to remain anonymous, told The Daily Signal:
Things have reached a boiling point. Parents have been raising objections for a long time now. We say, ‘We want to know what you’re teaching, we want transparency.’ We haven’t been getting that for a very long time. Parents have gone to school board meetings trying to get answers, and they didn’t get them. What we got was a bunch of opposition, labeling us.
The president of the DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] committee at Glendale told us at a board meeting that they would be doing a ‘day of love’ celebrating LGBTQ+, and a lot of parents felt like their concerns and voices were being ignored.
If you’re going to be doing this on June 2nd, we’ll boycott and keep our kids home on June 2nd, because parental concerns shouldn’t be dismissed, parents should be heard, and because I don’t want my kids exposed to that.
Glendale, a city located in the San Fernando Valley, is part of Los Angeles County. Its school system has 32 schools and 25,000 students, according to the district’s website.
In social media posts Saturday, Antifa joined Democrat congressional candidate George Pudlo in labeling the parental protests as an effort by “hate groups trying to silence LGBTQIA+ voices in the Glendale Unified School District.”
Pudlo, who goes by the name “Maebe A. Girl,” is a drag queen. He served on Los Angeles’ Silver Lake Neighborhood Council in 2019 and is running for the House seat of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is running for Senate.
Both Pudlo and Antifa’s Southern California chapter called on fellow “progressives” to flood the Glendale school board meeting Tuesday night.
A crowd of parents infiltrated by Antifa activists isn’t expected to show up for the school board meeting only because of Glenoaks Elementary’s “Pride Day,” however. Curriculum details and school district emails obtained by The Daily Signal reveal Glendale administrators’ obsession with shoving students into LGBTQ+ programs and activities.
For example, Lisa Avery, a teacher at the school district’s Rosemont Middle School, provides training for the California Teachers Association, one of the state’s largest teachers unions, on how to start “Baby Gender Sexuality Alliance” clubs in elementary schools.
Avery described how her relationship has changed with students since she started the club at her Rosemont Middle School, telling other teachers: “Some of them call me ‘Mom.’ Right? That’s just how it is now.”
Craig Lewis, an associate principal and a member of the Glendale school district’s Teaching and Learning Department in 2022, told department Director Christopher Coulter in an email that Glendale’s standard would be to teach children that everyone is both “queer” and a socialist:
We will also teach that LGBTQ+ is everybody, every society, every culture group, every age, over all time, with the only difference being the degree to which dominant entities are willing to cause injury, physically or emotionally, to others in an attempt to enforce conformity to their own narrow construction of ‘normality’ while perhaps even hinting (Danger, is my middle name) that not only is socialism the normal human condition … but also that we are all probably best described as Queer …
Lewis now works at the Los Angeles County Office of Education as a coordinator in its Center for History and Social Science.
The sex education curriculum for the Glendale district’s middle schools includes diagrams that encourage students to separate their “gender identity” in their heads from their “sexual orientation” in their hearts and their “biological sex” between their legs.
Books available in Glendale’s elementary schools include “Who Are You?” by Brook Pessin-Whedbee, in which students are encouraged to experiment in identifying as “trans, genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, agender, neutrois, bigender, third gender, [and] two-spirit.”
Several parents also have alleged that Glendale allows boys to share locker rooms with girls. Karen Nelson, a Glendale High School parent, told The Daily Signal:
The school principal literally lied to me and told me there was no girl in the boys’ locker room with my son. My son spent almost an entire year disrobing with a girl in his locker room and he feels lied to and violated. Why do they bend over backward for gender dysphoric kids and completely ignore the basic rights of the rest of the kids?
In a recent Instagram post and public statement titled “Get the Facts,” the Glendale school district claimed that information circulating about its “LGBTQIA+ curriculum” is in fact “disinformation.”
In the public statement, School Superintendent Vivian Ekchian doesn’t address any of the concerns that parents have about curriculum, emails, and photos.
She does, however, cite several California state laws on nondiscrimination.
Although Ekchian and other Glendale district officials claim to address what they describe as “disinformation,” none of the evidence presented by parents or other media outlets so far has been addressed, refuted, or disproven with “facts,” or met with any acknowledgement whatsoever.
The Glendale school board meeting is scheduled to be livestreamed Tuesday beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
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