Parental Rights Matter

Testifying to the Nebraska Legislature

by Sue Greenwald M.D.

On July 31, 2023, Senator Murman held a special session of the Education Committee of the Nebraska Legislature to illumate the problems in Nebraska schools that he is making efforts to address with his Parental Rights bill, LB 374. As a co-founder of Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, and a citizen who has done extensive research on the topic, I was one of the experts asked to testify.

I prepared 2 weeks for this event, as I considered it important and serious. I drove 2 hours each way to be there. It was an unpleasant experience, but I was prepared for that. The lawlessness at the Capitol had persisted unchecked for the entire legislative session, with innocent people caught up in the mayhem.

I entered the building with an armed escort. On July 31, there were protestors, but they were not overtly intimidating people in the hallway, as had occurred during the regular session. Imagine the mindset it must take to protest parental rights.

I wrote about my experience at the end of this article:

“The Death of Nebraska Nice.”

“It was incredibly disheartening that after all my preparation, there were few senators attending. Senators Sanders and Murman were there. Senator Albrecht was there by teleconference. Senator Wayne stayed for the opponents speeches and then left. Senator Conrad was there to support the NSEA position and try to discredit every speaker as if she were opposing council in a courtroom.

The proponents spoke last. We sat quietly and politely through the paid lobbyists spouting various versions of: “We aren’t teaching CRT, and it’s good that we are.”

State Board of Education member Kirk Penner was heckled by the bystanders. No one was reprimanded or asked to leave. Veteran educator Lisa Schonhoff mildly received that treatment. When it was my turn to speak, hecklers interrupted me 3 times. I paused each time so they could be asked to leave, but they weren’t.”

My testimony that day (lightly edited and updated) is as follows:

LB 374 Special Session Intro

Senators, you debated and compromised for years to get the Opportunity Scholarship bill passed. Before the ink was dry on the Governor’s signature, the NSEA had a recall drive with petitions and talking points already printed and mailed. No good deed goes unpunished. It must be frustrating for you, but what you are experiencing is perhaps one tenth of the pushback that parents receive when they try to advocate for their children in schools, public or private.

When LB 374 stalled in Committee this legislative session, parents received the message that their rights don’t matter. Many are looking for educational alternatives as we speak. It isn’t just a lack of transparency that is causing problems, it is the outright hostility to parents that is becoming more and more pervasive in public and even private schools.

Parents and teachers love their neighborhood schools. They don’t want to be at war over library books and student surveys and opaque online curriculums. This battle is being pushed by a national and even global agenda. The money coming from the government, non-profits and the unions has corrupted the system to the point where it has become an education and data collection cartel.

So much that happens in schools these days is not done by the districts. The districts have become wholesale brokers, purchasing contracts with third party vendors for curriculum, for teacher in-service, for mental health counseling, and for SEL. Education dollars are sought after because they keep increasing with little oversight. Since the teacher’s unions have a large influence, the preferred vendors are nearly 100% politically left, and often have a political agenda. Third party vendors are also completely unaccountable to any laws that protect the welfare and privacy of students.  Laws like the PPRA (The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment) and FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) only apply to entities which receive funds from The US Dept. of Education. That explains why your student’s transcripts are protected like Fort Knox, but their social studies curriculum can ask them to choose a pronoun.

The Covid Relief or Esser funds took hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and handed them out to the schools with the only major requirement being that 20% is spent on approved Social Emotional Learning or other critical race and gender theory-based curriculum.

Superintendents sometimes get kickbacks in the form of board and consulting positions when they successfully usher in these curriculums. Grant money from meddling billionaires is always available through a variety of cut-out non-profits, and it is often impossible to trace.

(See this previous article: “EdReports, Common Core Curriculum Via Gates Foundation” )

Money comes from grants and tax funds on a per pupil basis. Teachers are also expendable if they aren’t willing to follow the preferred narrative.  Concerned parents were designated “domestic terrorists” by the US Dept of Justice last year. Don’t discount that as not your problem. It is significant.

Parents are not a profit center, and they are irrelevant to the enterprise.

Parents are locked out of most school buildings. An elected school board member in Norfolk was recently reprimanded by the Superintendent for visiting a school building without an appointment. This isn’t what Local Control is supposed to look like. Most parents and school board members don’t yet understand why or how they have lost control over their schools, they just know they have.

As a co-founder of Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, I hear all the stories. The one element each of these stories shares is these words: “Don’t tell anyone my name.”

Veteran teachers are quitting for 2 reasons. 1. They are getting no help with discipline problems, and 2. They don’t believe in the ideology they are being forced to impart to their students.

Teachers are generally nurturers who will give their all until they see the futility. They fear they will be fired or targeted by administrators if they complain. When they feel defeated, they quit. Teachers are also parents. Parent’s Rights are Teacher’s Rights.

The primary fear of both groups is that their children will be bullied at school if they speak up. That has happened so often that school board candidates have begun to make alternate arrangements for their children before they announce their candidacy, and people who can’t move their children have chosen not to run. You’ve heard testimony of the young man from Seward who had to quit football due to being targeted and scapegoated by his coach. His sin was that his mother ran for school board.

A mother and school board candidate in Waunita-Palisade was forced to home school when her children were bullied by both teachers and administrators at the only school available to them. The same school staff ran an online smear campaign against her making her a pariah in her small community. (They were posting hate-filled screeds during school hours). Similar things were experienced by school board candidates, and their families, in Nebraska City, Gothenburg, and Gordon, to name just a few. Two elected school board members in Plattsmouth and Papillion-La Vista were recently hounded out of office using the same tactics.

Parents and Teachers are asking for some basic rights. Currently, the law is against them. School districts fear being sued more than anything. They fear the ACLU and the teacher’s unions. They don’t fear parents or teachers. The obscenity exemption protects the school porn, and the third-party contracts protect the curriculum. Even if a parent tries to make an ethics complaint to the Nebraska Professional Practices Commission, the complaint must first be vetted by the Nebraska Commissioner of Education. Our last Commissioner was so much a part of the problem that people stopped trying to pursue that route.

1. Parents deserve the right to direct their child’s upbringing.

In 2005 the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that “Parents have no constitutional right to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise.”

This ruling created an anti-parent precedent and made it necessary for states to innumerate parental rights in state law.

Here in Nebraska, parent’s rights to direct their child’s upbringing regarding values and religion is being violated by design.

The vast majority of Nebraskans believe the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a good thing, and oppose discrimination. Yet discrimination is being implemented in many school subjects. The Nebraska Commissioner of Education declared in June 2020 that Nebraska schools would henceforth promote anti-racism, trauma informed care, restorative justice, and culturally responsive teaching (CRT). All of these phrases are from Marxist teachings. Those policies are still in place today, as are the links to Marxist resources on the NDE website. 

Most of you must have seen the Westside High School video where administrators brag about using Social Emotional Learning to hide the critical race theory from parents, and calling units “belonging” to hide the fact they are “progressive.” The superintendent brags about the “things going on behind the scenes” to protect their political agenda.

Parents have seen this and many other exposés. There is little that a school could do that is more disrespectful to parents than intentionally lie to them. Yet that is now the acceptable daily practice of many school personnel.

In small town Nebraska a white teen was isolated in a corner of the room and berated as a racist when he refused to agree with the teacher’s characterization of white people. That boy testified before this committee. A young woman from Omaha schools testified to you that her rapist went free because she is White and he is Black. That is an example of the “restorative justice” our last Commissioner was bragging about.

Parents are not on board with discrimination of any kind and do not want their children taught that some types of discrimination are more acceptable because of good intentions. The intentions don’t matter to the people on the receiving end of the discrimination.

Parents who are trying to instill religious values in their children are also undermined by the schools.

Social Emotional Learning is immersing students in moral relativism. Each person decides what is moral depending on how they feel. There is your truth and my truth in moral relativism. The explosion in unruly student behavior is not being improved by SEL, it is being exacerbated by SEL.

Religion is about moral absolutes. “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t come with an asterisk. “Thou shalt not steal” isn’t followed by “unless you have a good reason.” For the devout, there is only one truth.

A Cozad mother became alarmed when her first grader was being taught anti-racism and her second grader suddenly thought he was Buddhist. The lessons were from a language arts curriculum called CKLA that the ESU’s have convinced several school districts to purchase. $150,000 for Cozad, $800,000 for Bennington. The Cozad mother made an appointment with the principal to discuss her concerns. When she took time from work to arrive, she was told the school attorney had been consulted and she was not allowed to ask questions.

Several times at State Board of Education meetings, the undermining of faith was brought up by public comment speakers. There was always a Senator Hunt or someone else present to respond: “If you don’t like it, you can home school.” So, the goal apparently is to eliminate families of faith from public schools. Well, it’s working.

2. Children deserve privacy.

Remember, third party contractors do not have to abide by any of the laws that govern schools. School districts are prohibited from discussing sex, religion, politics, mental health, or family issues with a student. But Savvas, or Second Step or Panorama, are not. They are NOT prohibited from gathering and selling your data.  If you are using a CASEL compliant curriculum, your personal answers to every lesson are going right into the international cloud to be purchased by anyone. There are no laws that protect that data. SEL is big money because data is worth big money.              

If you sync your chromebook to your phone, every text and email could be collected. If you had a fight with your parent that morning, or you were searching online about transgender, you might be individually targeted with a prompt on your chromebook to visit the counselor. The same counselor who may be highly trained in "saving" you from your parents by altering your pronouns.

Teachers are now trained to have students click an emoji on how they feel that day. Why does the teacher need to know how students feel before teaching math or reading? They don't. It is used to target and emotionally control students. SEL is being sold to the public and the teachers as good for mental health, when it is actually mind control, individualized to the child. When artificial intelligence is part of the equation, the child will have no defense against it and the values of the family will cease to matter.

Imagine 20 years from now your child wants to get a mortgage, or buy a gun, or run for elected office. Will his health test answer from seventh grade come back to haunt him?

Ask yourself why reading is being taught with computer-generated curriculum instead of with books. Books are easier and more fun to read, but the digital companies can’t control content or mine data from books.

3. Parents deserve to know what their children are being taught.

School administrators admit to playing cat and mouse with parents. They know what they are doing, and they know they are hiding it. Sometimes it is ideology driving it, but usually the motive is money. Remember, third party contractors can do things and ask things that the schools are prohibited by law from doing.

Third party SEL and curriculum programs are unaccountable to anyone. The law does not protect students from the information imparted nor gathered.  Textbooks are obsolete.

Second Step is one of the most popular SEL programs used by Nebraska schools. It has a lesson for first graders called “Question Objective Reality.” The teacher’s guide says the purpose of the lesson is to “get the students to ignore what they see” and to “question their internal beliefs.” Those would be the same internal beliefs that their parents taught them. The teacher is to convince the 6-year-olds that a blue square is actually a circle.  I have provided the lesson and you can read more about it on my Substack archives.

Middle school is replete with lessons on how to do "direct action" for social justice. In other words, lessons in rioting.

Transgenderism is part of nearly everything, the programs are constantly asking kids how they identify. They can't escape it.

The programs for math, reading, science and social studies are all just as bad. It is impossible to opt out of the ideological indoctrination because it is in everything. Savvas has a history curriculum being implemented in Nebraska, their website brags they focus on “culturally responsive teaching”, which is the new iteration of CRT. Their curriculum writers are doctorate level critical race theorists.

Even if parents are fully aware of this, what can they do?

Parents across the state have tried to get access to various online lessons. They will be given a hard copy of a cherry-picked lesson or two. They are almost universally told that the software is "proprietary" and not allowed to be shared. Sometimes they are told they can sit in the office and view it. It would take weeks. The worst parts of these curricula can be found in the videos, which are often hidden and much more time consuming and difficult to review. Everything is password protected.

Many, many parents have tried doing public records requests to get access to the curriculum being used on their children. They are told they will have to cough up many thousands of dollars in fees. If that doesn’t deter them, there will be some other roadblock. There have not been any successful public requests regarding curriculum in Nebraska that I am aware of. Because these are third party vendors, they are protected from such requests.

Another pernicious aspect of online lessons is that what you see today could be completely changed tomorrow. The online companies reserve the right to alter the content at any time. Teachers on curriculum committees have complained of a bait and switch where the objectionable parts of the curriculum are hidden until after the purchase is complete. Then they have to spend their time picking through the bad stuff to find lessons they can use.

Transparency doesn’t mean posting a lesson on the school website. Transparency means giving parents the key code to the online curriculum to watch in real time.  Nowhere in the digital world are parents expected to entrust their children to an online entity without oversight, except in education.

4.  Parents deserve the right to direct the health care of their children.

California is currently moving Planned Parenthood clinics onto school campuses to start kids on puberty blockers and hormones, and drive them to abortions, which children can consent to at age 12 in that state. Parents have no rights in California, nor in Oregon where kidnapping by the state to promote transgenderism was recently legalized.

The One World Clinics are aiming to fulfill a similar role in Nebraska schools. They ask parents to sign a blanket permission form which allows the “convenience” of not having to take your child to the doctor during the school day for whatever ails them. They don’t talk about the fact that transgender hormones are one of their main services.

Bennington is just one of the schools who will attempt to transgender an autistic child without notifying parents. Secret transition has almost become a badge of honor among a certain group of school counselors, The ASCA.

Meanwhile, the school nurse can’t give your child a Tylenol without calling you first. Third party contractors can legally do things the school can’t do.

5. Parents deserve the right to be consulted regarding Sex Ed.

The tiny Panhandle school of Gordon-Rushville has a school board that roundly condemned Comprehensive Sexuality Education, which is Planned Parenthood’s curriculum, when it was proposed by the State Board of Education. Meanwhile a curriculum director was implementing two CSE programs quietly behind the backs of the parents and the school board.

The most egregious form of sex ed is pornography. Anyone who attended the hearing for LB 441 this past session got an earful of school porn taken straight from the libraries of schools all over Nebraska. These books had both pictures and words that could be legally defined as obscenity. Themes of rape, violence, suicide, and prostitution are presented without meaningful context in many of these books. This is a new phenomenon based upon an agenda that parents had no part in. Many of those books are donated by politically oriented non-profits. Many are recommended by the American Library Association whose elected President, Emily Drabinski, brags of being “a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible.”

A Kearney mother spent 9 months of her life jumping through all the hoops thrown at her by the Kearney Public Schools book challenge system. She used up her vacation days attending the required daytime meetings. She challenged 8 of the worst books found in her daughters’ school. These books were rated by Booklooks.org as equivalent to an X rated movie. At the end of the process, the school board had the final say. Many of the school board members said they would not want their children reading those books, but they still voted to keep them. Then, they voted to abolish the book challenge policy. They didn’t want the responsibility, they said. There is currently no book challenge process in Kearney. Their policy is this: Parents can choose to segregate their children from the library. All or none.

6. Teachers deserve free speech.

Many Nebraska teachers are not on board with the online curriculums, the pervasive ideological and anti-Christian slant, the overt sexualization, and the loss of their autonomy. These teachers are methodically and, it sometimes seems, purposely being weeded out. They have been threatened repeatedly with the loss of their jobs, the loss of their union benefits, or just living with a target on their back from administrators and fellow teachers. They are the shyest of whistleblowers. The Parent’s Bill of Rights also needs to protect teachers. Nothing can improve regarding schools if the insiders are afraid to speak. Parents love their teachers. They want to trust them.

Bennington schools were questioned about their SEL curriculum containing CRT. What if this curriculum contradicts the firmly held beliefs of the teachers? The response was very telling. “Bennington teachers may share concerns about lessons and activities that make them uncomfortable. This is a sign to the administration that additional training is needed…Teachers are required to teach District curriculum.” In other words, the teacher’s firmly held beliefs will have to change.

A rural second-grade teacher is uncomfortable teaching about Greek gods and world religions. It is confusing to 7-yr-old children whose families worship one God.  According to state standards these are middle school topics. They are not appropriate for second grade, yet she has to teach them.  

A Lincoln curriculum director was just as shocked as the parent when a pre-teen student was forced to answer questions about her sexuality on a required on-line health test.

A successful and experience Language Arts teacher quit when she was expected to conform to the online lessons.  “My job was to make the students love reading. I’m supposed to read a script and follow along?” she said. “I’m not needed.”

A suburban Nebraska teacher risks her job by continuing to have her students memorize the times tables. She was told by her administrator that it was forbidden due to equity. “Some students can’t memorize” she was told.

An urban Nebraska teacher is fed up with the constant Equity training over the last 3 years. She knows it is CRT but she has been told by her principal to deny it if anyone asks. She is finally raising some concerns because she knows if something doesn’t change there is no way she is bringing her kids to this school district. She knows many of the other teachers agree with her but they “just know not to speak up.” When asked if the Equity training is making her want to quit teaching at the public school, she says “I’m 70% there.”

Summary-Where We Find Ourselves

Currently, we have teachers who live in fear of speaking up because they might lose their job and their kids will be bullied. Parents are afraid to speak up because they have been dismissed and their kids have been bullied. Good people resist running for school board because they will be demonized and their kids will be bullied.

Opponents will say that LB 374 is imposing the state’s will on local school districts. That is the view of some administrators, the curriculum vendors, the data collectors and the social justice warriors. The people who are profiting from the money and/or the ideology don’t want to see a change.

However, the majority of parents and teachers don’t see it that way. They see their beloved schools being destroyed from within. They would be willing to do something to stop it, but they will NOT tolerate their children taking the arrows in this battle. Many, many teachers and parents are close to the “70% there” of leaving altogether.

A Parent’s Rights bill won’t begin to solve everything, but it would give families more of a fighting chance. The big money will be against it. The teachers’ unions are petrified of transparency. That's why there is a petition against opportunity scholarships. 

There will have to be a point where the welfare of students and their families becomes more important to this body than profit for, and from, the education cartel. If not, the public schools will enter a death spiral in my opinion.

Parenting isn’t easy, and neither is protecting Parent’s Rights. Thank you for being here today to dive into this important issue.