Angry parents: Fights over masks, sex, CRT in KC area schools follow a national strategy
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Angry Parents
After two years of pandemic restrictions, parents are mad as hell. What do they want - and is it dangerous?
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Angry parents: Fights over masks, sex, CRT in KC area schools follow a national strategy
Northland parent says public school system needs to be broken down and rebuilt
Parent says political views at board meetings detract from what’s best for students
Blue Valley student speaks up about “anti-science bigots’ at school board meeting
Angry parents speak out against masks, CRT at Kansas City area school board meetings
Committed to her cause, Christine Kraft, a 42-year-old mother of two grade school girls, stepped to the lectern at a meeting of the North Kansas City Board of Education certain of three things.
Masking kids against COVID is useless. Critical race theory promotes a harmful outlook that divides Black people and white. And children are being sexually groomed by books she regards as pornography available in school libraries.
She stared down, reading prepared comments from her pink cell phone. Books were on her mind this evening.
“I stand before you today as an American patriot, professional nurse practitioner and, most importantly, as a mother,” Kraft said at the October meeting .”Today it’s hard for me to believe that I have to stand up here and discuss the material that is being used in our school system.”
Seated before her: seven school board members and the superintendent. Behind her, a cadre of parents just like her, members of the recently-formed-in-frustration Northland Parent Association, a group whose website describes it as grassroots fighters “for American freedom in the classroom.”
“You have a duty to defend the U.S. Constitution, as an American, for the vulnerable,” she told the board. “The vulnerable is our children. Your children are my children. Whether you understand or not, I am speaking to protect your children as well as mine. . .
“May God have mercy on us sinners, one and all, for having to even discuss such material being printed, disseminated, purchased by our tax dollars, and provided to innocent children to destroy their innocence in the blood of sex.”
Later, she said in private, “What’s going on in the schools is just no longer education. It (the system) needs to be broken down.”
It’s a scene that has played out in school boards across the Kansas City metro and the country over the past two years. Scared, angry, passionate and mostly white parents — egged on and emboldened by a Republican Party that sees an opportunity for electoral gain — have been speaking up in ways unseen in decades.
In North Kansas City, Raymore-Peculiar and Pleasant Hill, board meetings have turned into confrontations over books, masks and what parents allege to be the teaching of critical race theory. In Blue Valley and Olathe last fall, two out of three conservative newcomers won seats on each school board. All were endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC, a New York-based group that believes many schools are promoting an anti-white ideology in their teaching of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Their opponents, who include parents of color, teachers, students and elected Democrats, are equally certain of three things. What they are hearing is racist and homophobic, anti-intellectual and deeply dangerous.
Schools are traditional battlegrounds for the country’s culture wars. From Brown v. Board of Education and busing to Common Core to transgender rights, the politics of public education are highly combustible. Now tensions created by the pandemic have lit a grassroots movement around the classroom.
It began with arguments at school board meetings over when to reopen schools. Then it was how to reopen: Must kids wear masks? Must an entire class quarantine if a single student is exposed? Tempers flared over COVID-19 precautions. Parents, watching their kids struggle emotionally and with distance learning, saw schools from a whole new vantage point. Many discovered that what they saw disturbed them: powerful teachers unions, administrators who didn’t like their authority challenged, a system that felt opaque and unaccountable.
Add George Floyd, Black Lives Matter and a conservative backlash challenging how race and history were taught.
Parents of color are feeling the resistance to change.
“There is a large, unfortunately, part of society that doesn’t want to upset the status quo, because the status quo has always served them well,” said Alethea Rollins, a doctor of human development and Black parent of a daughter who graduated from Lee’s Summit.
“There are a lot of people who want to control the schools and what their kids are being taught. They have forgotten what public education is — it is about teaching what is best for society, not what’s best for your individual family.”
Potent voices
Kraft knows how others have cast her in this drama: angry and even racist, anti-mask, anti-sex, anti-LGBTQ and pro-book banning.
But what some choose to see as anger, she said, is for her more a reflection of fear, concern and passion for protecting vulnerable children, starting with her girls, Caydence, 11, and Corra, 9.
Christine Kraft’s fear: that the world is moving too fast. That through the internet, social media, television and public schools, children risk being harmed and indoctrinated, buffeted by a confusing swirl of messages around race and sexual identity.
“Any parent that wants to speak up — if they do become emotional, or become angry — they have every right,” Kraft said. “Because that’s over their children. If you want to induce a parent into shuddering fear, you come after their children.”
She feels so betrayed by public schools, that this academic year she removed her daughters and enrolled them in classes at a private learning center in Liberty.
Politicians have long understood that no matter the party affiliation, there is no greater motivation for voters than fear. Fear of lost jobs and a sagging economy, fear around immigration or integration, fear surrounding national security, homeland security, changing culture and ways of life.
It’s voters like Kraft and others similarly-minded that Republicans want to capture in 2022 and 2024.
Born and raised as an athletic “tomboy” in Auburn, Nebraska, Kraft is a Christian conservative. A red hat promoting “Trump 2024” hangs in her closet. While there is not a shard of credible evidence, she suspects that the 2020 election was stolen. She is mistrustful of certain government entities, a feeling that’s extended to school boards.
When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governorship of Virginia in November using fears about education as part of his platform, politicians nationwide took note. One ad late in his campaign featured a mother talking about how her high school son had nightmares from reading Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Beloved,” about a woman who murders her child to spare her from slavery.
Critical race theory made it into a memo in President Donald Trump’s White House. It spread to local school board meetings where it melded with conservatives concerns about the 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning issue of The New York Times Magazine, which focused American history on the year the first slave ship arrived.
Now many Republicans see education, through the lens of parental control and “parents’ rights,” as a political winner.
“These parents want somebody to represent them on these issues,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican political consultant who served in the administration of former President George W. Bush. “I think for a long time, maybe parents were just bebopping along and not thinking too hard about it. Well, now they are. And I think they’re also realizing how potent their voices can be organized under a candidacy that’s willing to represent them.”
Trojan horse?
Within weeks of Youngkin’s win, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley introduced his own “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” The House Republican Caucus followed a day later with its version. Neither is likely to pass the Democratically-controlled Congress. But in numerous state houses with GOP majorities, such measures are flooding legislative hoppers.
In the last month alone, legislators in at least six states, including Iowa, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky and California, have introduced bills giving parents greater control of what their children are exposed to in schools. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last week suggested that he would support what is widely being called a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit school discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.
In Missouri, at least a half-dozen “parental rights bills” have been filed in the current session, most allowing parents to review curricula and teaching materials, as well as other public information, and re-affirming existing rights to religious and medical school vaccine exemptions. Even more have been introduced to curb the teaching of race-related curricula that conservatives object to.
“We need to send a very clear message that the state of Missouri, if we ever have to choose a side, we will always take the side of parents,” said Excelsior Springs Republican Rep. Doug Richey, sponsor of one of the measures.
It’s left some lawmakers concerned that opposing parental beliefs would clash in the classroom. Districts that violate parental codes could be held liable for damages to parents and a voucher-like school choice program lawmakers created last year to fund scholarships to private or nontraditional schools.
Kansas City Democrat Maggie Nurrenbern, a former North Kansas City Schools teacher, called the proposal a “Trojan horse to destroy quality public education in Missouri.”
Meanwhile, capitalizing on parents’ choice, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in January sued 45 school districts, including 12 in the Kansas City area last month, asserting that mask mandates are a government intrusion on family decisions.
Schmitt, who is running for U.S. Senate, also supports a national Parents’ Bill of Rights. He is using the same campaign consultant who helped Youngkin win — Jeff Roe, who got his start in Missouri working for Rep. Sam Graves.
‘Terrorist’ parents
Kraft was already deeply active in schools in September when the National School Boards Association — representing 90,000 school board members — sent a letter President Joe Biden. It declared: “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.”
The letter chronicled disruptions and attacks in districts across the country. Stung by the newly aggressive mood among parents, board members were resigning.
But it also outraged GOP lawmakers and parents like Kraft when it equated some of the acts to “domestic terrorism” and requested that the president mobilize the FBI, and other federal agencies to protect and investigate. The Department of Justice issued a memo within days offering to help.
In the resulting uproar, the association apologized for some of its language. More than a dozen school board groups, including the Missouri School Boards’ Association, cut ties or distanced themselves from the national group,
Instead of de-escalating conflict, the letter furthered emboldened already upset parents. Kraft sees it as a watershed moment.
“My joke that Halloween was that I was going to go as a domestic terrorist,” she said. “You just dress up like a parent.”
She proudly wears a T-shirt that reads, “Supporter of Parents as Domestic Terrorists, Against Tyrannical School Boards.”
CRT and ABCs
Critical race theory has been another galvanizing influence for Kraft.
It refers to an academic concept — taught almost exclusively at the university level, and not in secondary public schools — that racism has endured because it remains embedded in American institutions and policies despite the historic Supreme Court decisions and legislation of the civil rights era.
That was before the theory was weaponized by GOP consultants, right-wing media and conservative think tanks, distorting it into a message that liberal educators want to attribute all the ills of the nation to white racism.
Kraft concedes that she has not read deeply on the subject, but thinks districts are dodging when they claim that they don’t teach it by another name.
“It’s called equity and inclusion,” she said.
Kraft believes she’s learned enough about critical race theory to judge it as an approach to history — focusing on systemic racism and inequities erected for the benefit of a white majority — that does more to divide Black people from white than bringing them together.
One reason she moved from small-town Nebraska to Kansas City, she said, was because it’s a “melting pot.” Her patients are diverse.
“The way I raise my girls is that everybody matters,” Kraft said, a reference to the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd. What we can do, as always, is to be kind and courteous, no matter what. Never judge a book by its cover.
“And what does CRT do? It judges the book by its cover.”
She believes that lessons of prejudice and segregation, inequity, endemic racism and the struggle for Civil Rights are important.
“I learned that without CRT,” Kraft said. “It was called American history. When you start separating, you’re causing division.”
As a practical nurse Kraft visits people in their homes, but she has chosen not to be vaccinated against COVID-19, taking a religious exemption. She thinks the technology used to create the vaccines was too new and their approval was rushed.
To her: “The science just isn’t there,” she said. “The studies are not sufficient.”
Data shows that more than 90% of the patients currently in Kansas City area intensive care units with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. A December report by The Commonwealth Fund holds that over the previous year COVID-19 vaccinations likely saved an estimated 1.1 million lives in the U.S. and averted 10.3 million hospitalizations.
At work, Kraft wears a mask. She is confident it prevents illness. But she uses an N-95, not the flimsy cloth she sees many children wearing at schools.
“I’ve always voiced that these masks are ridiculous,” she said, “these cloth masks we’re buying at Walmart with Mickey Mouse on them are insufficient.”
For its part, the North Kansas City School District, like other districts, said it has taken its cues from local public health officials throughout the pandemic, requiring masks when they are mandated and rolling them back as when authorities recommend.
“The Board of Education has never voted for nor against masking,” the district wrote The Star, “we have simply followed our own policy with great consistency. “
Parents protesting at other school boards, meantime, frequently argue against masks by citing CDC statistics that do, indeed, show that of the 900,000 COVD-19 deaths in the U.S. so far, about 1,000 , a minuscule percentage, involve children ages 18 and under. In general, COVID-19 infections are also more often asymptomatic or far milder in children.
The CDC notes, however, that masks don’t only protect kids, but also prevent them from spreading the virus. The agency still recommends “universal masking by students ages 2 and older, regardless of vaccination status.”
Given the significantly lower incidence of death or serious illness, parents in opposition argue that it ought to be a parent’s choice whether to mask their child.
“People forget what America is about,” Kraft said. “It’s about freedom.”
’An important piece of work’
That, she said, includes the right to fight school boards and express views she knows are shared by others. Among them:
It’s one matter if public libraries choose to carry books with themes of sex or gender. But, Kraft believes, they have no place in schools. Nor, she holds, do clubs related to gender identity.
Children, even of high school age, she believes, are too suggestible, too easily indoctrinated by predatory adults, such as teachers.
“They don’t have the capacity or understanding,” Kraft said. “What are you starting to see more and more, but teachers being arrested for pedophilia or molestation. You know why? Because they (students) are being groomed that way. Or they’re a loner and they’re confused and the teacher takes advantage.
“Grooming is making them comfortable with the uncomfortable. That is truly the case. You give a young girl a book where a girl is having oral sex with another girl, or a man touching her in her privates — there’s books of this in the school library — it makes them groomed to think this kind of behavior is appropriate.”
Only minutes prior to Kraft’s appearance before the North Kansas City school board, another parent, Jay Richmond, the Northland Parent Association’s president, had stood up to protest against some 25 books, including Jonathan Evison’s critically-acclaimed “Lawn Boy,” Ashley Hope Perez’s “Out of Darkness,” and George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue.” Each includes depictions of sex and sexuality with, in some cases, sex between minors, gay sex and assault.
“Why are you allowing it in our school?” Richmond demanded. “These deal with LGBTQ sexual, explicit scenarios with minors — teaching minors, allowing them to read it. It deals with incest, pedophilia. That is called grooming. That is something you all are pushing on our schools. I want to know why.”
Such charges carry the echoes of larger political movements.
Concerns about pedophilia and the grooming of children in schools are a longstanding trope used by anti-LGBTQ activists like Anita Bryant. She led the organization Save Our Children in 1977 to repeal an ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prevented discrimination against gays and lesbians. Her campaign relied on claiming homosexuality was a sin and falsely accusing gay people of recruiting and molesting children. It was successful.
Pedophilia has also been at the root of several far-right conspiracy theories in recent years. Supporters of the Q-Anon believe that several prominent Democrats are participating in a child sex trafficking ring.
When Lee’s Summit R-7 School District parents for asked that “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” be removed from high school libraries., officials impaneled a 10-member Media Review Committee to read and discuss the book. The panel included three librarians, two high school teachers, two parents, two students and a district administrator.
In the end, they “determined it is an important piece of work that should be accessible to our underrepresented and/or marginalized students,” Katy Bergen, the district’s executive director of public relations, told The Star in an email.
“The author provided multiple opportunities for readers to be aware of sensitive content,” Bergen wrote. “The team determined the material did not fit the definition of pornography because the author’s intent was not to arouse or cause sexual excitement.”
On Dec. 16, at the committee’s urging, the Lee’s Summit school board, “voted unanimously to retain the book without restriction.”
In North Kansas City, the district kept all “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and other titles on its shelves, after temporarily removing them. Such removal, it said, violated students’ First Amendment rights.
If a parent finds a book objectionable, the district decided that a parent could list the book on a form. Their child would be prevented from checking it out — a measure that is cold comfort to parents like Kraft.
“I mean, growing up,” Kraft argued, “you couldn’t walk into a truck stop without having covers on pornographic magazines. There’s PG-13 on movies. There are movie theaters that don’t allow kids in unless they have an I.D. to see an R-rated movie. So you’re telling me it’s OK to put a book of pornography in the library?”
‘Call to action’
As Kraft and like-minded parents promote their agenda, waves of students, parents and educators are pushing back.
The North Kansas City School District, in a statement to The Star, reiterated: The district does not teach CRT.
“Attempts to conflate CRT with equity and inclusion are misguided,” Susan Hiland, the district’s director of media and public relations, wrote. “In short, our goal as educators is to break down barriers for kids. We want all kids to have access to curriculum, programming, facilities, and overall school experiences that honor who they are as individuals. . .
She continued, “When we see data that shows disparate outcomes for different groups of students, it is a moral imperative to address it. . . .There is not a different standard when we see data that demonstrates inequitable outcomes for students of color. The district’s tagline, Champion for All Students, is a call to action for each of the 21,000 we serve.”
In Lee’s Summit, Davoya Marshall — who, with her husband and four boys, moved from Raytown in 2020 for what they deemed to be better schools — has witnessed the polarization at school board meetings.
“The emotions and the tensions right now are crazy,” she said. “I actually knew, once I moved out there, that I would be active because I didn’t want the thoughts and emotions and opinions of others to predict the outcome of my children.”
At meetings, she has spoken in favor of masks, as one of her sons has a preexisting condition and had recently been in the hospital.
“I wish you guys could have seen his face,” she told the board at one meeting, “having to lay on the bed looking at his heart rate go up and down. And then having to come back fearing if somebody is going to give him a disease he could potentially die from. . .Wearing a mask is not a political issue, it’s a health issue. It’s not red or blue, black or white, but it could be a matter of death or life.”
Marshall, who is Black, is also a member of the local nonprofit, Suburban Balance, that aims to provide kids of color equitable opportunities in suburbia and at schools that lack diversity. She is convinced that most parents railing about CRT have almost zero idea what they’re talking about.
“They’re equating CRT with diversity and inclusion when — if you look up the diversity and inclusion — it doesn’t have anything to do with Critical race theory,” she said. “We just want opportunities.”
In a written statement to The Star, LaShawn Walker, founder of Suburban Balance, called the CRT “a false narrative driven by fear.”
“I believe the fear of not wanting the full and true history of this country taught in the classroom stems from the same fear that caused people to fight against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, school desegregation and against abolishing slavery.. . . .
“I have not spoken to one student that believes that telling the full and true history of this country will make them feel bad. Nor do they feel telling the full and true history is divisive.”
After Kraft and her Parent Association allies spoke at the school board meeting, an organized stream of high school students descended on the board at the next two monthly meetings decrying the group and its aims.
“I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of an educational system that incorporates diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said one senior boy. “My school has not made me desensitized to graphic or concerning content, but rather made me more aware of the issues faced by many less fortunate than I.”
He called the members of the Parent Association a “vocal minority.” The group’s views “do not reflect those of your students,” he cautioned the board.
Another student, part of the Asian Student Union, castigated the board for even briefly removing books from their shelves.
“These literature pieces offer a voice to me,” she said, “people of color and marginalized groups. . . .Books do not corrupt the mind. Ignorance and intolerance is what corrupts students.”
One book the group wanted removed deals with issues of sexual assault.
“The (Northland Parents Association) is attempting to censor any piece of literature that has mentions of sexual violence,” a student argued. “By doing this they are telling the students that sexual assault is not something that should be discussed within educational environment. . . .We need to allow students to hear and read stories that include experiences that they can relate to. If students are old enough to be targets of sexual assault and harassment, then you’re old enough to read about it.”
Standing at the same lectern where Kraft spoke, she read the board a brief passage that spoke of rape and dismemberment.
“This,” she said, “is from the Holy Bible.”
“High schoolers aren’t dumb,” she reminded the board. “We aren’t kindergartners who need to read picture books to learn how to be good to one another. We can understand context and nuance.”
Yet another described the parent group as a “far-right” group trafficking in “fear tactics” and “extremes.”
“Students deserve to learn about the world we live in,” she said. “And it just happens that the world we live in has an extremely racist past and present, a patriarchy, and is unfair to those who aren’t straight, white or men.
“Teaching students this is not going to hurt them. It’s the truth and schools are here to teach them the truth.”
Kraft, meantime, plans to move forward guided by a truth of her own.
“Schools boards have been like, ‘We have control of your kids,’” she said. “’When they’re in school, we have control.’
“No you don’t. You don’t have control of my kid. I can take that away. I can break this system down. And we will.”
Earlier versions of this story misspelled the name of Lee’s Summit parent Alethea Rollins.
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
