O P I N I O N
The Soapbox
Stand up. Speak up. It’s your turn.
June 10th was a sad day for many of New Hampshire’s children and public schools as Governor Ayotte signed HB 10, a Parental Bill of Rights, into law.
Gov. Ayotte’s opening remarks upon signing the bill, four years in the conservative making, were telling: “No one loves a child more than a parent and making sure that parents have rights and can understand and know what is happening in their classrooms when their children are in school is so, so important.”
The statement is naïve regarding the silent epidemic of child abuse. According to the Child Welfare League of America, 86 percent of child maltreatment perpetrators in New Hampshire in 2020 were the child’s parent or parents. Reports of child abuse and neglect were alarmingly up 30.6 percent in the state from 2016-2020. In my opinion, Gov. Ayotte and the almost exclusively GOP backers of the bill, are wishin’ and hopin’ that parents will rise to the occasion and maintain a deep interest in their children’s assignments of Hamlet and trigonometry tangents. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark. Public school teachers, administrators and school boards are now mandated to develop a streamlined plan as to how parents can access classroom content and also “promote parental involvement.” 1,208 adults opposed the Parental Bill of Rights in an online House hearing with 174 in support. The Senate hearing numbers were similar with 737 opposed and 39 in support.
I’m not buying HB 10, either. The bill is a smoke and mirrors attempt to set aside learning for students for Monday morning quarterbacking by parents to insure that American history, sex ed and every other class is taught the right way.
As the warden told Luke, a Florida chain-gang convict played by Paul Newman, in Cool Hand Luke, “Luke, you’ve got to get your mind right.”
When asked to comment on Gov. Ayotte’s remarks, Mike Skinner, founder and director of The Surviving Spirit, a self-help and online information source for adults significantly traumatized as children, had this obvious remark: “Not all parents love their children.”
Skinner and his guitar have presented and advocated for survivors of child sex trafficking, of which he is one, in almost every state, including at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Skinner found an ally in his 4th grade teacher Mr. LePre in Billerica. “He told me I was smart and this was like a new language to me,” Skinner said. “He encouraged my dream of wanting to attend West Point.”
It’s been proven that a single ally for a child at risk can make all the difference. Who’s trusting who in the parent-child-teacher triangle? A teacher as confidant for a student is a train that’s gradually disappearing down the tracks. “It’s hard to dream about something that’s not visible,” Michelle Obama writes in The Light We Carry.
While parents can now review “instructional materials” in New Hampshire, my bet is that “review” is only code for “complain.” HB 10 has over 40 corollaries, some of which require decoder rings to interpret. To wit: “A school employee that is not a teacher shall be placed on unpaid leave for the remainder of the school year for a first offense [of violating any of the corollaries ?] or have their employment terminated for multiple offenses.” Does “not a teacher” refer to maintenance staff, the school police officer, coaches, club advisors, educational assistants and the lunch ladies? Who determines what constitutes an offense?
The second sentence in the bill’s Declaration of Purpose couldn’t be fuzzier: “The general court further finds that important information relating to a minor child should not be withheld either inadvertently or purposefully, from his or her parent, including information relating to the minor child’s health, wellbeing and education, while the minor child is in the custody of the school district.” Best to zip your lips bell-to-bell if you’re LGBTQ+, sexually active, bullied or sexually assaulted. If my parents ever found out…
Suing your child’s school just got easier. The New Hampshire judicial system is bracing for an increase in court time for parental rights cases. Taxpayer cost? Unknown.
Nathan Graziano recently wrote a column in this space stating this Presidential administration has landed us in the National Socialism black hole of the Nazis. I beg to differ. I see the grim content of executive orders, which states are implementing with impunity, as closer to Chairman Mao’s decade-long (1966-1976) evil Great Cultural Revolution in communist China.
“Thus, I recommend you never trust the education system,” Mao said in kicking off the Red August of 1966. “Do not even consider it good.”
The Red Guard, composed almost entirely of middle and high school students, killed hundreds of educators and forced thousands of others into “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution. A typical session found a teacher or administrator wearing a white dunce cap with a large placard around his or her neck reading “I am an ox-ghost and snake-demon,” or “I have yin-yang head.” China’s colleges and universities were closed for a decade.
HB 10, in my opinion, replaces a search for knowledge with a search for who to blame. We’re in deep trouble when a college graduate can’t tell an Alex Jones fully-baked editorial from a well-researched hard news piece.
At-home ground rules for parents and children are vital as this is where education starts. The following come from Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference, by Susan Vogt.
- Monitor the monitor. Better yet, put the computer in the family room. Will morality ever catch up with technology?
- No TVs in the bedroom. Publisher’s Weekly states that only one American in 13 buys more than two books a year. Making reading space makes more readers. Rose Dawson writes in Mind Abuse-Media Violence in an Information Age, “Television and related technologies are now the main, if not acknowledged, educators in society.” We can do better.
- Use of cell phones in school has to be reined in. I agree with Gov. Ayotte on a ban during the school day. No teacher can compete with Facebook, Instagram or AI.
American history is being rewritten on a daily basis. When Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she had this to say about Mount Rushmore to USA Today in 2023: “It’s the greatest symbol of our freedom and history in the United States of America.”
Trouble is Mt. Rushmore is carved into the Black Hills, which is sacred land to five Native American tribes. In an 8-1 decision in 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the Black Hills do indeed belong to Native Peoples and $106 million, now $2 billion with interest, is owed to them.
They don’t want the money. They want their Black Hills.
Noem is now no longer welcome on any reservation in South Dakota. Who’s learnin’ who?
Joey Ramone is a pen name for a reader who asked that their real name be withheld.
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