As teachers' unions move to limit parental rights in schools, social justice and LGBTQ issues have replaced academics as the primary focus in the classroom, said a California teacher who founded a website that “pulls back the curtain on what’s really going on in public education.”
Brenda Lebsack, a teacher since 1987, said she decided to become more involved with her union, the California Teachers Association, in 2015 and was alarmed to discover that “my union does not seem to care that much about academics as much as they do the political side of things.”
“Basically, whoever does not agree with the union’s ideology, including students, was compared to the KKK. This intolerant, extremist, union-promoted viewpoint will create hostile school environments for many students and school employees. It’s dangerous, it’s hateful, and it’s exclusive” Lebsack told The Daily Signal in an interview published on June 15.
Lebsack, who founded the website Brenda4Kids, would like to see parents get more involved and find out for themselves what is happening in their children’s school district.
Teachers' unions and lawmakers in California are “removing more and more local control,” Lebsack said. “And they are removing parent rights.”
In her interview with The Daily Signal, Lebsack recounted that in 2016 she had attended an Equity & Human Rights Conference in Torrance, California where she spoke with union lobbyist Seth Bramble.
Lebsack said she told Bramble about a former student, a Mormon, who said he believed that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that gender is ordained by God.
“How do you think I should have responded to that student?” Lebsack recalls asking the union lobbyist.
She says he responded: “You should treat that student as though he said black people should be burned at the stake.”
“I could not believe what I heard,” Lebsack said.
In December 2017, Lebsack attended the union’s LGBTQ+ Issues Conference in San Jose.
During a workshop session with about 40 attendees, Lebsack recalls, she asked Scott Miller, the union’s LGBTQ+ caucus co-chairman, whether he agreed with Bramble’s sentiment
“Without hesitation, he agreed,” Lebsack says. “To me, it was just a wake-up call.”
Lesback noted that the Santa Ana school district has a memorandum of understanding with Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, “to teach sex ed to our students and provide ‘resources.’ ”
The district, Lesback said, also partners with The Trevor Project, which describes itself as “the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) young people under 25.”
The Trevor Project operates a suicide prevention hotline, or Lifeline, which is advertised to students on posters in school restrooms, Lebsack says.
Parents, Lebsack says, “have no idea that The Trevor Project affirms unlimited gender identities and unlimited sexual orientations.”
Despite her decades of experience as a public school teacher, Lebsack told the Daily Signal she no longer is an advocate of public education “because parents are being betrayed, disrespected, and left out.”
“The unions’ radical, forced ideology of unlimited genders and pronouns does not match the values of most California families, especially immigrant families,” she says.
Lebsack says she now is an advocate of school choice, because “parents know what’s best for their children, not the state.”
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