PROFITING OFF AMERICA’S CHILDREN: ONE MOM’S FIGHT TO EXPOSE WOKE SEL ACTIVISTS
Social Emotional Learning is poisoning schools across America, but parents are starting to wake up—and fight back.
This report and its follow-up originally appeared in Restoration of America News and are reprinted here with its permission.
When recent polls showed that students are more depressed than ever, different explanations were shuffled around, ranging from the effects of the pandemic to worldwide political tensions to “climate anxiety.”
A more basic answer might be the right one: Kids are depressed in schools because schools are telling them they’re depressed, off of social-and-emotional programs which are transforming primary and secondary education into a mental obstacle course.
These programs are part of a broader educational project to take over personality development and make students more pliant learners, workers, and citizens—Social Emotional Learning (SEL).
Now roadblocks to SEL are coming from parents like Kristine Strachan. Under the basic, relatable mantras “Don’t mess with my son,” and “When I’m mad, I let everybody know,” she has collected information that opens a window onto just what this curriculum looks like on the ground; its effect on students; and the institutions and practitioners driving its spread.
An Unsettling Incident Introduces Kristine to SEL
Kristine’s odyssey started in 2018, when her son ran into a problem at Chehalem Elementary School in Beaverton, Oregon. Her son, a third grader, had told two female students that one was white and another was black, and the students had become offended. The incident had been handled by Lisa Lane, a “Social Emotional Instructional Assistant,” who reported that in their conversation her son divulged that “his mom was a little bit racist.”
Kristine talked to her son, who “vehemently denied” the comment, and she emailed asking for an explanation. She was told by Assistant Principal Erika Hansen-Rudishauser that “our staff have no reason to believe you or anyone in your family is racist” and that she could not correspond with the Social Emotional Instructional Assistant “due to district practice to not have paraprofessionals . . . respond to emails from parents.”
Kristine pointed out that “if staff members can’t respond to the accusation . . . they should not be able to start these conversations.”
The upshot of Hansen-Rudishauser’s reply: “We believe this incident has been fully addressed.”
This might sound more like the Soviet Comintern, or a corporate customer service phone line, than a school funded by taxpayer money; but it was just the start of the problem. Though Kristine had never heard of Social Emotional Instruction or SEL, she was soon seeing it everywhere—because COVID closures had forced instruction online so parents could see what their kids were being taught.
SEL Invades Fifth Grade
The problems started in fifth grade, in homeroom with Paul Wear, where a look at the schedule supported Kristine’s son’s contention that “he learns nothing of substance at school.” The majority of the day, Kristine was surprised to find, had nothing to do with teaching traditional subjects, and even those subjects were infused with new, personalized, identity-based learning:
9:00am – 9:30: Community Circle –
Review SEL [Social Emotional Learning] lesson – Create a “Heart” that has things in it that describes you in pictures, drawings and words. It should be in color. (This will be included at the end of your Culture Bag/Google Slides) DUE 9/25Review & continue Google Slides (Culture Bag. Remember that you were going to include information in your culture bag that Uses the cultural iceberg.) DUE 9/25 9/22/20 Check-in – Assignment to be shared during class on canvas.
9:30am – 10:00:
Race & Racism – finish Lesson 2Race Justice – begin Lesson 3
10:00am – 11:00:
Math Lesson #3 (Highlighting Cultural Assets)Worktime for Dreambox lessons.(if time permits) Number String
12:00pm – 1:00:
Growth Mindset discussion/videosReading Identity – Assignment to be shared during class on canvas. (Lesson #2)(if time permits) Google slide/cultural bag worktime
1:00pm – 1:30:
Start YET writing assignment – (Y-you E-education T-Technology) Think about what YOU want to get better at in each category….
In Sixth Grade, SEL Gets Explicit
Within a year, SEL got even more pervasive.
In sixth grade, ground zero of SEL was PE/Health, where one of her son’s graded assignments was a survey on mental health titled “Activity Log Reflection” which included questions like “What roadblocks do you have that prevent you from connecting with friends and family?”
The teacher, Jenna Garske, was on Kristine’s radar because she’d passed out a graded assignment that she stipulated students “do NOT need to share with family . . . (just me)” and she’d showed students videos from AMAZE: A company which, in the name of helping with physical, social and emotional changes during puberty, sells “age appropriate puberty and sex education videos.”
But the “age appropriate” label was deceptive.
In May 2022, Christine wrote to Paul Ottum, the principal; the district superintendent, Donald Grotting; and the president of the school board, Tom Colett, detailing AMAZE images and instructions. These included “[a] young girl looking at porn on her phone,” a woman “eating a hotdog . . . [while] discussing oral sex,” “a young boy with an erection . . . holding up a car with his penis,” and “[instructions on] how to get medical, gender identity or sexually related care without your parents knowing about it.”
In response, Kristine was told that the teacher “removed” some material and “the school district is now looking for a different resource.” But eleven days later she was writing again, this time about an AMAZE video titled “Expressing Myself My Way” aimed at “letting the students know that not all girls have to like pink, have long hair etc. and [not all boys have] to like trucks or blue etc.” which soon turned stranger:
The teacher links that video [to one] where “Charles” doesn’t like to wear “boy” clothes, so he puts on a dress and renames himself “Charlotte” and “Darla” goes into the dressing room and decided to not wear “girl” clothes so now she changes her name to “Darren” as if your fashion choices make you transgender?
Oddness like this extended outside the lesson plan—e.g. Mrs. Garske deciding to share with her class that her estranged husband had just died and detailing how she was coping with her grief, prompting students to console her. But they also extended past PE/Health throughout the school, where SEL meant mental health activities of all kinds.
SEL Takes over the School via Identity
One of the first intrusions Kristine noticed was the dissemination of materials in advisory class under the heading Erin’s Law, an Oregon bill passed in 2015 mandating that public schools “implement a prevention-oriented childhood sexual abuse program” through, among other techniques, “narrating emotional experiences” and “emotional regulation.”
Along similar lines was a “Breaking the Silence” activity, where students were given the option to “[not] talk to anyone for the day until your chosen . . . activity.” Activity suggestions included “reading a poem aloud about the discrimination you’ve faced” or “joining GLSEN’s (Gay and Lesbians Independent Teachers’ Network) rally being held via Instagram.”
There was also focus on another piece of Oregon legislation, the 2019 Adi’s Act, requiring public schools to deal with “suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention,” which was distributed through Social Emotional Learning assignments in Advisory class under headings like “Mental Health Awareness” and “Recognizing Anxiety Depression, & Suicide.” And there were related school-sponsored groups, like a “Middle School Girls Anxiety Group: A Six-Week Group for Female-Identifying Students to connect with others and learn Coping skills for Anxiety”; as well as a “Gender and Sexuality Alliance” kids could join “whether you’re questioning, an ally, or queer.”
Classes kept getting compromised, too. Language Arts featured “identity maps” and “emotional icebergs,” the product of “online education tool” Kami, off which a teacher divulged to students that “her mother abandoned her and her dad was three times divorced.” To Kristine, this seemed like an invitation for students to divulge “how screwed up their families are.”
When it came to Social Studies, administrative emails promised parents more ABAR (Anti-Bias Anti-Racism) curricula after the George Floyd protests, as well as “hir[ing] an outside consultant to . . . eliminate our equity gaps” while having staff “explore” [their] roles in identifying, interrupting and eliminating . . . bias and racism.”
At the root, as always, was SEL, embedded in the programs’ promises to empower “students to excel intellectually, socially and emotionally.” But SEL also, Kristine found, was used enforce psychological monitoring for “at risk” behavior.