The Platform

Parental Rights and Parental Engagement are at the core of the Parent and Taxpayer Coalition’s mission. We emphasize your rights first because we believe that it is only through respecting your rights that we can earn your trust, which is critical to your engagement. The United States Supreme Court said in 1923 that “the child is not the mere creature of the state”. Many of our representatives seem to have forgotten this. These are your children, and it is our job to make sure the school district is serving you.

We also see that many of our children are suffering from mental health issues. This phenomenon is not limited to children, however. It is our belief that these issues arise from a general crisis of purpose in our country, which is especially acute for the young. No public school or other state entity should be in the business of defining purpose for your child. That is something that parents must instill with the help of their chosen religious and cultural institutions, and we do implore parents to take this as a sacred task. What we can do is disallow activism that subverts your efforts as parents. We strive to create an environment with the order, space, and sobriety in which a sense of purpose can flourish.

• We have fought to keep controversial curricula out of our school.
• We will continue to safeguard our school libraries against sexually explicit or radical materials.
• Unprecedented transparency about what your children are learning and participating in has been provided under our new direction.
• We will defend parents’ rights to make health care decisions for their own children. We opposed the mask mandate, hybrid learning, and oppose any Covid vaccine mandate. We support improving virtual options and measures that do not infringe on personal liberty.
• We strive to create an orderly environment, with space in the day allocated for students to engage in private contemplation, prayer, or mindfulness activities.

Primary schools are not a “free marketplace of ideas”. They can’t be. Young minds are too impressionable for them to be informed, critical consumers of those ideas. It is incumbent upon the school district that they not allow young children to be indoctrinated in ideas that the majority of our community not only disagree with, but consider inappropriate for children.

It is imperative that our children receive the training necessary to be competitive in the workplace. We want our children to have access to an excellent education in our district. To ensure this we promote board members who will demand:

• That the administration work to create a safe, orderly, well-disciplined environment, so that students and teachers are able to thrive in their classroom environment.
• Transparency in curriculum so parents and community members can know what is being taught in our schools.
• Keeping the academic letter grading system on Sapphire so that parents can be actively engaged in monitoring their child or children’s progress.
• Objective, external measurement criteria to evaluate whether the strategies the school is pursuing are working or not.
• Teaching true history rather than activist ideologies masquerading as history, such as CRT and the 1619 project.

Transparency is a keystone for a properly functioning school and school board. Without transparency we cannot achieve accountability. When transparency is lacking it builds mistrust between the school district and the community.

• We have pursued a greater level of transparency by allocating time for the board to respond to public comment, believing it is appropriate for board members to either respond, or at least let their silence be noted.
• Under prior boards, board members rarely responded to emails from parents or community members outside of election season. This has changed, and we will continue to promote a culture of responsiveness.
• Public discussion of agenda items was rare under prior boards. That has changed, and it is now common for board members to ask questions of public interest in public and deliberate over issues where there has been community feedback or where there is a difference of opinion among board members. The culture of pressure towards unanimity has been replaced by a culture of voting based on conscience, while also respectfully accepting the results.
• We have worked with the administration to provide preliminary agendas to board leadership earlier. This is a step in pursuit of a goal of providing them to the public earlier than they have been historically.
• We have ended the practice of deleting videos of the board’s public meetings a month after the meetings were concluded. Now meetings are kept in perpetuity, or as long as technological considerations will allow.
• We have ended the former practice of “pass it to find out what’s in it”. Policies and policy revisions are now released shortly after first read, which gives the public several weeks to examine policies, email the board, and make informed public comment prior to passage.

Accountability is, in a sense, the entire reason we elect a school board. If the school board does not hold the administration accountable for how it runs the school, the ideas it allows to be promoted, or the way tax dollars are spent, we might as well not have one. We have not, however, seen that our present board takes this responsibility very seriously. We do.

• We revised the health and safety plan to reflect actual practice and reasonable measures.
• We have implemented a true vetting process that is not simply a rubber stamp, but carefully evaluates speakers for content that furthers education rather than activism.
• Creation of the agenda is no longer driven entirely by the administration with little input from the board. Instead, the board officers actively collaborate with the administration to create agendas.
• We have increased the frequency and detail of reports to the board to give us more actionable data. Additionally, we have contracted with an outside agency to help evaluate our organizational effectiveness.

The parent and taxpayer coalition is committed to holding our school board and administration fiscally accountable. The prior school board passed a 60+ million dollar building project in their last school board meeting leaving the responsibility for paying for it to the future board.

It will be imperative that in this current climate of inflation that we hold the board accountable for spending, in order to ensure that our property tax bills do not climb to a level that the taxpayers cannot afford. This will be a very challenging issue and will require a school board that can be transparent, and accountable.

• We have exercised unprecedented scrutiny over the use of tax dollars.
• We have said “no” to large-scale building projects that are inappropriate given the enrollment trend and projections of our district.
• We seriously consider the impact of taxes on those with fixed incomes that are not adequately adjusting to inflation.