We Need the Parents BIll of Rights Act So We Can Censor Curriculum and Ban Books

“A divided House on Friday approved legislation that would mandate that schools make library catalogs and curriculums public, and that they obtain parental consent before honoring a student’s request to change their gender-identifying pronouns, part of a Republican effort to wring political advantage from a raging debate over contentious social issues.” — New York Times

I support the passage of the Parents Bill of Rights because I believe every parent should have the right to be involved in their child’s school, whether through censoring curriculum, banning books, or blocking kids from choosing their own pronouns.

The Parents Bill of Rights will mandate that teachers post their full curriculum online so parents can root out the harmful content corrupting our children’s young minds—like sex ed, the scientific method, and the Civil Rights Movement. This is also the only way to stop teachers from carrying out their insidious fixation on hiding LGBTQ+ propaganda in school. A French teacher has no business telling kids that it’s normal and acceptable for adjectives to be gender-fluid.

It’s shocking what the schools are trying to force-feed our children, even the youngest ones. In my district, kindergarteners spent a whole morning studying spelling by having a wedding for the letters Q and U. Newsflash: some of us believe that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman, not between a consonant and a vowel. Some of us don’t want our kids to see Q in a wedding dress and get the idea that it’s okay for letters to dress in drag.

The Parents Bill of Rights will force public schools to offer at least two parent-teacher conferences a year. Sure, most schools already provide that, but this law is really going to snap the few stragglers back in line. In addition to the conferences, this bill will grant parents full access to the whole school at anytime. (This proviso was put in place because I was once denied entry to a locked janitor’s closet when I simply wanted to inspect it for hidden books about Kwanzaa.)

Perhaps most importantly, the Parents Bill of Rights says that schools must make their detailed budget available because, for all we know, our schools could be spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion, when what most parents want are homogeny, inequity, and exclusion. Schools could be spending money on making “safe spaces” when what we actually want for our kids are spaces filled with sharp objects, spiders, and disrespect for personal pronouns.

You may say, “Wait, aren’t school budgets already regularly posted online, as well as emailed to parents, reported on in the local newspaper, and discussed at length in board meetings that are open to the public and can be attended in person, via Zoom, or by CB radio?” Yes, they are, but it’s not my fault that I like to attend only the part of the meeting when parents yell in unison about critical race theory, something I do not understand but am definitely against.

The Parents Bill of Rights additionally guarantees that schools must provide parents with a list of all the books in the library, which will be extremely helpful to me because I have yet to figure out how to use the school’s already available online card catalog. I need that list so I can demand that the librarian remove and burn all the books with authors whose last names I can’t pronounce and also because I know they must be hiding those Kwanzaa books somewhere.

Look, schools are locking us parents out, and not just because of that scene some of us made at the Scholastic Book Fair about the lack of fair and balanced science books that present the flat earth theory. The truth is, even though we can schedule parent-teacher meetings anytime we want, even though schools are constantly begging for parent volunteers to come to campus and get involved, and even though I personally have received so many texts, emails, newsletters, parent portal messages, and Remind App push notifications from my kid’s school last week that my phone melted, we have absolutely no idea what is happening in our kids’ classrooms.

Our only choice is to support the Parents Bill of Rights so that we can move forward, forget about the schools, and start needlessly targeting a different public institution once it is passed.