The Half Hollow School District had at least one of its teachers distribute antisemitic study guides to their students. As of this writing, the district is, amazingly, claiming they don’t know how it got there.
This demands an investigation from the district itself, the state legislature, the state Board of Regents and the state Department of Education.
Our paper has been warning about the trend of the New York State Department of Education and Board of Regents imposing DEI, critical race theory, and other Marxist teachings upon children throughout the state, superseding local control.
We saw it a few years ago as the Education Department started to push pornographic materials that were obviously age-inappropriate into our school libraries. We noted how one book, Gender Queer, has illustrations of young people performing oral sex on each other, while another shows a bearded man reaching out for the privates of an aroused boy.
The book All Boys Aren’t Blue described in great detail how the author, as a 13-year-old, was having anal sex with a family member. It wasn’t in the context of a rape scene; it was in the context of him explaining his joy of having gone through this process, seemingly telling others that this was OK.
When concerned parents spoke out against this obviously age-inappropriate materials, they were labeled homophobic and anti-trans by some state leaders.
Then we saw the state Regents incorporate language into their regulations telling local superintendents that the plans for their schools would have to be approved by the Regents itself. This was a major shift from the traditional rules and regs that allowed for local control.
In the latest brouhaha, it has come to our attention that school personnel are handing out materials for students teaching them that Zionism, the support for the Jewish state of Israel, is an example of “extreme nationalism.”
So these rogue people are now putting their thumbs on the scale in denigrating Israel to the benefit of the Hamas terrorists. Is it any wonder that our younger generation has taken to the streets in support of the repressive terrorists over Democratic Israel?
Parents need to wake up and demand that their elected officials put pressure on the state Board of Education and Regents to bring it in line with the wishes of the state’s majority who do not want their children indoctrinated in such a fashion.
When we first started looking into this issue, we were thinking that the state had once again mandated this awful curriculum on our local school boards. We were somewhat relieved when we found that it was only at the Half Hollow School District. So it didn’t seem to be some state-oriented program emanating from Albany.
But upon further review, we saw the quote from a school official saying they had no idea where the guidebook came from. The district representative stated the guide “was not created by an individual or group within the district.“
This makes us almost as flabbergasted as if the program did indeed come from the state.
How could the district not be aware of where these official study guides came from? What teacher allowed them to be used as a guide? Was that teacher questioned? Did the teacher make up the study guide or take it from another source? If the latter, who was that source?
There is an urgent need to uncover these answers. It is simply unacceptable for the district to say we don’t know where it came from.
Let’s see if our state legislators, the state Board of Regents or the state Education Department follow through on this atrocity or if this will be another instance of antisemitism being implemented without consequences.