GUEST COLUMN: New Mexico’s political elite are devastating public education

My husband and I enrolled our artistically gifted daughters in the New Mexico School for the Arts, thinking it would be a place where they could thrive.

Unfortunately, it became clear very quickly that the school did not encourage excellence — instead, it indoctrinated students. We later found out that these directives were supported by the state: New Mexican public officials are silently creating divisive policies that are at odds with their constituents’ values. As a result, school administrators have been pushing materials on kids that parents know nothing about, including age-inappropriate art and LGBTQ+ materials.

At my daughters’ school, I saw gender ideology targeting minors explicitly. Students used materials from transgender activists to elicit donations for a “transgender closet.” The school denounced the nuclear family and superimposed gender-neutral terms on language like “mother” and “father.” The school also required students to read a novel which depicted graphic pedophilia between a 10-year-old and a 64-year-old.

There was more, too, but the school never disclosed the extent of inappropriate content to which it exposed our kids. We never had a say. When I spoke up to administrators about the required reading containing graphic pedophilia, the book was not removed. Rather, the list of recommended reading was emailed to the parents with a disclaimer that some books might have “controversial content.”

My children’s story is not unique. Students from all over New Mexico are being manipulated and lied to in the name of ideology, with schools driving a wedge between children and their parents. Eight school districts in New Mexico have policies stating school personnel should hide children’s transgender status from their parents: Albuquerque, Gadsden Independent, Gallup-McKinley, Las Cruces, Los Alamos, Moriarty-Edgewood, Rio Rancho and Santa Fe. In Las Cruces, for instance, school teachers and staff were given a training about “developmentally appropriate strategies for communication with students and parents about issues related to gender identity and gender expression that protect student privacy.”

What is more staggering is that many parents in New Mexico do not actually know what the political elite are forcing onto their children. I didn’t.

According to recent polling in a new report released by Independent Women, 88% of New Mexicans disagree with the statement, “Teachers and school nurses should be able to ‘transition children’ without their parents knowing.” How can school boards and state politicians make decisions that are so far removed from what we think?

Ninety-one percent of New Mexicans across the political spectrum believe that there are important reasons to separate the bathrooms between sexes in K-12 schools, and 94% agree that there are important reasons to separate locker rooms. Yet administrators center school policies around trying to minimize biological differences between the sexes. While they claim this is to be “inclusive,” they are not including the vast majority of New Mexican voters in their decision-making.

Moreover, at New Mexico School of the Arts, the administration encourages students to use bathrooms that align with their self-proclaimed gender identity instead of suggesting those with gender dysphoria use the single-occupant bathrooms.

As an immigrant who left Poland after having experienced state-sanctioned communist repression, I could not believe what was happening in New Mexico. In addition to school curricula that teaches our children to hate America and defy the values that have made this nation prosper, the kids are constantly exposed to woke ideologies as well as subjects they’d be ashamed and embarrassed to discuss at home with their parents, just like that inappropriate book that was assigned to my child in her English class.

I urge parents to take our children’s education back. Monitor the curricula in your children’s schools and find out what they’re reading. Dig into what your kids are being taught every day. And if you feel like something isn’t right, speak up and hold teachers and administrators accountable. Hopefully then, our representatives will listen, and parents will be respected again, as they should have been all along.