Caught On Tape: Florida Parents Treated Like Children For Questioning School Curriculum

David Bolduc, a resident of Naples, Florida recently sent us a note highlighting a video in which he, and several other concerned parents, were reprimanded and treated like little children in a School Board Workshop as a result of them expressing concerns about school curriculum.

In order to give you some background on the issue, see the Letter to the Editor he wrote to the Naples Daily News on 1/28 to say what he was prevented from saying at the 1/20 School Board Workshop. Letter reprinted below:

Patton the cause

The controversy behind the recent parents’ review of school textbooks lays squarely at the feet of Superintendent Kamela Patton.

Specifically, Collier County School Board Policy 2240 reads, “Furthermore, the Superintendent shall prepare administrative procedures detailing the manner in which students and parents will be adequately informed, each year, regarding their right to inspect instructional materials, and the procedure for completing such an inspection.”

By failing to prepare procedures to implement Board Policy 2240, Patton created the perception the textbook review was a nighttime Watergate-style break-in masterminded by conservative political operative and School Board member G. Gordon Lichter.

I examined seventh-grade “Civics in Practice” and it contained numerous factual inaccuracies. For example, on Page 100 it states, “The Constitution can be changed in two ways; formally by Amendment, and informally by Government.” This notion of dictatorship is enhanced by eighth-grade textbook “United States History,” which states on Page 185, “The President issues Executive Orders. These commands have the power of law.”

While some called us book-burning Nazis, Page 274 of “Civics in Practice” states, “Citizens must be alert to propaganda” and glittering generalities is a “type of propaganda which often uses words such as freedom and patriotism.” This world government indoctrination is augmented on Page 425, where a geographical map of North America eliminates the United States, and places our great nation in nine new “cultural nations.”

For pointing this out, one public speaker at the School Board textbook workshop called us “narrow-minded, racist Bible-thumpers.”

Thank you, Superintendent Patton.

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