A Practical Guide To Reading School Board Agendas
It’s time to play pin the tail on the consent calendar!
By Kenny Snell, July 12, 2023 2:30 am
Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) will be holding their school board meeting this Thursday at 6:30 PM in the boardroom 87-225 Church Street in Coachella. Which means, it’s time to play pin the tail on the consent calendar! Join the fun, anyone can play! What is this pin the tail game of which I speak? Well, let me tell you in this practical guide to reading school board agendas.
Reading School Board Agendas
You see, you can’t just scan through school board agendas, you must read them closely. Delve into the items, especially the consent items, research, analyze, and use discernment to determine if everything is as good as the agenda makes it sound. After all, the key to school district malfeasance is in what they don’t tell us. What does a pin the tail on the consent calendar game have to do with reading school board agendas? Allow me to explain.
CVUSD Agenda
We’ll use the upcoming CVUSD agenda as an example, but you can play this at home in just about any school district in America right now. Especially California. Many of the most egregious moves by school districts can be found in the consent calendar. Not to say other areas of the agenda should be ignored, but the consent calendar is often considered routine and voted on as a block, with no discussion.
Got it? Routine. Everything is fine… and unicorns fart fairy dust. Often times you find the craziest things by randomly selecting an item from the consent calendar. Thus the name of the game. Want to see? Come along then, let’s get to it.
I landed on 13.1 of the educational consent calendar. A request for a contract approval for a consultant that utilizes something called a “S.U.P.E.R Peer Counseling Program.” Well that sounds… super?
Research School Board Agendas
First of all, yes the use of the acronym “S.U.P.E.R” seems a tad over the top. So called by design; a glittering generality to make us feel good? More suspicious however, is the use of the word “Transformational,” an Obama era term that has become synonymous with the attempted destruction of the American psyche and human spirit. Just take a look at how genders are being “transformed.” To me, this item deserves closer scrutiny, so let’s see what we can find.
The first step is to open the agenda item to review the details. Within the details is where you’ll find the item is indeed a fairy dust flatulating unicorn and usually accompanied by a recommendation for approval. Observe.
This is where most people cease their investigation. Don’t do that. The next step would be to open up the service agreement. Sometimes you’ll gain another nugget of knowledge in the agreement, sometimes not. In this case it is just more fairy dusted unicorns, though the mention of highway traffic crashes is odd, almost as if it’s a red herring of some sort. Again, don’t stop here.
The next step is to determine exactly who, or what, the service provider is. School districts are throwing money to consultants faster than Joe Biden can sniff a kid. So fast, it seems unlikely anyone is vetting these consultants, so we must. Transformational Family Counseling (TFC) is the name of this consultant, so let’s check them out.
TFC’s website lists the CEO as Dr. Kathleen Sarmiento. Except Sarmiento is as much of a doctor as Jill Biden – Sarmiento has a Doctorate of Social Work. The rest of the TFC’s website is just more unicorns.
OpenCorporates.com confirms that TFC is indeed a legitimate California business, albeit a pretty new one. Do we stop there? Heck no, but what’s next?
Analyze School Board Agendas
The next step is to search the CEO, “Dr.” Sarmiento. Here is the good Doctor Sarmiento on YouTube three months ago, showing her gratitude to the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists for awarding her an “Educational Foundation Grant.” Sarmiento said the grant would help her get her platform online and help her get Social, Emotional, and Behavioral support training into the schools. Sounds pretty close to Social Emotional Learning (SEL), does it not?
Discernment
No, we are still not stopping. Since the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) gave Sarmiento money, let’s dig that way to see who she associates with.
First of all the CAMFT Educational Foundation Scholarship is not to be used for personal gain. Oops. Sarmiento just told us she was going to use the grant to get her platform into schools, yet she is making $32,000 from CVUSD. The grant makes no mention of using the funds to infuse life into a business. Things that make you say “hmmmmm.”
Continuing on, what about CAMFT, what are they about? I’m glad you asked because the first thing that pops out about CAMFT is their very prominent DEI statement. The DEI statement alone is enough to out CAMFT as a Woke organization and a purveyor of Marxist cultural rot. An organization that seems to have influence over children therapists in California. Therapists that the likes of Alex Briscoe and California Children’s Trust want to put in every school, for every child.
So, should we dig more? Yeah, I agree let’s move that dirt.
CAMFT, as it turns out, has a yearly conference. Oh boy, shudder warning.
For $70 you can attend a luncheon and listen to a couple of real Doctors (debatable) describe how they medically intervene in transgender youth. Transgender youth that increasingly “presenting [themselves] for care,” by the way. During lunch! Gross.
Right after lunch, you can enjoy a leisurely stroll to the next session with thoughts of these people with your kids churning in your head. And then you enter porn literacy 101. Oh boy.
After an hour and a half of porn, if you’re up to it, you can head on over to how therapist deal with the pesky parents of “Gender Diverse Children.” Later that evening give your money away at the Political Action Fundraiser reception! The next day, enjoy your afternoon with a “they/she” lady that will discuss the problems that “people with vulvas” have. You know, those people that were “assigned females at birth.”
For those keeping score at home: CVUSD is going to hire a therapist with a doctorate in Sociology that just started a company infused by a grant by an extreme leftist organization. An organization that gives, according to the FEC, most of it’s money to extreme leftist politicians, such as Barbara Lee and Karen Bass. An organization that has obvious influence over the consultant. And we didn’t even get to the S.U.P.E.R program, but dollars to doughnuts it’s just as insidious.
Conclusion
Thank you for hanging in there. I hope you can use this methodology to give a close reading to your own school board agendas, if you’re not already. Look for the “woke” keywords and the unicorns and simply dig deeper. Then, after you seemingly hit bottom, dig a little more. The educational consultant class is getting filthy rich off of the taxpayer these days, so concentrate on those. Remember, these people, or those influenced by them, want one-on-one time with your kids. It is dangerous nonsense and district personnel are either ignorant or complicit.
I’ve been speaking on consent calendar items at my district meetings for a decade. This is a great article, valuable tips for parents to read consent calendar, but unfortunately shot through with political spin and references to hot-button topics in ways that will turn off those who do not have the same views – or perhaps those who simply do not view those issues with such importance.
I’d love to see a version of this without all the references that would cause many to dismiss this as “just more foaming at the mouth from a right wing conservative” and instead perhaps read it as a real-world guide to “things to look for in the consent calendar.”
“Wokeness ” is alive and well in California. Amazing how these leftist boards sneak this nonsense into the schools into kids heads. This just shows the importance of school board elections. My last kid has graduated from high school. If I was to do again I would pull him out of government schools and seek alterrnative private education.