California Parents and Kids are Abandoning Public Schools with Gov. Newsom’s Attack on Parent Choice
‘The current un-enrollment trend is about to become a torrent’
By Katy Grimes, October 4, 2021 5:09 pm
Only hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Friday announcement of a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for all schoolchildren of FDA approval age in California, homeschooling and tutoring inquiries shot up dramatically, with some homeschooling sites even going down to the sheer volume of users searching for help, the Globe reported.
Social media was on fire over this mandate, and many education experts weighed in as well.
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By Monday, Gov. Newsom published statements from “education and public health leaders in California and throughout the country” patting the governor on the back, “applauding” his mandate announcement:
California State Parent Teacher Association President Carol Green: “California State PTA supports the use of vaccines to protect the health and safety of children and families across California.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten: “@CFTunion ready to work with Gov. Newsom on Covid vaccines for children and staff including the mandating of vaccines (with appropriate exemptions) the semester following full authorization. Good step by @GavinNewsom”
California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd: “Teaching and learning are most effective in person, and the COVID-19 vaccine is a proven measure to prevent life threatening illness, keeping schools safe and open for in-person instruction, and will get us closer to being able to put this devastating pandemic behind us.
While those unions and special interest groups now appear to prioritize adults over the students, education scholars and experts expressed far different views over Newsom’s mandate announcement.
“It says a lot about who Gavin Newsom values most when you notice that his press release places the comments of the American Federation of Teachers, the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the California School Employees Association above the comment of the California Medical Association, which is near the bottom,” said Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute and the author of the upcoming PRI book The Homeschool Boom: Pandemic, Policies, and Possibilities. “The comments of Fauci and the CMA bookend the real power influencers for the Newsom administration–the teachers and staff unions and the public education blob. But Newsom and the public education deep state are too clever by half because their ham-fisted top-down authoritarianism will push legions of parents and their children into abandoning the public school system for homeschooling. The current un-enrollment trend is about to become a torrent.”
Izumi says said the COVID-19 pandemic “may have been the crack in the dam that allowed parents’ building frustration with the regular public schools to burst forth.” Izumi explains:
Across California, state figures show that K-12 enrollment fell by 160,000 students, which was a 3-percent dip and the largest drop in enrollment in twenty years.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, enrollment dropped by 27,000 students, which was a nearly 6 percent fall. The Los Angeles Times noted that this percentage decline “is three times what planners in the nation’s second-largest school district predicted.”
Even more ominous for the future of the regular public schools is the plunge in enrollment among the nation’s youngest students.
Specifically, in California, Izumi said a report by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics found, “Charter schools saw enrollment increases for nearly every racial and ethnic subgroup, while district public schools saw enrollment decreases for nearly every racial and ethnic subgroup. Specifically, charter schools saw particularly large increases of Asian, Filipino, Hispanic, and multi-racial students. District public schools saw a particularly large decrease in White and Black students.”
Janelle Smiley, President of California Parents for Public Virtual Education, and mother of two online charter-school graduates said, “Largely because of the educational disruptions caused by the pandemic, many California parents saw firsthand the failings of the traditional classroom brought to their kitchen table. School closures and the subsequent classroom zooms started out as a difficult inconvenience, and quickly turned into a huge wake-up call.”
Smiley also cited the National Center for Education Statistics and reported California charter schools had 15,283 new children enroll in the 2020-2021 school year, a 2.3% increase from the previous year. By contrast, the state’s public schools saw a decline of 175,761 students, a 3.2% drop.”During the 2020-21 school year, the pandemic forced schools of all types to close their doors and switch to remote learning.”
Izumi says “as public schools continue to flail with controversial reopening policies, unpopular woke curricula, and unresponsive top-down one-size-fits-all edicts, parents, as the Census Bureau observes, ‘are increasingly open to options beyond the neighborhood school.’ That is why homeschooling, especially, will be the education wave of the future.”
Gov. Newsom and the teachers unions continue to push parents right into the arms of charter schools, and into homeschooling options with decisions like the vaccine mandate for school children. With so many students locked into failing California public schools already, school choice may very well be the civil rights crusade of our time.
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“”Newsom doesn’t believe in capital punishment, but he just signed a death warrant for 129 innocent kids. CDC says the COVID vaccine death rate is one in 47618 as of today. There are 6,163,001 students. Do the math. That’s 129 kids dead. More than that will have permanent disabilities from the vaccine. More people have died from COVID vaccines in the U.S. in less than a year, than all other vaccines combined for the last 30 years.””
It’s about time parents start waking up that the public school system is corrupted by leftist idealogy social engineering that indoctrinates children into their ideology and groupthink. The future is home-schooling, tutors, church schools, and so one in which children are taught a classical education of grammar, logic, and rhetoric to become an independent critical thinkers.
Just refuse to pay your school taxes and this will be over quick. They can’t arrest you all.
If a large number of parents kept their children out of school for two weeks, the school districts would lose so much money it would be crippling for them. Much better plan that refusing to pay taxes, which will result in property being forfeited.
Is Gov Newsom hoping to effect this new requirement via the CA Dept of Public Health? If so, they need to wait until the vaccine is fully approved by the FDA. If not, then he is in opposition to CA law, which states that only the legislature or the CA Dept of Public Health may issue vaccine mandates to public school students. There is already a cease-and-desist request and corresponding lawsuit in LA. Please review this and check this link regarding the group spearheading this effort (apologies if posting link is not polite):
https://ca.childrenshealthdefense.org/legal/vaccine-mandate-at-lausd-leads-to-a-cease-and-desist-and-upset-parents/
As it stands now, without FDA approval, drug companies are not liable for vaccine injury or death. Everyone who receives one (or their parent) must sign a consent form, which presumably outlines the risks. That’s because this whole thing is an experiment and those who get the vaccine are taking part in the clinical trials that precede vaccine approval. There is an implication with these mandates that FDA approval has been won (which it hasn’t). If that were true (which it isn’t) students injured or killed by the vaccine would be able to sue the vaccine manufacturer. Sorry for the blunt language, but that’s where we are now.
Bill Gate$ needs the world depopulated to avoid his “existential threat of climate change” so clot-shot your kids to either sterilize them or possibly remove them outright…
These jabs are nefarious, evil products… every day, we learn more about their dangers and those that jumped on the bandwagon to “get back to normal” are gonna be PISSED when they start having all the side effects… the only saving grace is that not everyone got the active payload, since this is their “live lab” Phase III clinical trial experiment….
And the stupid companies do the pharma companies and their government lackey’s bidding by demanding that everyone take the shot… no thanks, you can have ours… my RNA works fine the way God designed it….
The California School Choice Foundation thanks Gavin Newsom and the teacher unions for their support.