Starting Monday, Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is having LGBTQ+ Equity Week in all of its pre-K, elementary and middle schools.

The curricula is tailored for each age and grade level, and touches on topics including LGBTQ identities, family diversity, gender stereotypes in fairy tales and historical figures, to name a few. Parents were given access to lesson plans.

I strongly encourage you to follow that lesson plans link. To the school’s credit, they aren’t hiding anything. This is the conceptual vocabulary that kids in pre-K, elementary, and middle school will be learning this week:

Unbelievable. They are teaching kindergartners in public school about the basics of LGBT activism. In first grade, they will be training these kids in the basic of transgender theory. Second and third graders will be writing gender ideology fairy tales for the little kids. And on and on. Middle schoolers will be compelled by their public school to embrace LGBT activism.

For the teachers, this background:

More info for the teachers:

There’s more. Here’s a guide for how teachers are to handle parents who object:

This is the lie they always tell: that this is only about being nice and respectful. Because compelling middle schoolers to make activist posters is so necessary to learning tolerance.

I invite you to read all the lesson plans.

District 65 is in a deeply blue (as in liberal) part of the country, so not typical. But if this isn’t in your public school district now, give it time. You conservative Christian parents who insist that your kid has to remain in public school to “be salt and light” are going to need to up your game.

St. Benedict, in his Rule, said that the monastery is a “school for the Lord’s service.” US public schools are becoming training facilities for propaganda and social justice activism. Read the lesson plans and see for yourself. They are feeding gender ideology to kindergartners. Even the special ed kids have to learn how to salute the rainbow flag.

(Thanks to the Chicagoland reader who tipped me off.)

UPDATE: A reader comments:

It’s important to think of this issue not in partisan terms but in moral ones, because the LGBTQ movement doesn’t care what party you’re with; it only concerns itself with your compliance to and celebration of its agenda.

I live in a prosperous suburb, and in the class one of my sons attends, there is a student transitioning from boy to girl. This is a something unprecedented at the school, so what is happening this year is going a long way to forming the cultural narrative of acceptance we will be living in for the foreseeable future. The parents were tipped off about it a couple days before the school year began, stating in an email that there would be an announcement about it made the morning of the first day of school. My wife was one of two parents that attended that announcement. (Only two! If that doesn’t give you an idea of the level of laissez-faire acceptance that provides the soil in which transgenderism can flourish.) The announcement was brief and did not go into any details other than that this student was to be welcomed and that we would be working with the community of the issue as the year progressed.

Wind of this blew beyond the school community, and somehow a well-known protest group found out about it and decided to stage a protest in front of the school. As you can imagine, this inflamed the community. Though there was talk of having a direct counter-protest by some of the parents, the school decided instead to have a “community celebration” at the back of the school (out of view of the protesters, who were across the street from the front of the building) to counter the protesters, complete with an alternate route to get to school to avoid the front entrance and the high school band to drown out any shouting from the protesters. This celebration was somewhat benign, but it had highlights of pro-LGBTQ advocates as well.

My wife and I decided that we would send our sons to school late that day and avoid the entire circus. Our attitude was that we wanted our kids to do school without having to publicly take side between vile protesters and what would be perceived as tacit acceptance of the LGBTQ agenda. I predicted that this event would push those in the school community closer to the LGBTQ crowd simply to show that they were not at all like the hate-filled, judgmental protesters who showed up. That is exactly what is happening. I hear parents now speak more openly and with greater conviction about “letting people make their own choices” and “not keeping people from being happy” as well as disgust toward those who would oppose this. I’m seeing this from Democrats, yes, but also Republicans. It’s now being seen as backwards to oppose transgenderism, even at an elementary school level. Who wants to be seen as oppressive and keeping people from being fulfilled, right? That reaches beyond party.

This is definitely an issue some of us did not seek to emphasize with our elementary school kids, but it has sought us out – Democrat, Republican, or Independent.

Reader KevinS:

Ugh. Even as a gay man who obviously favors tolerance, this seems insane. As a university professor who routinely gets students who cannot write complete sentences, have no idea what the Cold War was and cannot locate Iraq, Egypt or Germany on a map, I think our educational priorities should be focused on something other than gender neutral ads in the 4th grade.

Reader Elspeth (responding to another reader’s comments):

You raise good points, but those of us who are in the thick of raising young children have to make decisions about what happens to those children here and now.

My husband and I graduated three older kids from the public school system. The latest six years ago, before we decided that we were done with the PS, and our youngest children have been homeschooled and attend classical Christian school part time.

During the years that our oldest kids were in the public system, I spent a lot of time, along with other Christian mothers from our suburban community, wrangling with principals, bureaucrats, and our school board reps on any number of issues from curriculum, to sex ed, and a number of things in between. The best we could accomplish (after much investment of time, research, and prayer) were the occasional exemptions, exceptions, and interventions for our particular students. Nothing was ever implemented in a way that affected positive change school wide or grade level wide.

I doubted our experience was unique, which is why when we were blessed with more children a little later in our marriage, one of the first decisions we made was that we were abandoning the public system.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that there are no parents in there fighting the good fight. There are, but when you’re raising kids, you only have so much to give to that.

Maybe some grandparents, pastors, and other people with more time and extra money available to them should step up and join the fight. That would be a welcome development.

Until that happens, you will continue to have parents “ceding the ground” not out of a callous disregard for what is to come, but because we have to set priorities for our lives and families and act accordingly.

Reader Jefferson Smith:

This is a good analysis, particularly with regard to the ed schools and the teachers’ colleges as vectors for a particular ideology and the way it seems to its advocates like common sense. Why isn’t there more resistance from the public, though, do you think? It’s a serious question. I’m left-liberal myself and pro-gay rights, but would have misgivings about this kind of curriculum being delivered to kids of my own. School districts in the United States have elected school boards, and as a local newspaper reporter I covered many a school-board meeting where much lesser issues brought parents and voters out in force. Candidates would run for the board on platforms specifically targeting certain school policies for reform. Why do you think that’s not happening here?

Right. A public school district could decide to vote an entire week to teaching Benedict Option principles and activism, and I would say, “Are you nuts? Don’t do that! That’s not what school is for!” It’s just politicization gone amok — and this is exactly what the LGBT activists want. People in the West get mad at Russia, Poland, and other countries in that part of the world cracking down on teaching LGBT stuff to children, but when you see how far our Western LGBT activists and their allies (especially teachers) take it, one feels compelled to credit the Russians and Central Europeans for being able to see right through all the “tolerance” b.s.

You’re right to wonder why more parents don’t stand up against it. I think you can never go wrong assuming that the middle class will accept whatever they’re told is respectable.