Commentary

Increasingly, public school administrators and boards—controlled by unions—are pressing teachers to adopt woke and sexualized ideology. They threaten—and implement—punishments for anyone resisting, as teacher Sean Redmond is learning.

Mr. Redmond, 34, teaches in California’s Garden Grove Unified School District. He and some other teachers were not keen to adopt grooming techniques being pushed by administrators and teachers union officials. And now the school district is moving to fire him for his recalcitrance.

These grooming techniques Mr. Redmond and other teachers are being told to implement have chiefly to do with gender “roles” and sexual activities, both of which are priorities for the educational establishment these days, but which are abhorrent to a great many real teachers.

The idea, according to Equality California, a sponsor of the infamous Assembly Bill 329 that became law in California several years ago pushing this ideology, is to acclimate small children to transgender and homosexual practices before those behaviors are stigmatized by parents or others as aberrant or unappealing.

Mr. Redmond and other teachers in the Garden Grove USD were told to keep information away from parents pertaining to a student’s “gender identity,” even if parents asked about it. They also were steered to an absurdly named “Flower Power Activity” quiz, where teachers were to ask innocuous questions about favorite colors and hobbies, but then were directed also to ascertain students’ religions, “pronouns,” sexual orientation, and other deeply personal information. “Have fun with it!” the administration shockingly exhorts.

The district explained its order by asserting, “With all the recent events exposing bias and hate in our community, we must come together as one.” The district did not elaborate about “all the recent events” but the likelihood is that if asked it would cite celebrated cases of resistance to the woke agenda, such as refusal to honor “pronouns.” That resistance, increasingly, is characterized as “racist” or “homophobic” or “hateful”—all reactionary and wildly inaccurate descriptions that are intended to inflame and exaggerate so that unions and administrators can more easily promote their agenda in a climate of hostility and conflict.

Mr. Redmond, who will be in the dock Tuesday, July 18, before the Garden Grove school board, filed a formal complaint advocating for the rights of parents, teachers, and students. His job will be on the line when the board meets Tuesday, which is why appreciative teachers and parents from all over Orange County are traveling to Garden Grove to stand with Mr. Redmond. The district intends to fire him before any more of the woke ideology that it is pushing in Garden Grove classrooms comes to light.

Mr. Redmond argued in his complaint that compelled speech amounts to a violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and that quizzing students about their religious and moral beliefs violates their constitutional rights.

He’s not alone in being victimized by the union-administrator establishment (more aptly named “The Education Mafia” by longtime teacher Rebecca Friedrichs) that has overrun America’s public schools. The nearby Jurupa Unified School District earlier this year fired physical education teacher Jessica Tapia for refusing to withhold information from parents, to use “gender pronouns” and to allow transgender males to roam around the girls’ locker rooms at Jurupa Valley High School, where Ms. Tapia had been a teacher for several years.

Ms. Tapia has filed a lawsuit against the district, which explicitly instructed her to lie to parents.

The woke ideology has played out in thousands of school districts around the country. One of the more infamous cases, according to a Loudoun County, Va., grand jury, involved a transgender student who assaulted a girl in a locker room at a high school in Loudoun County. It was later disclosed that the student accused in the assault had been transferred to that school weeks earlier after being accused of sexually assaulting another girl in another school locker room. The district had simply moved the student to another school.

Parents and other citizens are gradually becoming aware that public schools are not the same as when the parents attended, sometimes just 10 or 15 years earlier. They have become hotbeds of political and cultural conflict, and the establishment is explicitly in the corner of one side in the conflict and in fact is fanning the conflict in order to better push its agenda.

That’s why multitudes of people already have committed to attending Tuesday’s meeting in Garden Grove, and as word spreads about the district’s treatment of Mr. Redmond and other teachers, more will likely become interested.

The meeting is on Tuesday, July 18 at 7 p.m. in the district’s fifth-floor board room at 10331 Stanford Ave., Garden Grove, 92840. The public is invited to attend and speak on the matter.

Roger Ruvolo is a longtime newspaper editor and a new contributor to For Kids & Country. Rebecca Friedrichs, founder of For Kids & Country, contributed to this article.