Brentwood High School staff members gave students a questionnaire on the first day of school this year and allegedly asked them to identify themselves by the gender pronouns “She/her/hers,” “He/him/his,” “They/them/theirs,” or “other.”
Middle Tennessee residents posted a screenshot of the questionnaire on their Facebook pages late last week. The posters said someone at Brentwood High — whom they did not identify — took the photograph.
The Tennessee Star made repeated attempts to ask the Williamson County School (WCS) Systems communications team about the screenshot Monday and Tuesday. WCS staff said Monday it received The Star’s phone calls and emails, but it did not answer The Star’s queries before Tuesday’s stated deadline.
The questionnaire also appeared to ask Brentwood High students if teachers may use the students’ preferred pronouns in front of their classmates and also when speaking to the students’ individual caregivers.
Last year, a Belmont University professor who specializes in social justice causes lectured Brentwood High School students about social justice matters. Brentwood High Principal Kevin Keidel invited that professor, Mona Ivey-Soto, to speak.
A Brentwood High parent who said he disapproved of Soto’s lecture provided The Star with an audio recording of her lecture.
Before Soto spoke, Keidel delivered a lecture of his own. According to the audio, he said Brentwood High alumni, who now attend Harvard and Princeton universities, complained to him that school administrators didn’t do enough to make them better people.
“We took that to heart this summer. It doesn’t do us any good if you’re smart but you’re a bad person,” Keidel said in the recording.
“That is not what we want from you. We want you to be better people. We want you to be able to treat your classmates well. We want you to be able to treat your friends well.”
Keidel provided no specific examples of how past and present Brentwood High students were bad people.
Soto told students that she prayed “there is a level of discomfort you might feel [because of what I say].”
“Why am I feeling uncomfortable and why is this pushing my buttons a certain way and what do I need to do to lean into that?” Soto asked students.
“The process of becoming a better level of ourselves comes from experiencing a level of discomfort that moves us to a place of greater awareness and greater social change, and I believe that is what our public education system in our country should be all about — that positive place of social change for everyone. If we can quickly acknowledge that there are underprivileged people, communities, schools, neighborhoods then we have to have the opposite, which is over privileged, and an acknowledgement we are not initiating a sense of guilt or remorse but rather a sense of stewardship.”
Brentwood High School has more than 1,700 students, according to U.S. News and World Report.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Seems like Belmont University, in its race to become like one of the “prestigious” Northeast elitist Ivy League propaganda factories, has fallen into the neo-Marxist social justice hole.
I don’t know what is worse, that Belmont gives professorships to people like this woman or the Brentwood HS principal who invited her.
There needs to be a system in place whereas the community can have voting power to remove and and all administrators from the county school system, when necessary. That will fix many issues, presently or in the future.
As far as the “Brentwood High alumni, who now attend Harvard and Princeton universities” go, if you follow their “thinking,” their white privilege has guaranteed their success not that they’ve started attending those schools. As with all elites, once thet attain whatever they are seeking, they tend to pull up the ladder behind them, so no one else can follow.
Perfect examples: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet,, Zuckerberg, et al. They got theirs, now it’s time to stop others from joining the club. Why do they all push for the wealthy (other than themselves) to pay their “fair share?” These people will agree to anything as long as it doesn’t affect them negatively.
It may be time to deep-six Kevin Keidel, to send a message.
All the money these idiots are supposed to have in Williamson County – Brentwood it sure as the the world does not help the moron disease they display. Williamson County Schools are becoming a bigger joke than Metro. Most people move to Brentwood to get away from the so called lower income people, well you people need help!