Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Moms for Liberty’s Robin Steenman to discuss the continued fight to put children in K-12 public schools first, above left-wing ideologies.
Leahy: We are joined on the newsmaker line right now by Robin Steenman of Moms for Liberty in Williamson County. Good morning, Robin. How are you?
Steenman: Good! How are you, Michael?
Leahy: Well, I’m looking at this propaganda that USA Today wrote about Moms for Liberty yesterday.
Steenman: Did they write anything else?
Leahy: Yeah. Mark Ramirez and Kathryn Varn. The way they write it, it’s just a political diatribe against Moms for Liberty, who are really, as I can see, doing nothing but trying to make sure that our kids get an education that is not steeped in left-wing ideology.
I don’t know if these authors, Mark Ramirez and Kathyrn Varn, have children. My guess would be probably not. Tell us how Moms for Liberty is doing in Williamson County.
Steenman: Well, we are just over a year old, and we started to take on Critical Race Theory in Williamson County schools. And then we stumbled into this toxic curriculum that was illegally adopted at the state level and is now the subject of a lawsuit by Parents Choice Tennessee, where the plaintiffs are suing our superintendent, our assistant superintendent of curriculum, our school board, and none other than our Commissioner of Education, Penny Schwinn.
So that’s how we started Critical Race Theory and masking. But what we didn’t realize, and what most parents don’t realize, is that that is but one battlefront in the war for our children.
There are so many fronts being encroached on by the left that it’s absolutely overwhelming to parents. You just see the far-off look in their eyes as they start hearing about all the things they have to worry about, and those include Critical Race Theory, social-emotional learning – which is, by and large, the vehicle for Critical Race Theory – restorative justice, which results in situations like Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Uvalde, comprehensive sex education … then you’ve got gender ideology encroaching, which brings in the trans agenda, and it’s all under the LGBTQ flag and the graphic and obscene library materials.
I mean, it’s really from all sides, and parents are just bewildered. So that’s what our chapter is doing now, is we’re saying, okay, these are your battlefronts. And it’s overwhelming, but over the coming months, we are going to dedicate one month to each battlefront and really take it on and analyze it and digest it and help parents to understand, because when they hear “restorative justice,” they have no idea why that’s bad.
Or social-emotional learning initially sounds pretty good, but we’re here to equip and inform and empower the parents to really be in the driver’s seat for their children.
Leahy: What about reading, writing, and arithmetic? Is that on the agenda of K-12 public schools these days?
Steenman: It’s difficult to say.
Leahy: Yeah, it’s not their focus, apparently.
Steenman: I forgot the last ranking of the United States and the national world for education of our children. But we’re pretty low, despite throwing millions and billions of dollars out.
Leahy: It’s an institution that clearly is not working in terms of providing kids the ability to read and write and do arithmetic at the level that they have historically in the United States. Now I want to talk about the political activism side.
Give us an assessment of how the recent school board elections went for Moms for Liberty and associated groups here in Williamson County.
Steenman: Lukewarm. We got some great victories but then there were some districts that really surprised us. All in all, the entire ticket was Republican. But then in the case of District 10 with Eric Welch, you have a hard-left Democrat posing as a Republican and the District 10 voters voted for him anyway because the Williamson County Republican Party told them to.
Leahy: So you had a few victories in the school board?
Steenman: A few victories, but we need people to wake up.
Leahy:Â Probably not enough. Are there 12 members of the school board now?
Steenman: Correct.
Leahy: And of those, I guess from my reading – maybe before the election it was 11, I don’t know – broadly speaking, 11 supporters of the current system, shall we say, and one critic right now. That would be my guess, because Dan Cash, I think, has been sort of on the side of sanity and he got re-elected. But has it gone from like 11-1 to 9-3? What’s the breakdown now?
Steenman: Well, there’s a couple in there. There are some districts in there that are kind of unknown. We’re skeptical but we want to give them the benefit of the doubt and see how they perform in the coming year.
Leahy: But the majority of the school board is still supportive of all of these very bad policies put together by the current school administration, it seems to me. Do I have that right?
Steenman: At a minimum, seven are still in support of the Left agenda. We have a lot of work to do in 2024.
Leahy: A lot of work to do in 2024. But my question to you is, is the K-12 public school system even salvageable today?
Steenman: I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, but I got to tell you the more and more layers of this onion that we peel back, and we find something rotten, it’s very discouraging.
And it’s not to say that Moms for Liberty is going to throw in the towel. We’re going to keep working. Because at the end of the day we’re moms and dads and we’re working for the kids and so that never stops. So we’ll never stop trying. But it’s pretty bad. It’s been a long time since kids have been first … (crosstalk, unintelligible speech)
Leahy: Oh, kids are not first. The agenda, the ideology to turn them into left-wing lunatics …
Steenman: … federal money, all of those things, are before the kids. And Moms for Liberty just want the kids to be first. And so that’s why we’re never going to give up.
Leahy: So here’s the deal on K-12 public education as it’s currently structured. You say you’re like a glass-half-full kind of person. And that’s a great attitude to have.
But my assessment of K-12 public education, I would describe it as the glass is only a quarter full and it’s three-quarters empty. Do you know what I mean?
Steenman: Yeah, that’s a fair assessment.
Leahy: Part of it is, the broader question is, I think, ultimately, right now, about 50 million out of 55 million kids in that age group go to public schools. It’s been declining a little bit, but still, they’re stuck in that.
Part of that has to do with parents’ attitudes. A lot of parents think, okay, well, I put my kids in school. I don’t have to worry about it now. The problem is you have to worry about it all the time.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
