It Begins With Family

The family unit forms a key component of a society. S.C. Aitken puts it very well in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography:

This "emotional geography" and the societal structures which undergird it? These provide the reasons why parental authority remains a central concept.

Backdrop: The Central Idea of Parental Authority

Parental authority determines the core rights and responsibilities of parents vis-a-vis their children. Parents are granted a host of rights as a consequence of their role as a child's parent / guardian, including:

• custody
• supervision
• education
• health and safety
• provision for food and shelter
• provision for love and care
• provision for physical / psychological well-being

Bottom line: parental authority gives parents broad rights to make the decisions necessary to raise and protect their children.

And yes, parents can temporarily grant someone else a certain portion of their parental authority, such as custody, supervision, or education. But the ultimate authority remains with the parents.

Organizations That Can Help

Parents may find the information provided by these organizations to be of use when working to correct what is taking place in schools today.

Public School Exit

Public School Exit provides an invaluable resouce for those wishing to remove their kids from today's toxic public school system. The group is providing parents and the church opportunities to rescue children from public schools, and perhaps even more importantly to reclaim the K-12 education system.

Read through their sections on school options, finding a school, steps for exiting, reasons to exit, and more. Like Freedom Project Media says, "It is time for the fraudulent 'education system' to be exposed and replaced with real education before even more children are irreparably harmed -- and the nation itself is destroyed". Subscribe to the PSE newsletter to stay informed...

Parents Defending Education

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, the group fights against indoctrination in the classroom -- and for the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

In one important investigative initiative, Cracked Foundations, the group looks more closely into five foundations spanning from 2017 through 2021. The foundations that were focused on during the research are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Wallace Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Windward Fund. Overall, 70 school districts were identified as having received grant funding directly from these foundations. In total, the five profiled foundations gave out over $200 million to districts over the five years.

Parents Rights In Education

Parents Rights In Education is committed to valuing students, empowering parents and supporting communities. They focus on securing a great education for children in America's public school system.

PRIE welcomes all students, families, and community members who care about scholastic success for K-12 public school students. The group strives to ensure that public schools are safe environments for all students, operating as institutions which inspire and unite all students as scholars. Parents want their children to be learning all day long, and wish them keeping their attention on things like math, reading, writing, history, art, music.

Per the organization's home page: "Parents expect their children to attend school to learn academics, not be politically activated. Uniting students with the focus on academics is job one in schools. We oppose labeling anyone, especially children, as that divides them at a time when an environment of acceptance is critical to their development."

Education Consumers Foundation

The Education Consumers Foundation are a group of trained, experienced, and independent educators who use data analysis to help parents and taxpayers identify which schools are operating well and which are not. They educate people on what is meant by school quality by reviewing performance data and turning that data into easily explainable graphics.

Their mission, as stated on their website, is to "improve education by showing those who use and pay for schools how to recognize good ones, find better ones, and get the most from the rest." If you are a parent looking to find a good school, or perhaps looking to see how a particular school is doing performance wise, these are the folks to check with.

Home School Association of California

The Home School Association of America (HSC) is a secular, nonprofit, volunteer-run homeschool organization. The group advocates for the freedom to homeschool children, offering parents support at every step of their homeschooling journey.

From the group's website:

• HSC believes that the joys and benefits of homeschooling should be available to all. We strive to provide support, information and resources for all families- regardless of access to resources, race, caste, ethnicity, physical ability, neurotype, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.
• HSC empowers families across the entire spectrum of homeschooling to make choices that respect the rights, unique needs, and aspirations of their children.
• HSC monitors and informs the discussion surrounding educational access and rights at the state and national level.
• HSC educates and supports families so that they can advocate for fair and equitable laws affecting homeschooling in California.
• HSC values community building, and provides opportunities throughout the year for homeschooling adults, teens and children to get together and make friends, through events, conferences, camping trips and volunteering.

Parents seeking information about alternative schooling options should click this button and review the links to the organizations provided.

Show Santa Clara county alternative education options

California Family Council

The California Family Council has a very simple mission: Advancing God's Design for Life, Family, & Liberty through California's Church, Capitol, & Culture. Their vision? To see God's people living as principled citizens of both heaven and earth by being biblically faithful, civically responsible, and culturally impactful.

The group's blog contains must read info for anyone looking to stay on top of the legislative environment here in California.

Home School Legal Defense Association

The Home School Legal Defense Association advocates for the freedom to homeschool children, offering parents support in every step of their homeschooling journey.

This site provides an excellent resouce for a number of different people, Including parents thinking about the possibility of going the homeschool route, what states require in terms of mandatory subjects and testing, selecting a curriculum and planning the schooling year, seeing to studens with special needs, and how to go about developing a plan for high school.

What this organization provides, specifically:

• Legal Protections - HSLDA works to protect a parent's right to homeschool their kids by advocating for homeschool freedoms in state legislatures and the public arena.
• Educational Support - HSLDA have highly trained consultants that offer personalized guidance and answers to questions about every stage of homeschooling, including how to get started, how to help students with learning disabilities, and how to keep high school students properly engaged.
• Gathering in Community - Through the combined efforts of the broader community that is supported, HSLDA makes it possible for all families to experience the joys of homeschool freedom.

Courage is a Habit

Courage is a Habit is an organization that is creating actionable education and strategies for parents to defend their children from public school indoctrination in grades K-12. Keeping the focus on real, actionable items, this group should be on every parent's goto list.

From their website: "Fear is a habit. Each time you want to speak up and you do not, it becomes a little easier next time to stay silent. The great news is that courage is also a habit. Each time you speak up, even when you're afraid, it becomes a little easier next time to not stay silent."

The website provides access to a number of useful pdf documents, including:

• A series of "decoding" documents to help parents understand what is being said in these various indoctination programs.
• A series of opt-out guidances to get students free of the various data mining activities taking place that are actually allowing many of these damaging programs to continue.
• Questions to raise with your school board, your principal, or your superindendent.
• The Groomer Playbook.

America First Legal Pupil Rights Amendment

America First Legal (AFL) provides info about the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. 20 U.S.C. § 1232h is an important - but until now little-used - tool for holding administrators and teachers accountable. First passed in 1974 and expanded several times since then (most recently in 2002), the PPRA provides parents legal rights to review curriculum, and in some circumstances to opt out of certain activities at any school that receives federal funding.

Some states have laws that empower parents directly to find out what local public teachers and administrators are up to. But it is important to recognize that federal law allows parents to review curriculum and prevents schools from asking highly personal questions about students' sex lives, drug usage, and things of that nature without parental consent. At the end of the day, parents must be vigilant, and must be willing to fight for their children. The PPRA provides one valuable tool when doing so.

Note that if a school wants to distribute or administer a survey created by an outside entity (not the school), the parent has the right to review the survey first, along with any supplemental material (including teacher's manuals) that come with the survey. The parent must request this; the school does not have to provide copies without being asked first. Critically, this applies to all gender and race-related materials.

• Read more about this important parental resource.
• Download the printable toolkit for parents.
• Download the parental rights demand letter template from AFL.

California Parents United

California Parents United aims to give parents the tools and resources needed to empower them to do what they believe is right for their children and family.

California Parents United has formed a grassroots membership based union for parents, grandparents and guardians of youth. The group is structured a bit like a special interest group, but with more of a coalition for good feel to it. The group has recognized that in order to amplify the collective voice of the group and actually be heard above the din of background noise, they must present themselves as larger than teachers unions and government actors that have harmed children these past few years.

For Kids & Country

For Kids & Country has a mission to unite, educate, engage and empower parents, teachers, students, and citizens in the fight to restore America's schools and culture. So their mission dovetails quite nicely with that of Moms for Liberty.

Focus is kept on school boards and the teacher's union. California leads in union involvement in school board races. In the recent election, the California Teachers Association funded 287 board candidates in 125 school districts large and small, dispensing more than $1.8 million for its supported candidates. The process is a nice loop. The teachers unions fund left-wing school board candidates. When a supported candidate wins, they support generous pay and benefits for teachers (in addition to various radical causes). Finally via union dues, a portion of teacher pay is routed back to the union, closing the cycle.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

American Education Defenders

American Education Defenders provides personal growth lessons for teenagers, making use of true stories from an event in American history to do so. They show that teenagers can be independent, self-reliant, responsible, imaginative, determined, empathetic, honest, and motivated. These are all values that America stands for, and understnding this bolsters a young adult's self-esteem, thereby removing any self-doubt that they may have.

The program appears to be solid and is being used by educators across the country.

A Voice for Choice

A Voice for Choice makes research available to Americans that supports a person's right to know what they are taking into their bodies, be it food, air, water, or medications. Specifically, the organization performs four specific tasks:

• Promotes people's rights to be fully informed about the composition, quality, and short- and long-term health effects of food and pharmaceutical products.
• Educates people about these issues and their rights to be informed consumers and control what they put in their bodies.
• Supports large-scale primary and secondary research into these issues.
• Works with doctors, nutritionists, researchers and other professionals to ensure the information we share is the most up to date.

With the growth of Big Ag and Big Pharma, it is very good to have an organization that remains vigilant about keeping track of what's going on in these arenas.

SIECUS - Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States

SIECUS is the organization responsible for what students are being taught in sex-ed classes.

The group's list of values, as provided on their website, serves to tell us all we need to know:

• SIECUS recognizes that good sexual and reproductive health is a human right.
• SIECUS advances comprehensive sexuality education as a means of building a foundation for a long-term culture shift that will positively impact all levels of society, particularly issues of gender and racial equity, sexuality, sexual and reproductive health, consent, personal safety, and autonomy.
• SIECUS commits to working to dismantle the systems of power and oppression [aka the American family] which perpetuate disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes and incubate stigma and shame around sex and sexuality across the intersections of age, race, size, gender, gender identity and expression, class, sexual orientation, and ability.
• SIECUS applies an intersectional lens to ensure people's real lived experiences inform our policy, education, and strategic communications work.

Parents should remain aware of the sex-ed standards being used within their school system.

• Read the National Sex Education Standards (2nd Edition 2020).
• Refer to the Sex Education and State Law Policy Chart (SIECUS - Sex Ed for Social Change).

Informed Parents of Silicon Valley

Informed Parents of Silicon Valley is a grassroots nonprofit organization created by community leaders in Silicon Valley. Team members include parents, grandparents, former elected officials, teachers, and business / neighborhood leaders who are focused on having a family values based, child centered school curriculum.

The group supports measures that protect our children and grandchildren, and works to bring into the light of day the divisive teachings of Critical Race Theory and the Comprehensive Sexuality Education being taught in our schools. Be sure to check out their school board news page.

iVoter Guide

iVoter Guide uses the tagline "Grounded in God. Rooted in research."

This group provides a snapshot evaluation of every person running for federal and state office. For partisan offices, each candidate will have a meter shown with a needle indicating where they fall along a seven point political view scale: verified liberal, liberal, leans liberal, moderate, leans conservative, conservative, and verified conservative. Simply visit the California state page to view all our candidates. In addition, enter your address on the main page to see the various ballot measures that apply specifically to you.

This resource proves to be invaluable during an election year.

Election Forum

The Election Forum offers another view of candidates on the ballot here in Santa Clara County. Here folks can find ratings for local, County, State, and federal candidates, including (importantly) judges (which to retain, which to replace). The tagline used: "Vote For - Not Against - Your Biblical Values".

On this site one can find the latest California Voter Guide along with the set of questions used to evaluate the candidates and come up with voting recomendations.

Like iVoter Guide, this resource proves invaluable during an election year.

National Liberty Alliance

The National Liberty Alliance has a well-defined plan to take back control of our judicial and political processes, as well as to re-establish a classical educational system for our children. Theirs is a clarion call for citizens to act now to get America's governance back on track. This organization provides a wealth of solid information on their website, stating that their first order of business is education, organization and communication.

The ultimate mission of the group is the restoration of sovereignty to the people (or perhaps more accurately, the restoration of understanding in who it is that acts as soverign under the Constitution). Individuals are empowered through the gaining of knowledge. Only through knowledge can people be armed with the virtue to take political and judicial power back from those who have taken it. The people have it in their power to disarm and defeat the enemies of liberty, both foreign and domestic, but only if they can gain a solid understanding of Common Law and of the central idea of Government by Consent.

Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation works in our nation's capital "to build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish".

But unlike other organizations operating in the deep swamp of Washington, D.C., The Heritage Foundation is not trying to put more power into the hands of the government. Instead, Heritage continues to wortk on getting power returned to the people. Heritage does not work on behalf of any special interest or political party. Instead, their commitment continues to be with the American people.

From their website: "For almost 50 years, The Heritage Foundation has advanced the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. We've led the way for reforms in every policy area - from taxes and regulation to crime and national defense."

Heritage Guide to the Constitution

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution provides a line-by-line analysis of the Constitution, a compilation of the thinking of over 100 well-known legal scholars committed to an originalist jurisprudence.

In this guide, each clause of the Constitution has its own essay in which the commentator has two objectives. First, the author provides an originalist interpretation of that clause. Second, the author articulates the contemporary legal relevance of the clause in question, and will provide (if needed) the historical development of the current doctrine. Reading the commentary on a particular clause requires the reader to visit the top level page and click the circled i icon that immediately follows the clause of interest. Each commentary begins with stating the clause in question, presents the commentary, gives info about the author of the commentary, and ends with links for further reading about the clause, applicable case law, and related essays in The Heritage Guide.

From the website: "We at Heritage feel it is very important for the citizenry to have an understanding of and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. With that goal in mind, we encourage you to visit and explore the online version of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution." We at Moms for Liberty could not agree more.