Blue State Teachers Union Trained Educators To Combat ‘Attacks’ From Parental Rights Group

Blue State Teachers Union Trained Educators To Combat ‘Attacks’ From Parental Rights Group

Reagan Reese on April 20, 2023

A Pennsylvania teachers union held a spring conference that offered educators advice on how to fight back against “attacks” from a parental rights group, according to a conference outline.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association Southern Region hosted an April 14 conference that offered members of the teachers union training courses, including “Combatting Moms for Liberty Attacks on our Teachers and our Schools,” according to a conference outline. The course, led by Lauri Lebo, a spokeswoman for the union and American Civil Liberties Union Pennsylvania Secretary, explored the “dark money origins” of Moms for Liberty, a coalition of parents working towards transparency in education

“Moms for Liberty jumped onto the political scene in 2021 at the height of the pandemic,” the course description read. “Seemingly overnight, an army of parents and community members started showing up at board meetings with a coordinated message, aggressively protesting the teaching of the misnomer ‘critical race theory’ and the wearing of Covid masks. M4L [Moms for Liberty] chapters are now targeting school board races across the country and here in the Southern Region. This session will explore the dark-money origins of this astroturf organization and its real long-term goal, as well as provide strategies on how to defeat them in the ballot box and at the board meeting.”

Teachers also took a course on “supporting LGBTQIA+ students and educators” which taught attendees how to provide a “safer environment” for the community within the classroom, the conference outline stated. The course taught educators LGBTQ vocabulary and how to “confront implicit bias, micro-aggressions and stereotypes.”

Another course taught educators about strike and bargaining tactics when “negotiations are not progressing as planned,” the conference stated. The training course “teachers unions and social justice” explained how internal and external systems can be used to fight injustice.

“Social Justice Unionizing seeks to expand how we think about issue identification, power building, bargaining, partnerships and the wins we achieve,” the course description read.

Teachers unions throughout the nation are implementing gender identity and Critical Race Theory (CRT) initiatives through their members and in the classroom; the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, hosted a “Race-Based Trauma Blended Learning Course” to train educators how to recognize the causes and effects racial trauma. The New York City teachers union hosted a workshop to teach counselors about how to resist the “harmful effects of whiteness.”

The Pennsylvania State Education Association did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.