by Shawn McBreairty
In April, school officials in Winterport, Maine led kindergartners and second-graders through “Welcome Week 2023” programming based on controversial theories about race and gender. But it goes way deeper than just that.
Photo courtesy of Leroy H. Smith school Facebook banner. Notice the “intersectionality wheel” poster, wrapped in the LGBTQ rainbow colors on the opposite wall, sponsored by the Maine Attorney General’s Office. The term, “You Belong Here” is also being posted in other area schools, such as Hermon School District.
The Leroy H. Smith School (LHSS) in Winterport is part of Maine’s RSU22 district, which encompasses the towns of Hampden, Newburgh, Frankfort and Winterport. According to documents and RSU22 employee insight obtained by Maine Source Of Truth, the school asked pre-K students and kindergarteners to prepare artwork celebrating “gender.” Officials also asked second-graders to prepare art celebrating “race & skin color.” The school displayed this student art in its hallways. What lovely propaganda created by our youth.
LHSS Kindergarten Teacher Hannah Hotham and School Guidance Counselor Kim Raymond developed the curriculum. Kim Raymond is the wife of RSU22 superintendent Nick Raymond and was the “Maine School Counselor of the Year” in 2021. One of the reasons she was selected for the award was based on, “…promot(ing) access and equity for all students…” as noted in the Link-22 February, 2021 newsletter. It is also stated by LHSS Principal Dawn Moore that, “(Kim Raymond) is more than a school counselor, she is a change agent.”
Charlotte Iserbyt, who wrote “The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America,” a comprehensive book detailing the fall of the American education system, mentioned these “change agents” inside schools as those who continuously deceive the public which tends to believe anything the ‘experts’ tell them. In 1973, Ronald G. Havelock wrote “The Change Agent’s Guide To Innovation In Education,” in which he spoke to sneaking controversial curricular and teaching strategies and to get them adopted by naive school boards. Sound familiar?
Why would RSU22 employees Hanna Hotham and “change agent” Kim Raymond push racism and gender-based art projects over math and English?
A child doesn’t have the capacity to understand gender and has hopefully never experienced their sexuality. Gender is a social construct meant to deliberately normalize speaking to minors about very personal topics. A five-year-old can no more choose another gender than choose to be a dinosaur. But as we know, many five-year-old children love to pretend to be dinosaurs. If they are given attention for pretending, then they are even more willing to keep up with the charade.
Let’s remember, there are only two sexes, God-given at birth. Radical leftists like those working within Maine schools use “gender” to break down childrens’ innocence by working sexuality into everyday school conversations with minors. Children’s “trans” identification is a social contagion, pushed by these very schools, by activists you pay via your property tax dollars.
Most teachers don’t realize they use a term linked to the sexual attraction of adults towards minors. John Money, who was an advocate for pedophilia, was the first to use the word “gender” to discuss sexual orientation. John Money’s work in the mid-1980s included a resurrection of “psychosexual age” (Money, 1986) a term from the 1950s that Money rebranded as “sexuoerotic age” (Hammer, 1954). That same year, Money advocated for “erotic age roleplay,” suggesting that some people have an inner-child, making them attracted to minors and that this is something that should be accepted and encouraged…even though he did not have scientific proof to back it up.
Money thought that “unrestricted enjoyment of erotica and sex in childhood” would encourage healthy sexual development in adulthood. In his book “Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man Or a Woman” (Money, 1976), he stated that pornographic images for children should be included in sex education.
Online photo of unknown origin.
According to a RSU22 teacher who chose to remain anonymous, district teachers, counselors and administrators have made a concentrated effort to encourage children to realize their sexuality as early as possible.
“I have seen a progression over the years to include younger and younger children in the concepts of LGBTQ+, gender identity, gender fluidity and sexual language.
Initially I thought this was to prevent bullying, but as time wore on, it was clear that was not the intent after all.
The discussions and signs all over the school aimed at young children really alerted me to the grooming of children.
Yes, grooming, that is what sexual predators do to children, exposing them to sexual content, language and visuals repeatedly to take advantage of them for their own perversions.
This robs children of their innocence, this information is not developmentally appropriate! We, as a society, separate movies, tv shows and books according to what is developmentally appropriate for certain age groups, but now we can use cartoon drawings of naked people doing sex acts and that’s okay?
It’s not okay, it’s sexual abuse.
There are other teachers that agree with me however, we can not speak up.
The climate is such that if you don’t agree with this sexual grooming, then you will be a target. Those of us that disagree are afraid of losing our jobs if we speak up.
Certain ideas and certain people are ‘untouchable.’
I have had a student confused and concerned thinking that he might one day wake up as a girl.
The hyper-sexualization of children is damaging to them. I’m so disgusted with the teachers and administration, including the school board, for so adamantly shutting down any opposing opinions and discussion.”
Pushing race and skin color on students is divisive. It divides children between “oppressors or oppressed” based on race, based on the melanin levels in their skin, or if they grew up with a supportive family or not. It explains the world using “white privilege” and “institutional racism,” two concepts that have not existed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Your skin color has nothing to do with the content of your character. We are all equal in America, under God and under the law. Focusing on “skin color” in Maine schools is a racist mentality, creating an environment in which young students are easily manipulated into judging others on race. This becomes another divisive wedge between a child and their parents and is pushed by a “trusted” educator. Racism is being taught in Maine schools in their earliest years.
The racial and sexual topics pushed in Maine schools have created a group of narcissistic students who think the world revolves around their traits. Students are often treated by schools as “protected classes” where, because of their skin color or sexual identity, they are hardly ever disciplined for fear of legal retaliation. This “hands off” approach to discipline has roots from B.F. Skinner and his aberrant “behavioral studies” where rewards are more important than punishment. This thought process has only increased school abuse and bullying. But don’t let the LGBTQ-cultists get it twisted. Many of them are the bullies in today’s schools.
There is little to no discipline in today’s Maine schools and “uncontrollable classrooms” are the biggest reason teachers are leaving the profession. Most teachers also feel that politics should be kept out of the classroom, and they are caught in the crossfire. Not all teachers in Maine are bad, but those going along with the radical agenda need to step forward and demand change as well. It can’t just be the parents speaking up. If you fear retaliation for speaking out and exposing the truth then you can feed inside information to a trusted source, like Maine Source Of Truth and Maine First Project. We will expose it to more parents and taxpayers. We will shine a light on it!
Maine students need massive help academically as we are in a full-blown crisis. RSU22 and Leroy H. Smith School should have sponsored a “Get Back To Educational Basics,” week to help these kids who have suffered from the past Covid political theater and from these non-stop divisive agendas. But, the RSU22 leadership doesn’t seem to be concerned that much about education, only indoctrination.
LHSS’s 2018 to 2019 testing showed seven out of ten students were below, or well below state guidelines in math. This was the last “true” test before the Maine Department Of Education switched to the “watered down” NWEA testing process, after not testing at all in 2019 to 2020, due to COVID. Miraculously, in 2021 to 2022, this same school in Winterport, ME suddenly “raised” math scores where only 2 out of 10 students showed below, or well below state guidelines!? This vast change is obviously impossible after two plus school years of COVID, which was shown to have “stunted educational growth” as noted recently by Harvard University, especially in these critical early years.
It’s simply moving the goalposts by the left. Not satisfied with the testing results? Bring in a new and easier test!
Spending RSU22 taxpayer dollars on a “Welcome Week” that divided pre-K through 4th grade children by race and skin color, national origin and ancestry, families, disabilities, genders and religions is not only a waste of time, but is the divisive politics the left are incorporating into everyday learning inside our public K-12 schools. But does anyone really care?
Provided by an RSU22 teacher, concerned that they were being asked to push BLM (hat) to 5 year olds at McGraw School in Hampden, also part of RSU22. This lesson is provided by “Focus on K2, K for ME, from the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood and Maine Department of Education.”
In Maine, the 2022 Nation’s Report Card stated that only 29% of all Maine students of all ages can read at proficiency, the worst since it has been tracked since 1998. Only 24% of all Maine students can perform math at proficiency. One would think parents would be screaming about this?
Today, Maine has the worst return on educational investment in its entire history. But schools like LHSS have focused on woke and Marxist student programming like “Welcome Week” instead of spending their time, energy and taxpayer funding on educational basics. The basics these schools are unfortunately failing to prove they have any proficiency with.
Maine’s K-12 public schools have been failing students for decades.
According to Donald J. Hernandez’s research in “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation,” as many as one-sixth of children who are not reading by the end of third grade fail to graduate high school. Some two-thirds of students who lack proficient reading skills by the end of fourth grade end up in jail or on welfare, according to BeginToRead. Some 85% of youth who are involved in the juvenile court system are classified as functionally illiterate. About 70% of inmates in U.S. prisons can’t read above a fourth-grade level.
If you can believe it, “Welcome Week” was allegedly “sponsored” by the 5-8 year olds in the Leroy H. Smith Elementary School’s “Civil Rights Team.” These kids are often used as human shields by the left, with adults trying to convince others that a 5-year-old organized anything more than his tater tots. These Civil Rights Teams are divisive groups incorporated in schools all over Maine and are promoted and funded by Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey. Frey was recently accused of having a sexual relationship with one of his subordinate workers, just to give you an insight into his overall lack of integrity.
The large majority of Democrats inside our schools seem to love the division the Civil Rights Team groups cause, as it is easy to separate kids by putting peer pressure on them to comply with the “state mandated” training. This is a push directly from Governor Janet Mills on down through the AG’s office.
Larger view of the CRT Project posters placed inside RSU22 schools.
We all know kids seek attention. The nearly entire Democrat party-led membership of the Maine Education Association (MEA) teachers union, Maine Department of Education (MDOE), Maine School Management Association (MSMA), Maine Library Association (MLA) and nearly a dozen more of these woke “non-profits” involved in your local schools, paid for by your tax dollars, want kids to be pushed toward the teachers and away from their parents. Slogans such as “Classroom Is Family,” have popped up inside Maine school classrooms. No, family is family, teachers should be teachers.
Just teach the damn basics already! Leave the kids alone!
Many Maine school teachers and administrators want students to become radical activists engaging in these liberal agenda issues at an early age. It’s easier to brainwash students in their single-digit years when they should be learning the fundamental basics of how to read and write. It’s gaslighting 101.
“Rise Up The Art of Protest” as displayed in the library of the RSU22 Earl C. McGraw School for kindergarten through second graders.
While Maine’s state institutions promote LGBTQ+ ideology in schools, mental health problems have also been on the rise. A recent Yahoo News article stated how horrific this situation is today. “In 2021, 35.9% of Maine’s roughly 55,000 high school students reported feeling sad or hopeless, up from 32.1% in 2019. The percentage of high school students who reported self-harming rose from 22.9% to 28.7% over the same time period, and students who said they seriously considered suicide increased from 16.4% to 18.5%. That’s on top of the 2,654 Maine youths who went to the emergency room because of suicide attempts or ideation in 2022.”
We will see more teen and early adult suicides in Maine in this next decade than we have seen in the previous decades combined.
Schools appear more willing to run programs about feeling safe and creating “safe spaces” than explaining to parents why two thirds of Maine kids can’t read and three quarters can’t do math. The educational failure of Governor Janet Mills and MDOE Commissioner Pender Makin may define life for Maine’s next generation of adults. This will also impact the previous generations of Mainers.
The goal of the modern day educational system appears to want to separate the child from their parents by using the building blocks of Critical Race Theory, COVID requirements, hyper-sexualization of minors, Comprehensive Sexual Education, Social Emotional Learning and any other non-basic type of educational nightmare that will be coming out next. These schools are able to graduate a majority of liberal Democrats each June from our high schools in Maine.
This student radicalization plan has incrementally worked for decades, but now they are “turning the dial up to 11.”
The RSU22 braintrust appears to want to ensure students know about gender and skin color as a top priority over the fundamentals of education. RSU22 starts them early, as young as five, and pushes these divisive topics all the way up through Hampden Academy High School, where teachers make students stand up in front of their peers and pick their pronouns. What is happening inside Maine’s public K-12 schools is educational malpractice. Activists on the taxpayer payroll who are destroying our country from within. Even if these school employees are only “useful idiots” and don’t understand the full extent of the harm they are causing. It starts with division at an early age, devolving students into radicals.
RSU22 has quite a recent history of national press, providing parents coverage of just how bad it is in these schools as an RSU22 student stated in this Epoch Times Article titled, “Maine’s Transgender Curriculum As Seen Through The Eyes of a Child and Her Family.” The young student in the article stated, “Straight people like me, I think they get a lot of anxiety, and they can’t find a voice inside of them to speak up. And they just are stuck not doing anything.”
In Lucy’s Maine school district (RSU22), hallways exploded with posters celebrating new gender identities, she said. Some exalt new gender identities over heterosexuality. “Why use the symbols givin to you … when you can make you’r own!” one poorly-spelled poster read.
A poorly spelled poster suggests that it’s more interesting to make your own gender than to be born a man or woman. Photo was taken inside RSU22’s Reeds Brook Middle School in 2021.
This (RSU22) school atmosphere encourages middle school children into strange sexualities, Lucy and her parents say.
Kevin and Hannah, Lucy’s parents, first learned her teachers educated her in radical gender ideology when she was between 10 and 11. “What does non-binary mean?” she asked her mother one day when she got home. Before the incident happened, Lucy’s parents asked the (RSU22) principal to not educate her on radical gender ideology. But the school didn’t listen, they said. “Without parental knowledge or consent, they were presenting information about transgenderism,” Hannah said. All chose to use pseudonyms to protect Lucy’s identity.
Yet, it seems many Maine parents don’t want to know how truly horrible our public K-12 schools are. Are they afraid they may have to make a life-altering change for their child to homeschool, or find a Christian school alternative? To break up their “soccer mom,” or PTA image? Afraid of taking a stand for your child?
These parents appear to be simply “rolling the dice,” hoping their children make it out of these schools alive, instead of holding these schools accountable for positive educational results. That is a bet I’m not willing to make, and I’ll continue to expose these schools for as long as I can. We need more involved students, parents, grandparents, taxpayers and teachers to push back on this woke agenda that has infiltrated our schools.
Our number one role should be to protect the innocence of our children. Innocence lost cannot be regained. Once the toothpaste is squished out of the tube it can’t be stuffed back in. Lost innocence becomes a wedge between child and parent, causing strife and struggles within the household. So, why are teachers pushing this far-left agenda on these young, impressionable minds?
To create division within the American family unit and to destroy America.
I tell every parent in Maine and across this once-great country, pull your kids out of these public K-12 indoctrination centers now. Or, if you don’t have the resources to do this (but it is way easier than you think), you must fight for your child’s education everyday like their lives depend on it. Because they do. There is no third option available for parents and their children.
If you don’t get involved, you may lose your child forever. Now is the time, parents. Stop rolling the dice…
Shawn McBreairty is the Director of Special Projects at Maine First Project, a non-profit organization offering grassroots advocacy training in multiple areas. For two and a half years, Shawn has been exposing CRT and the hyper-sexualization of minors (“aka” grooming in the classroom) as well as many dangers within the programs, teachings and curriculum of Maine and this nation’s public, K-12 schools. Check out Shawn’s Podcast, “Maine Source Of Truth,” which can be found anywhere you listen. Follow the podcast page on Facebook and @ShawnMcBreairty on social media.