Outraged parents in Spreckels, California tore into the school board Wednesday night, accusing school staff of pushing gender dysphoria on their children.
One parent’s voice shook with rage as she accused school staffers of making her daughter suicidal after they caused her to question her gender, and change her preferred pronouns.
“My child almost lost her life! You didn’t tell me that my child was suicidal!” she exclaimed during public comments at the Dec. 15 Spreckels Union School District (SUSD) board meeting.
The mother, Jessica Konen, has alleged that her then 12-year-old daughter was tricked into joining a predatory LGBTQ group that was deceptively named an “Equality Club,” the Epoch Times reported.
Konen told Epoch Times that she discovered through meetings with teachers that the school knew her daughter had searched online for information about suicide, but never told her about it.
“They failed to tell me that part, so I was very angry, and after that it has just been downhill,” Konen said. “It is not okay” for teachers to keep parents in the dark about gender identity issues or anything else, Konen said.
Earlier this year during the California Teachers Association conference held in Palm Springs, California, two teachers were caught on tape coaching other teachers on how to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs from parents, Epoch Times reported. The sold-out CTA event was held from Oct. 29 to Oct. 31, and billed as the “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities.
The two teachers reportedly held a workshop called “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities” where they discussed the obstacles activist teachers face concealing the student-led Gay-Straight Alliance [GSA] clubs from parents.
The teachers reportedly handed out the materials below during the workshop.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1471372862753685509?s=20
The slide below shows “troubleshooting” methods of getting around parent concerns about their grooming efforts.
During the conference, teachers shared strategies on how to find targets for their grooming activities, including “stalking them on Google.”
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1471604047765405702?s=20
SUSD officials have not responded directly to inquiries but SUSD did post an alert on its website notifying the community that school staff involved in the alleged incident have been suspended pending an independent third-party investigation.
Konen claims that one of the teachers coaxed her daughter to join a lunch-hour “Equality Club” and began affirming her daughter as transgender.
Near the end of sixth grade, Konen’s daughter told her she might be bisexual, and by the middle of the seventh grade, Konen was called to the school for a meeting with her daughter, a teacher, and the school principal.
The teacher told Konen her daughter was “trans fluid.”
The teacher accused Konen of not being “emotionally supportive” of her daughter, who was to be called by a new name and male pronouns and would be using the unisex restroom at school.
“I felt she completely coached my child,” Konen said.
“I sat across the table, and I was crying. I was trying to absorb everything,” Konen told Epoch Times.
“They kept looking at me angrily because I kept saying ‘she,’ and that it was going to take me time to time to process everything,” she said. “I was very confused. … I was very upset. I was blindsided—completely blindsided.”
Konen told Epoch Times that the teacher had a mean-spirited, “smirking” attitude towards her throughout the meeting.
And she said she felt hurt and betrayed because her daughter had not come to her first.
“It made me feel very, very small as a parent. I was unaware of anything. Not one time had she mentioned to me ‘Oh, I think that I want to change my name,’ or ‘I’m transgender’ or anything. Nothing. I only heard bisexual one time, and that was it,” Konen said.
A few days after the meeting, the King City Police Department showed up at her door and told her that there had been a complaint made to Child Protective Services (CPS). The police asked her two children if they wanted to be removed from the home.
“They made me feel like a monster,” she told Epoch Times.
Konen was directed to bring her children to meet with CPS that week, and complied. Afterward, CPS reportedly dropped the case, and didn’t force Konen to call her daughter by masculine pronouns as her teacher had instructed.
Even so, Konen lived in fear for the rest of the school year, afraid to ask questions about her daughter or her school activities due to the threat that CPS could take her children away.
Her daughter is now 14, has reportedly abandoned the transgender fad, and is now attending a new school where she uses her female birth name and feminine pronouns.
Konen told Epoch Times that she told daughter it was okay if she wanted to continuing using the male name and pronouns her teachers had used at Buena Vista, but her daughter responded, “Mom, they’re not good people.”
“I asked her ‘Would you like to have an a.k.a. on your attendance?’ and she said, ‘No, I don’t want that, Mom,’” Konen said. “Things are better. She’s in a different school, different surroundings. Nobody is really pressuring her,” Konen said.
During the school board meeting Wednesday night, Konen let the board members have it.
“You allowed these teachers to open their classrooms to teaching predatorial information to a young child—a mindful child who doesn’t even know how to comprehend it all!” she screamed. “How do you not know what was going on in your own campuses! Did you think that no parent would ever come forward?”
She also asked the board members if they or the teachers have psychiatry degrees she didn’t know about, “because I didn’t hire them! I did not hire them to sit there and nitpick my child’s brain!” “You took away my ability to parent my child!” Konen added.
She accused the teachers of “planting seeds” in her daughter’s head instead of doing their job of teaching math, science, English, etc. “Do your job and let me do mine!” she exclaimed to cheers.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1471356907176615941?s=20
A father told the school board that the activist teachers at the school have “gone too far.”
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1471418284608159744?s=20
Konen’s father, Gunter Konen, told The Epoch Times he was shocked by the way the school had treated his daughter and granddaughter.
“I’ve watched my daughter—what she went though. It really broke my heart,” he said. “My daughter’s done nothing wrong. If anything, she’s too much of a good mom.”
He blasted the school for getting police and CPS involved.
“Right is right, wrong is wrong,” he said. “I think it’s not their place to teach what they’ve taught to my granddaughter.”
“I’m furious,” he added.
“What goes on in the schools? What’s the criteria that’s being taught? I mean, the things that are being taught in school kind of made it through the cracks,” he said.
Another mother shared a similar story about activist teachers targeting her daughter, and siccing CPS on her when she questioned their grooming activities.
“It’s happening across the state in California. It happened to me,” Jacobs said. “When I spoke with the school administration where my daughter was attending school about the name change, a few days later CPS was at my doorstep.”
The parents’ stories suggest school officials are using police and CPS as enforcers of their radical ideologies on families that are reluctant to go along.
“It’s extremely scary for parents to have CPS show up at their home over a name. It’s unexpected, and we’re caught off guard. Our parental rights are being trampled on by a teacher who may or may not have our child’s best interest at heart,” Jacobs said.
Another parent whose children attended Buena Vista Middle School told Epoch Times that she had repeatedly complained to the school over the last six years about the LGBTQ activism in the classrooms and on the school grounds. Cheryl Duffus said the activism had reached acceptable levels.
But she said when she heard about how Buena Vista teachers had coached other teachers how to hide GSA Clubs from parents, Duffus said she was shocked and outraged.
“I knew things were going on at that school. I had no idea about the deceit that was going on, the preying on children, and the lying to parents. I knew they were passionate teachers and that their agenda was spilling into the classroom, but I did not know that it had gone that far. I was mad. I mean, I was beyond mad,” she said.
“I do have several friends whose kids went to Buena Vista who are struggling with gender, and immediately … I wondered if they would be struggling if they didn’t go to that school,” Duffus said. “Would they be? Were they pushed?”
She told Epoch Times that something needs to be done immediately to stop the damage being done to the students at the school.
“It’s a disaster zone,” she said. “Somebody has to stand up and do the right thing or our whole town is lost,” she said.