Following another election in which openly conservative candidates fail to gain traction in Waunakee following the publication of direct attacks on the school district over DEI and LGBT+ issues, where will the community turn?

Last week, the Dane Undivided blog posted an anonymous screed, titled “Gender-Bending Books at Waunakee School District’s Camp Kindergarten” with such catchy subheadings as “Are Schools Fostering Gender Dysphoria?” and makes the following closing argument to a WCSD audience within short distance before a School Board election where at least one conservative candidate is openly seeking to do battle with “DEI” in schools:

“Most parents want their elementary aged children to be taught valuable academics  at school. We want the school to stay out of trying to influence our child about thier [sic] sexual identity. We see great harm being done even by reading books to our children about gender identity. But the bottom line is that our schools are not what we want them to be. They’re mostly not run by people we can trust. In truth, our schools have been captured, and many of the teachers and administrators who staff them think they’re actually doing our children a favor by teaching lessons on gender identity. Parents who sit back these days run the real risk of seeing their children isolated from them and permanently damaged. Is it a risk you’re willing to take?

If any of this information concerns you, then you should demand to be fully informed on every single book, lesson, survey, and activity that your child is doing at school. It’s not just Waunakee that’s taking liberties…”

In short, the Anonymous Author sees “great harm” in a book being read to children about a boy who puts on a dress with some pretty pictures. Further, the author claims our schools are “not run by people we can trust” and suggests the schools are permanently damaging children by reading such books as “Julian At the Wedding”.

As any recent parent of a young child knows, if you read to your kids, you’re likely to end up reading a panoply of boring, inane or otherwise forgettable works of art designed to sell books to parents desperately holding off sticking their children in front of a tablet. Julian at the Wedding is a fairly anodyne entry in the thousands upon thousands of books in the milieu of children’s literary entertainment. If you’re tired of reading Paw Patrol or Roald Dahl to your kids, you can read a book about a boy who tries on a dress at a Big Lesbian Wedding and then dances at the party. BFD.

Perhaps those afraid of Julian are afraid of the sequels to this work of fiction (that they’ve created in their own brains), including: “Julian Scores a Hat-Trick on the U8 Girls Soccer Team”; “Julian Decides That Peeing Sitting Down is Preferable”; and “Julianna’s Grandparents Are Cancelled for Deadnaming”.

“At Heritage Elementary in Waunakee, WI, we definitely see some things happening around both LGBTQ+ and gender-bending books that administrators want to keep in the dark.”

Anonymous Author on Dane Undivided

I must respectfully disagree. I filed an open records request on March 26, 2024 with the Waunakee Community School District, as follows:

I never believed there was anything happening in the school district related to LGBTQ+ or “gender bending books” that the district wants to keep in the dark. This is buoyed by the fact that multiple individuals have done records requests over the last 2 years regarding these issues, and the district has presumably responded. The records obtained today (April 3, 2024) in response to my request are addressed below.

The individual who requested the information disclosed in the Dane Undivided piece stated her name is “Ruth Nelson”. I’ve attempted to contact the only Ruth Nelson I could find who lives in the Waunakee area and have received no comment.

It is unclear why Dane Undivided decided to redact Nelson’s name from the email chain.

Dane Undivided’s desire to prevent things from being kept “in the dark” clearly does not extend to their own identities.

It is not clear if Nelson is the author of the Dane Undivided piece, or if they were merely the conduit of information to the anonymous authors. Regardless, I place no value judgment on Mx. Nelson, as nothing in their emails indicates any level of animosity towards anyone, as they merely requested information from the District.

Further, the following documents display the records requests the district received from other individuals related to DEI, CRT, gender issues in the last two years:

• Five (5) requests from an “Ann Marie Malich” (who bizarrely copies Board of Education member Ted Frey on every email).
• A request from (presumably failed BOE candidate) “Zach Jensen” in which they claim that a teacher “read a book either about or involving drag queens, and then showed a subsequent video of similar content to her first grade class”.
• A request from a “Greg Gentz” over a spectacularly broad range of items.
  

And in a grand dénouement, these are those dastardly lesson plans in which Waunakee Camp Kindergarten teachers plot the destruction of the gender dichotomy that has upheld western civilization for +2000 years.

In summary:

Waunakee district staff are not grooming children. Don’t be stupid.

Teachers are not pushing gender ideology in class. No one really thinks this.

They are doing the best job they can to teach children through a transiently hostile work environment created by chronically misinformed, jughooting muppets.

Email your child’s teacher(s) today and tell them they’re doing a good job.

That’s what I’m going to do. And while you’re at it, email your Board of Education representatives and tell them to visibly speak out against this nonsense.

Last night, Mark Hetzel absolutely rinsed his challenger for his long-held board seat. If that’s not a mandate to support what Mark has already been doing by supporting public schools, I’m not sure what is. To his credit, Mark actually has already publicly fought back against Dane Undivided drivel while most others remained silent.

Above all else, I’m selfish. I’m supposed to be retired from these issues. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to never hear from me again. Maybe even tell the BOE members that if they bothered to publicly advocate for their staff and shut bad faith individuals down, “Mike Brandt might actually shut the fuck up for a change.”

It’s not likely, but it’s obviously worth a shot. ;-D