What in the world happened to Wauwatosa Schools? The Wauwatosa School System is now effectively MPS-West. Gone are the days of Tosa being the go-to destination for young families to escape districts like MPS in order to get into the ‘better’ Tosa schools.
There was a time when Tosa Schools were in the top five of the state. Now they are lucky to be in the top 30 and falling quickly. They are now hub of left-wing indoctrination and a new hyper-sexual curriculum. I bet this makes Tony Evers very proud. More on that later.
So, how did we get to this point, and how do we stop other school districts from suffering the same fate? To put it simply, it was slow and methodical over the years and followed by a quick push over the edge.
I personally have more than 30 years invested in the Tosa School system, and I have seen the changes first-hand.
In 1982, when I was in 8th grade, my family moved to Wisconsin, and we settled in Wauwatosa. I eventually graduated from Wauwatosa West. Like many people, I stayed for my first few years of adulthood, got married, and moved. Then, after having our first child, my wife and I made the same decision my parents made and moved back to Tosa.
Tosa was well known as a great place to raise a family. It was growing, thriving, and very diverse. Politically, I loved the fact that it was deep purple. Liberals and Conservatives worked together, got along, and there was very little ideological tension. On top of all that, the schools were in the top tier in academic achievement. A selling point.
Fast forward several years, we were still in Tosa and all three of our children were in the Tosa School system. It was a great system where parents were involved, teachers taught, and the School Board actually listened to parents. Things were great.
Of course, there was a strong Teacher’s Union presence, but it was not over the top. Or so I thought…They were quietly working behind the scenes to cram liberal agenda items like Common Core into the curriculum.
The tipping point seemed to be in 2008 with the election of Tony Evers as Wisconsin State Superintendent of schools, followed by the election of Governor Scott Walker in 2010. Walker and the Republican legislature proposed Act 10 and, according to the left, the ‘sky was going to fall!’ Some teachers were handing out union propaganda at parent/teacher conferences, while others were using school resources to make protest signs for the leftist insurrection in Madison.
Of course, I complained to the principal and the Tosa School Superintendent. They seemed responsive and that was mostly quashed.
In 2015, something more sinister began to brew behind the scenes. We saw the emergence of a ‘non-partisan, concerned parents’ group called SOS-Wauwatosa. It turned out that it was a left-wing, hyper-partisan, an activist group that was hiding behind the ‘non-partisan’ label. The founders had signed the recall against Scott Walker. Need I say more?
I wrote an op-ed exposing them and they were not happy with me.
Starting in 2016, the School Board seats started to move further and further to the left as one extremist activist after another was elected, under the guise of being ‘non-partisan.’ That’s when I noticed the seismic shift toward complete left-wing indoctrination.
I’d be wrong to neglect the now infamous ‘$125 Million’ referendum ($300 Million+ real cost) that Tosa taxpayers got duped into supporting. Money for bricks instead of books. Incidentally, with today’s increasing interest rates, that cost could top $500 Million. But I digress.
The liberals on the school board shifted from merely begging for more money while suckling at the state government tit, to allocating preciously limited class time for the utter ideological indoctrination of our kids.
Suddenly the merry band of extreme leftist social justice warriors on the school board had a virtually unlimited pocketbook to pull from in order to begin to entrench their ideological indoctrination agenda. You didn’t really think that money was strictly going to pay for cool new buildings, did you? Buyer’s remorse? I dare say, I told you so!
This indoctrination started affecting younger and younger grades. In 2019, part of the 7th-grade class at Longfellow Middle School QUIETLY took a field trip to the LGBT Community Center. Huh? A field trip to a place based on sexual preference? Yes, this is a true story. I’m sure they won’t be going to the straight people community center anytime soon. But wait, it gets worse.
I had long suspected and complained about the covert creeping indoctrination and even wrote about it in previous articles, but in early 2020 I had proof. I received an anonymous tip from a Tosa School employee.
They had talked about how the district championed the removal of the reading hour in 8th Grade, replacing it with an ‘Advisory Hour’ at both middle schools. It was touted as a time to ‘help’ students with their ‘socio-emotional’ learning.
Seriously? Why did they focus on socio-emotional learning when test scores had dropped by 10% since taking away reading hours? It’s not like reading is important or anything. Please forgive my sarcasm. Mind you they did not ask parents, because of course, the ‘professionals’ knew best. Sigh!
Initially the hour focused on things like anti-bullying programs and making sure our kids treat everyone with respect, etc. Noble things to be sure, but what came next made the REAL intent even more clear.
Along with the anonymous letter, I received a printed copy of the 16-page LGBTQ PowerPoint for that advisory hour. That’s right–16 pages ‘instructing’ kids on how to act, talk to, and talk about, the LGBTQ ‘culture’.
Simply put, indoctrination materials and propaganda for a specific political group are being FORCED down the throats of our kids. This was to be taught to 8th graders at both Whitman and Longfellow. That’s right, 8TH GRADE!
Of course, the left-wing social justice warriors will immediately call me a bigot and a homophobe for daring to question their ‘infinite’ wisdom. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s sad that I even must clarify this, as a Conservative with some Libertarian leanings, I have a ‘live and let live’ mentality. I don’t care who people sleep with. It’s not my business.
What I do care about, is kids as young as kindergartners being hyper-sexualized at such a young age, with so much detail when they don’t have the mental capacity to handle it. Schools are NOT the place for this. Especially when Wauwatosa Schools are falling behind on things that actually matter. Like reading. Like math. Like science.
What’s more, somebody removed the PowerPoint from the school’s Google drive after the ‘lesson’ was complete. Seriously, if it’s something so controversial that they felt they needed to remove any trace, should they have been teaching it to our kids in the first place?
In early 2021, with growing concern after a couple of years with the covert ideological ‘agenda’ that had been creeping into the Tosa school curriculum, I had to make a very difficult decision.
You see, schools must be ideologically neutral and focus on teaching skills that kids will need in life, college, and the workforce. But in the case of Tosa, the school system had swung so far to the left that Mao would have been proud. At this point, my two oldest children had graduated, and I still had one left, a Freshman at Tosa East. I really wanted my son to finish in Tosa, just like his sisters before him.
Then, to add insult to injury, then Superintendent, Phil Ertl, as a last effort to stick it to the taxpayers, approved spending close to one million dollars to hand out $1,000 ‘hazard pay’ bonuses to teachers and staff. Why? Tosa teachers did not lose a dime in pay throughout the pandemic. This expense was on top of the recent referendum boondoggle which taxpayers were still reeling about
My son’s mom and I could not offset the permanent damage caused by this ideological indoctrination and wasteful spending. I was done, I immediately pulled my son out of Tosa East. I did not even wait for the semester to finish. The schools were becoming unsafe, academic performance declining, costs increasing, and moves that would surely entrench the leftist indoctrination agenda pushed by the merry band of social justice warriors on the school board.
Tosa schools today are now unrecognizable from 2015. They have become a cesspool of ‘extremism, grooming, and indoctrination. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is now the rule and they are no longer stopping at middle school.
THE EXTREMIST SCHOOL BOARD IS NOW OUT IN THE OPEN and the curtain is pulled back for all to see, and they are now coming for our youngest…
To control what people think, you begin by controlling what they say.
Presently, the now solid 6-1 Tosa School Board is led by School Board President, ‘Dr.’ Eric Jessop-Anger, a self-avowed ‘male feminist’, UWM Professor, social justice warrior, and beta-male who hyphenates his name. Need I say more?
Armed with a supermajority and unlimited money train, Jessop-Anger and his five other like-minded school board members set out to control minds from the youngest ages. They began by replacing the outgoing school superintendent with an extreme and compliant social justice warrior, Dr. Demond Means.
Means is an extremist who literally got chased out of town by a former school system for his indoctrination agenda. A perfect person to implement the Tosa board’s extremist agenda.
After the most recent spring elections, Jessop-Anger and his 6-1 majority immediately set out to implement the Wisconsin Department of Education’s newly approved Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) curriculum, aka Human Growth and Development CSE hides behind the label of ‘Rights, Respect, Responsibility (3Rs).
The 3Rs use lectures, classroom activities, slideshows, and role-playing games to ‘educate’ students. Thanks to the Tosa School Board decision on August 22, 2022, the 3Rs will be used in the Wauwatosa School District beginning this school year. , even though the teachers haven’t been trained, nor have all teaching positions been filled as of August.
Soliciting community feedback
Of course, as with any indoctrination program, the left wants to implement, they begin with a ‘parent survey.’ But this time it was rather telling how they went about it. The CSE was ‘proposed’ at an earlier board meeting, which set the nefarious actions into motion.
In order to try to direct the survey results toward the end goal of implementation, they had to control the results.
First, they worded the questions in such a way as to make CSE seem ‘harmless’ in an effort to soften the real ‘agenda.’ Here’s what the community was NOT told in the survey: The CSE program is designed to normalize child sex in order to deliberately desensitize children to sexual things. Some exercises give examples of children having sex and imply that many of their peers are sexually active. It even glamourizes sex, uses graphic materials to teach explicit sexual vocabulary and encourages discussion of sexual experiences, attractions, fantasies, or desires. As early as Kindergarten, it promotes affirmation of and/or exploration of diverse gender identities.
It teaches children they can change their gender or identify as multiple genders or may present other unscientific and medically inaccurate gender theories. To stay true to the overall agenda, it fails to teach that most gender-confused children resolve their confusion by adulthood and that extreme gender confusion is still a mental health disorder (gender dysphoria) that can be helped with mental health treatment.
CSE deliberately encourages children to question their parents’ beliefs or their cultural or religious values regarding early sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. It may instruct children they have rights to confidentiality and privacy from their parents and gives access to sexual commodities or services, including abortion, without parental consent. Finally, in a very sneaky way, it encourages kids to not to tell their parents what they are being taught about sex in school.
Parents and community residents were only allowed two weeks to research, review the curriculum, and take the survey. To make things worse, they broke up the survey into literally every grade level; effectively requiring 13+ surveys to be taken. This was all by design, after all, who had the time to take that many surveys? The fix was in.
Luckily the results came back overwhelmingly against the program. End of the story?
Not quite.
After all Jessop-Anger has the title of ‘Dr.’ at the front of his name, so he knows better than ordinary parents. He desperately wanted this program implemented and nothing would stop him.
The school district immediately started to purge the survey results of ALL emails that were not on current school lists. Really? So basically, all of the Tosa taxpayers who did not have kids in the Wauwatosa School District but were still shelling out tax dollars for schools and the referendum were not allowed a say in the matter?
What arrogance on display for the board to ignore them. Things that make you go hmmm. Why was Jessop-Anger and his merry band of social justice warriors so desperate to sexualize our youngest kids?
Well, obviously the manipulation by the board members changed the results and got them closer to what they wanted. They had one last session of regulated public comment (not everyone was given a chance to speak), even though they had already made up their minds, to appease some of the citizens.
Once the comments ended the board proceeded to discuss in an Oscar-worthy performance for the citizens. One glimmer of hope was the lone holdout, Mike Meier. He wanted to pause the decision until the late September meeting to formulate an alternative for parents who did not want to participate in the 3Rs.
Of course, Superintendent Means objected because this ‘would delay implementation.’ And we all know he wanted to begin the indoctrination process immediately to have maximum effect. Then Jessop-Anger spoke and dared to call the CSE 3Rs program the ‘RADICAL MIDDLE’. Not even close, this is a page right out of ‘the Naked Communist. Look it up. It’s a blueprint from the 1950s of how Marxism would take over our society. This was not the radical middle, but in sync with the radical left.
Then came the vote. Not surprisingly, Mike Meir’s proposal failed 6-1. Then on the final vote, the best actor Oscar went to board member Leigh Ann Fraley, who had a dramatic pause when her name was called; as if to be reflective and on the fence. Hardly, as she has been a left-wing rubber stamp ever since getting on the board. She didn’t fool anyone with that performance. Once again, the vote was 6-1.
In other words, the board NEVER intended to consider the results of the survey, or consider the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Tosa taxpayers who objected to this garbage.
This is really no surprise, the board was just doing the bidding of Tony Evers anyway. Let’s remember, that Evers became State Superintendent of Schools in 2008, a decade before becoming Governor. Coincidence? Not at all. TONY EVERS HAS HIS NAME ON EVERYTHING! This is all by his design.
Alas, here we are with the Wauwatosa Public School system in a pile of metaphorical ashes after the extremists burned down everything that was built over the years and with one sinister August vote, changed everything. I am aware of several parents who are immediately pulling their kids out of the system. I am also aware of several teachers who have left the system because of indoctrination.
The system is nothing more than a hub of the Democrat party. Recently, current Lt. Governor and Senate Candidate Mandela Barnes filmed a campaign commercial inside of Wauwatosa West. Are they going to allow Ron Johnson to film a campaign commercial there? I doubt it. And that’s just one example of Tosa Schools showing Democrat party favoritism in an election year. But it doesn’t stop there. On opening day, democratic Lt. Governor candidate Sara Rodriquez was at Wauwatosa West shaking hands with teachers and staff and “welcoming” students.
Where do we go from here?
An exodus is happening, but really, where do Tosa Schools go from here? What recourse do Tosa residents have? I’ll be honest, this will literally take years to repair the damage and get Tosa Schools back to the center. At the same time, other systems in the state are falling victim to this extremism.
First things first, we need to elect Tim Michels as Governor in November. If we do not have the catalyst for change at the state level, NOTHING WILL CHANGE. He is on record supporting Universal School Choice.
That is a start, but more needs to happen. Governor Michels, along with a Republican legislature can completely overhaul the State Superintendent’s office and how the state allocates revenue sharing to schools. Districts like Wauwatosa can be forced to change directions when part of their funding is withheld.
At the local level, there are board seats up for re-election this coming April; PRIMARY THEM! Then there is always the possibility of recall. Those can be tricky unless there is a lot of funding and support. Remember, state law requires a person to be in office for at least a year before recalling. And in Tosa, consider making the school board seats aligned with a “district” similar to common council seats. All but one school board seat is held by a member of the “west” side. The rest are from a more liberal east Tosa.
As parents, knowing this will all take time to fix, I fear the best thing you can do for your kids is to consider removing them from public schools. Now, the system is failing and will only get much worse. There are options, from Choice, Private, Home School, online, etc.
Also, start talking to parents in other districts. Make them aware so they don’t become like MPS West, I mean, like Wauwatosa Schools.
Remember, you do have resources and parents from all over the state who are willing to help and spread the word. You are not alone.
There is a lot of work to do to stop this insanity in our schools, and this starts with you. WE CANNOT BE COMPLACENT. Let’s continue winning back school board seats, one by one. Above all, remain in the fight–they cannot silence us all.
