Scores of documents obtained by a parents’ rights organization show that staff of Rochester Public Schools have undergone indoctrination in gender and social justice ideology, and imply that some teachers have been trained to keep gender transitions hidden from parents.
Parents Defending Education filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and obtained numerous documents, including presentations from staff trainings on LGBTQ issues.
One presentation from Dec. 10, 2020 featured a school’s “Equity Team,” which describes the “district’s strategic plan to ‘increase all students’ access to effective, culturally responsive educators,’” and includes the rainbow flag and “COEXIST” imagery. Another presentation from Nov. 22, 2023 included a land acknowledgement featuring a video of Native Americans using one word descriptions such as “lies, colonization, horror,” and “massacre” to describe Thanksgiving.
Other presentations given to staff included one from the AMAZEworks organization which offers “Pride resources.” Along with a “Land and Labor Acknowledgement,” the presentation included an activity called the “Social Justice Stretch.” The exercise directs participants to “reach down to get power from the grassroots” and to “reach up to the sky, to the ancestors for inspiration.” The exercise then directs stretchers to “shake off dominant western culture expectations of individualism, productivity, and perfectionism, move with the winds of change,” and “shine your superpowers into the world.”
Another training was focused on the topic of “exploring microaggressions,” which included discussion of “microassaults,” “microinvalidation,” and “microinsults.”
Beyond staff exercises, which also included helping “staff understand the concept of implicit and explicit bias,” other presentations outlined actions to be taken on the subject of gender identity. One presentation specifically instructed teachers that “someone’s gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation are not behaviors [for] you to ‘report’ to other staff or parents.”
Additionally, the presentation advised teachers that when “contacting parents of a trans student make sure to use the student’s name and pronouns as it is displayed in Skyward,” unless “the student has expressed to you that it is okay to use their preferred name and pronoun with their parents or guardians” or if the “parent is using the student’s preferred pronoun and name in communication with you.”
Alpha News reached out to Rochester Public Schools for comment on the nature of the documents, as well as the $15,000 charged for the public records request. Mamisoa Knutson, director of communications, replied that “all the examples of presentations Parents Defending Education published today were of staff training sessions, decided on at a school level.”
“The fee we charged is allowed under Minnesota law and was applied because fulfilling this was a diversion of staff time from teaching and learning to complete a complex data request. The data request was not a simple keyword search; dozens of staff at the district and school levels had to look through multiple years of their materials to find items that fell within the themes Parents Defending Education requested,” Knutson added.
The emergence of this information comes as the school board prepares to vote on a controversial policy on gender issues Tuesday night.
Evan Poellinger
Evan Poellinger, the Alpha News Summer 2024 Journalism Fellow, is a native Minnesotan with a lifelong passion for history and politics. He previously worked as a journalism intern with the American Spectator and an investigative journalism fellow with the Media Research Center. He is a graduate of College of the Holy Cross with degrees in political science and history.
