Dear Colorado residents,

With all due respect, what the hell is going on with your public schools? Altitude sickness? Last week, your largest teachers’ union passed a resolution declaring “Capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.” (That was ratified on Lenin’s birthday, no less.)

Today, we learn that families have filed a suit against Wellington Middle School and the Poudre School District for luring 6^th graders to a phony after-school “art club” that was “actually a gender and sexuality awareness club,” according to one mom.

The art teacher responsible brought in a speaker from “an organization called ‘Skittles’ for kids five to eleven to discuss gender and sexuality.” And the art teacher said to her daughter that “You don’t have to tell your parents.”

Hmm. A secretive sex class disguised as a kids club involved with someone who named their creepy organization after a beloved candy. I’m thinking of a word that may or may not be allowed on Twitter these days: starts with a G, ends with an ING, and has a ROOM in the middle.

Yes, that’s not a word sophisticated people use, but sophisticated people are seemingly okay with this:

[She] told the students they were transgender if they were not fully comfortable with their biological sex. The presenter also told students they could describe themselves as “queer” if they had not yet figured out their sexuality.

“She talked to them about polyamory. She told them that these new labels that they had just adopted made them more likely to commit suicide and talked to them extensively about suicide,” she continued … The presenter also allegedly discussed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, warning those in attendance that their parents may not be “safe” people to turn to as they struggle with certain identities.

Did I mention these kids were in sixth grade? Not too long ago, people who came up with elaborate schemes to sexualize children went to prison. Now they just go to education school.

But you know who the real bad guys in Colorado education are, according to NBC News? The conservative majority on the Woodland Park school board. Those weirdos, who won, NBC asserts because “because school board elections are held in off years” have done many horrifying things: so many and so bad that NBC’s story runs near 4,000 words (and has lots of thoughtfully moody pictures.) I’d say “Read the whole thing,” but I’m no sadist.

What did the school board do? Well, mostly, they angered the comrades in the teachers union. And one of them approvingly cited Donald Trump’s political tactics. And another one concluded his remarks at a January board meeting “with a prayer for the district: ‘May the Lord bless us and keep us, may His face shine upon us and be gracious to us.’” Is your flesh crawling?

They adopted:

the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.

“Positive aspects of the United States?” NBC doesn’t stock enough smelling salts to get its journalists through this kind of story. Now, it does sound like the board could be a lot more open with the public, but its real sin is pushing back against the woke education blob.

“I think they look at us as this petri dish where they can really push all their agenda and theories,” said Joe Dohrn, a Woodland Park father who described himself as a staunch Republican and “very capitalistic.” “They clearly are willing to sacrifice the public school and to put students presently in the public school through years of disarray to drive home their ideological beliefs. It’s a travesty.”

When you put it that way, how are they any different from the school boards of Loudoun County, Virginia or Chicago? How are they much different from David Graf, an English teacher who quit over the Woodland Park board’s direction?

He’d been teaching an elective class called “Civil Disobedience?” Why? NBC said it was “as an attempt to boost reading comprehension in Woodland Park.” What book was he teaching? “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Was “Das Capital” unavailable? If you want to boost reading comprehension and the first book you turn to is about hating America, you’ve got a severe ideological bent, and you are no better than the people you don’t want to work with anymore.

But here’s the point, Coloradans: it’s entirely reasonable to disagree with and deride the Woodland Park school board (though spending 4,000 words doing it says more about your problems than theirs). But unless you rein in the loony Marxists in the teachers’ union and purge the creepy groomers from the art room, get used to hearing un-ironic prayer during your school board meetings.