Dear Editor,
As someone who wonders if the continual rise of MT property taxes will one day make our home unaffordable, I want to give School District 2 voters some things to consider prior to voting on the safety levy. Ballots will be mailed out soon.
We will be asked to vote on the safety levy for schools, which is a perpetual levy that will only end IF the trustees one day decide we have enough funding and will vote to end it. Who believes that would ever happen? I do not feel this detail has been shared transparently enough to voters.
This levy will fund salaries for mental health counselors due to an indisputable increase in mental health concerns and violence among students. However, the push to increase mental health counselors within public schools stems from Michelle Obama’s initiative when her husband was in office. This causes me great pause. I personally know a school counselor within the district whom I greatly respect, admire, and would definitely send my kids to. However, many counselors these days are trained to affirm the cult of gender ideology upon our vulnerable kids. As we all know, the younger generation is experiencing a social contagion of confusion now which has been devastating to the kids, families, and our country.
There have been a group of concerned parents and community members within the district trying for many months to get SD2 to update their book review policies so pornographic, sexually explicit, obscene content would be removed from school libraries, and so librarians would have a policy in place that gives them guidance and a mandate to stop purchasing these types of books for children with our taxpayer funds. SD2 board has been dragging their feet on this and has not fixed the problem. They are forcing taxpayers to be complicit in providing obscene material to minors, which is against MT law. Providing this content to minors has been proven to cause depression, anxiety, and violence, among other problems. This should have been fixed prior to asking taxpayers for more money.
Finally, I also want to make sure all parents and taxpayers are aware that a Billings high school English teacher, a Billings West librarian and teacher, MT SCHOOL COUNSELORS Association, and MT Association of School Psychologists filed a lawsuit against OPI, Gianforte, MT Board of Public Education, and Supt. Artzen. Were they upset about their student’s failing academic scores? West High students alone have a 16% proficiency score in math, 26% proficiency score in reading, 18% proficiency score in science. That’s abysmal.
Maybe the district librarian and teachers in the lawsuit are upset about that? No, that’s not it, they are upset that legislators (voted in by the people of MT) passed a parental rights bill in 2021 which required 48 hour advance notification to parents prior to teachers instructing on gender identity or human sexuality instruction. Precious tax payer dollars will now be spent defending against their anti-parental rights lawsuit. If we think this through, this law should not have even affected the teachers’ daily job, had they had a focus on improving academics, and not pushing agendas. They would not need to worry about having to notify parents of anything, had they wanted to stick to teaching foundational subjects and not ideologies.
So, to get this straight, SD2 has staff that want to sue the state for the right talk to our kids about sex and gender identity without notifying us as parents first—that is a safety issue as big as anything they want us to pay for in a safety levy. I will be voting no on the safety levy.
Jessie Browning, Billings, MT
