I learned a great deal about the ways of the world when I performed some real investigative journalism that exposed a “bully” superintendent and the radical education agenda she sold like snake oil.
A few excerpts from interview sources in Trussville (where Dr. Freeman was superintend before her contract was terminated.) I easily found numerous sources, people those “vetting” Dr. Freeman for the same position in Pike Road apparently never spoke to:
“I think she was a cancer on our whole education system.”
“She left a trail of tears in our town. She split the whole community.”
“She got rid of at least 15 (teachers) at my school alone,” said one teacher. "Many teachers were so unhappy. They were subjected to constant criticism and felt so much fear. (Freeman) made their lives miserable.”
One math teacher friend was routinely “harrassed. Frreman picked on her every afternoon in one-on-one counseling sessions."
Those who might not have agreed with her philosophies were viewed as a threat and were basically “run-off.” These were people who “had not drunk the Kool-Aid.”
(Note: My wife and mother-in-law also didn't drink the Kool-Aid.)
A small group of parents began investigating the Schlecthy “Working on the Work, learner-centric” model.
Their quick conclusion: “These were shaky, unproven theories being tried on students. It was like our children were going to be guinea pigs. I remember I kept asking to see the data to support these ideas." No such data was presented to her satisfaction.
There's never any data, and never any quantifiable objectives that can be used to hold the cult to account. Ever.
This is, perhaps, its biggest weakness in a corporate context. Ask for measurable goals and accountability in writing, just as is the case with everything else (market share, product quality, customer satisfaction, etc, etc).
When you don't get them, ask if the objective is really just a form of affirmation and validation for its practitioners, and ask if it truly belongs in a professional context, or at a therapist.
The "march through the institutions" is possible because no real journalist can march into a mainstream news room and produce important real journalism.
Hi Bill--Was this person running a prototype experiment on how to implement 'woke' agenda into non-brainwashed (more traditional) states/communities? Did she have connections to the federal government? Very interesting post examining the micro level of how we got to where we are today ~ Ginger Breggin
She was - and might still be - the most conspicuous champion of these ideas. She'd been attending these "education leadership" seminars for probably decades. I have no doubt powerful people and companies were pushing these reforms.
In Part 2, I'll get into why so many parents - in a conservative Southern, affluent community - went along with these radical "California-like" reforms. I think "confirmation bias" - similar to what we see with the Covid shots - largely explains this. Once people "buy in," they are afraid to admit they might have been sold a bill of goods and were wrong on such an important subject to them and their family members.
When I covered the school system in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the nineties I saw a trend where that system and others fell into the habit of hiring "star" superintendents who promised to transform schools in various ways, in return for huge salaries and lots of other goodies.
In some cases these "star" superintendents didn't even live in the districts they were hired to transform.
Bill, accolades to you, your wife (and mother-in-law) for demonstrating the courage and fortitude it took to bring such educational malpractice out of the shadows and into the light. What I really appreciate is you operating in the local trenches to fully expose one version of the long march through the education institutions below the university level. If it was happening at Pike Road outside Montgomery, imagine how many other local school systems have adopted similar practices and elevated and encouraged superintendents like Dr. Freeman. It’s absolutely frightening to think about the impact this can have at an individual, community and national level. The letter you received from the very disenchanted student (“leaner”) was a beautiful catalyst to completing your investigative reporting. Have you thought to share this with Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute? His focus on these practices would be further informed by your first hand experiences.
Thanks, Mark. You and other readers get the point I hoped would come across - this is a wide-spread and coordinated program. Thanks for the suggestion on forwarding this to the Manhattan Institute. A retrospective study of what happened in this school system would be just the type articles the Manhattan Institute specializes in.
Bill, I appreciate your work here - and want to help spread the word your work represents.
That’s why I suggested sharing with Chris Rufo in particular - because he is all about identifying institutional takeover as you have - but also taking specific counter actions. If you don’t already subscribe to Chris’ Substack I strongly recommend you do. You two share a strong frequency.
[Corrected version.] Bill, in my area I have two library systems--which work hand in glove with the education system in implementing a collage of the implicit and explicit principles and guiding "fruits" of Vladimir Lenin, John Dewey's Pragmatism, and the genocidal project of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford: 'Authoritarian Personality'---a powerful tool for destroying European, Christian civilization mischaracterizing it as proto-fascist. But I imagine that you have investigated a lot of this. Of course, there are many other bad actors and their works. Back to the libraries, both systems have removed essentially all of the mathematics books. By "essentially all," I mean all except one or two useless works. At the Carnegie system, once a great system for elevating the American common man, the librarian struggled to find where the mathematics section should be and had to go back to the desk to look it up on the computer and then resorted to the head librarian in the office. But they had plenty of trashy sex magazines targeting young girls. In the other system, the librarian explained that a woman comes from the central [library] of this system and periodically remove[s] books that "were not of interest," and mathematics are just not interesting to young people now. One of the systems was parking, by agreement, their bookmobile in a Baptist church parking lot. I visited it once. The driver tried to draw my attention to a book he was pulling off of the top shelf ---the topic was homosexuality. When I signaled [m]y rejection, he quickly re-inserted it into its shelved position. This is the kind of filth that we have allowed to "march through the institutions." It is non-governmental organizations that have, of course, long ago penetrated the various levels of government: Federal and, variously, many if not most state and local governments as well. With that accomplished, and with the education system up through higher academia producing the now-reigning Marxo-corporate leaders, they have established a system that has already purged, like Communists do, any potential dissidents. Of one thing I am sure, the degree to which I am deliberately ignored on social media sites, even here for the most part, is blaring and glaring testimony to the fact that someone wants me silenced. And wherever censorship is, there are also agents of soft-soap distraction come to fill in the vacuities. Look at the symbolic spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, or the Democrat convention and even parts of the Republican convention and you can see the agenda. As a good acquaintance of mine of thirty years explained to me once in a frank moment, when I asked him what bothers Jews about European Christians, he answered: "You're too uptight." Well, of course, he meant "too uptight" about sexuality. This is the big rub---that, and of course the idea that some have that Chrisians are not equivalently human, or ensouled. Th[at] latter thing makes the vicious genocidal slaughter and re-location of civilian Palestinians, men, women and children (including significan[t] numbers of Christians), and upwards of 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and many civilians and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers (almost all Christians in both camps) matter little. What did Jordan B. Peterson say, something like, "Go get 'em, Bibi?" Good God, what a foul thing to say. Make no mistake, through banking, the Press, Hollywood and pseudo-academia, these forces have diminished the Christian character of America and the West and have targetted the cultures of restrained sexuality. The consequences are all around us. The end goal is ominous, for corroboration look up Barbara Spectre's well-known, infamous warning (if not threat) to ethnic Europeans. I recently invited Naomi Wolf to a discussion regarding Israel. She avoided the invitation and two subsequent reminders that the offer still stands. I suggested that it was time for the Jews to apologize to the Christians for what has been done. It is indeed time for Jews to be introspectively critical, publicly remorseful and to see themselves a co-equal and valid with every other ethnic group. I was a long-standing philosemite, and am still respectful of their excellences as each ethnic group has an adaptive excellence. And we each have our propensities for abuse as well. It is time for Israel to join the family of nations, not as an overlord, but as a friendly nation. No, Benjamin Netanyahu getting--as is typical--nearly 60 standing ovations in Congress for a 60-minute talk is disgraceful and as Representative Massie exposed: 'prima facie' evidence of the massive, treasonous bribery of U.S. politicians along with likely blackmail (or possibly worse). Our government [ ] presently does not serve American Citizens. The United States and the European nations, Christians--especially Catholics--have many enemies and many around the world whose 'ressentiment' and infiltrative and migratory power can be utilized against them. In the early days of the COVIDian mania, early December 2020, I began podcasting. As a biologist, I early on recognized that what was going on was a very sophisticated type of predation, and I introduced along with that idea the notion of vigilance as the counter to the accusation of "conspiracy theorizing." (I was well familiar with this concept from my graduate school days where we employed exercises for students in Animal Behavior teaching labs to study vigilance in birds.) Some of our biggest threats are not external, however. They are internal. The DNC convention, soaked in Marxism, should be evidence of that, as the outworking of decades of the dissolution of our culture and its "immune sytem" of Christian consciousness [is manifested and celebrated]. Now we return to the issue of your school system and its deliberately imposed dys-educational pathology. It is g[ua]ranteed [that] students with excellences and gifts will be discouraged and disadvantaged---especially males. It is guaranteed that white Europeans will be disadvantaged by the authoritarian, in-your-face implementation of "progessive" systems, policies and contrivances. It is guaranteed that deconstruction of Catholic, Christian and Western sexual restraint will be integral to present, or soon-coming, indoctrination. Sexual restraint, family building, strong and loving husbands and fathers as leaders of the family, intellectual excellence as a value (a real bonus that Catholic schools previously provide[d] for Catholics and non-Catholics of all races for social advancement), these are the things that build civilizations and keep them strong. No[w] who would want to counter these things as "hateful?" And by the way, Dr. Naomi Wolf, if you read this, the offer still stands for you and me having a public discussion on how we can build a more peaceful and secure world for everyone, Jews and Gentiles. It should be fun and, God willing, a charitable blessing for everyone.
Government screwel is tantamount to child abuse. Woke parents won't spank their kids, but will cut their nuts off. Parents are to blame for having allowed the commoditization/indoctrination of their children... ignoring that the system and the professional acceptance of the system is one big fraud. Marxist 'workers' act like they're doing something to be paid for - and the government acts like they're paying them to do something - but neither are true.
The most obtuse leaders - espousing the "craziest" or most radical reforms - often end up in positions of power and authority. They end up in these influential positions because they get sterling recommendations from other leaders who attended the same conferences, retreats and "leadership seminars."
Nobody in the press covers these education/leadership symposia .. or, if they do, the journalists agree with all the reforms that are being pushed.
.... clubs/guilds hold their meetings in secret - and our silence gives them consent. JFK said, ".... secrecy is repugnant in civilized societies." Education is just one small slice of the bureaucratic 'stolen and redistributed' pie... among the countless criminal government enterprises they'd have us believe are legit.
The school boards who intentionally hire these superintendents need to have their feet over the fire. When the community responds to the woke reformers, it is the taxpayers who have to, pay the buyout contracts and again pay the finders fees. Salt Lake City, where I moved to five years ago, had this happen twice within two years. Though most families are passive or plain busy paying for food and shelter, there must be enough citizen involved to push back on the harmful and overly progressive school boards.
You are absolutely right in pointing out that this problem and many others would not go under the radar if journalists and media companies were doing their part as a true fourth estate. They are one of the main culprits of all our problems.
I also learned no reporters ever covered the Pike Road school board meetings - until I started attending. The only reason I attended is that no member of the school board would grant me any interviews. The lawyer for the school system threatened to throw me out of a meeting after I attempted to ask a few questions at one meeting. (Details to come in Part 2).
I got the minutes from all these school board meetings and learned the board had never rejected a Freeman proposal/recommendation. The minutes were a joke and included virtually no important details.
Man, I wish that meeting had been video-taped. It was something. I've never had a lawyer and entire school board threaten to throw me out of a public meeting before ... for asking questions they didn't like ... when I am a journalist.
Names of superintendents in salt lake school district since 2019
Based on the provided search results, here is the list of superintendents in the Salt Lake City School District since 2019:
Lexi Cunningham (resigned at the end of the school year)
Interim Superintendent Martin Bates (appointed after Cunningham’s resignation)
Elizabeth Grant (officially became the new superintendent on July 6, 2023)
Timothy Gadson III (selected as the district’s top administrator on December 20, 2023, making him the first Black superintendent to lead a Utah school district)
Brave, microsoft, and google search engines are being very squirrely and evasive when I posed the question of SLC superintendents since 2019. That by itself is very interesting.
Excellent work Bill!!! Kids need ADULTS to be there and watch over them. Not to use them as puppets in their theatre of life. About 3yrs ago I was at my 6rd old niece's bday party and she kept parroting, "I don't want to be normal!" Then a month later I was back at their house for another party and heard a younger friend (maybe 5?) singing the same sentence while roaming around the yard. I asked my sister what she thought it meant and she said, "Oh I don't know, they're telling them to basically let their freak flags fly. Let their inner weirdness out." I wasn't shocked but definitely concerned. Seemed like a weird concept for a kid under 10 to embrace, but who am I?
I just read the autobiography of the leader of the Foo Fighters, who used to be the drummer for Nirvana. He uses that "freak flag" language all the time. His mother encouraged him to let it fly ... and it worked out for him!
He became an author in 2020 when the experts and authorities banned all concerts. He had to have something to do - so he wrote a best-selling memoir. (I enjoyed it).
Wow, Bill! Very similar to my experience teaching elementary school for 30 years in No. Calif. We had more than one “Dr. Freeman” as both superintendents and school principals. Then “equity education” and COVID came down the road, and many parents began to see the “useless eaters”/so-called “educators” for what they were (and still are) and some even began to move their children to private schools…but no real reform in spite of some very colorful school board meetings. Tragically, nothing permanently changed and the district is as “woke” as humanly possible.
God graciously allowed me to retire and move to my husband’s smaller hometown before total madness became the district norm. No looking back for me, though now with grandchildren enrolled in nearby school districts we are becoming aware of the evil DEI disease trying to creep into our previously RED (now purple😮) community, and are looking to support a wonderful conservative young father who is running for school board to help stop this insidious encroachment.
Thank you for this article, and for the bravery shown by both you and your wife and family. 🙏
Thanks, Judy. As I'll show in Part 2, I learned that 140 students left the school system in its first few months - and more after this. People were voting with their feet - and were willing to pay expensive private school tuition to get away from "The Pike Road Way."
Even the first PTA president resigned and sent her kids to a private school.
Good luck to that school board candidate. I now believe even more in elected school board members - not the ones that Suzanne Freeman herself appointed (to be her "boss.")
That link works - or my long, main story pulls up - after I Google "Dr. Suzanne Freeman Pike Road Way - The Wetumpka Gazette 2016."
It's disheartening to me that this story - multiple stories actually - are not easily accessible or archived on the web. I think links to these stories could help prevent Dr. Freeman getting hired as superintendent in other towns or expose some of these radical reformers .... but not if the stories are gone.
The bottom-line to me is that education reformers like this harm children, who receive an inferior education. So they should be stopped.
Pike Road students should score in the Top 10 percent of all School Systems in the State on annual state-mandated assessment reviews. This is because this is a very affluent suburb and school districts with similar demos almost always have the best test results (like Auburn, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, etc.) PIke Road students score average or below average on these test results.
Bill, I never knew about this since at that time we were living in Dothan and our daughter was out of college. I so appreciate the courage of your wife, mother in law and you for doing all that you did to expose this. Having a husband and daughter as well as many in the family who are educators, I cannot thank you enough! Cannot wait to read tomorrow’s article!
The Lord works in mysterious ways. After Carrie was fired, she applied for teaching jobs in Montgomery, Autauga and Elmore Counties, but nobody would hire her. One educator told her, "Carrie, you have a giant 'Do Not Hire" sign on your head right now."
Fortunately, Troy City Schools needed an English teacher and I was friends with chairman of the education board and put in a plug for Carrie. Troy City Schools hired Carrie, which prompted us to move back to Troy.
The teacher Pike Road Schools and Dr. Freeman fired (my wife) was later named "Teacher of the Year" in Troy.
Here, here for Carrie. There are so many casualties in this war that are unlikely to be celebrated by even the alternative press. But it is not being celebrated that matters to such virtuous people. What I regret is that such stories of wrecked jobs, ruined family finances, derailed careers, whistleblowing, scapegoating by organizational mobbers, destroyed reputations, political assassinations, etc. are not entered into the compendium of necessary stories that we get to know about, to learn from, and to inspire us and to educate into the strategy and tactics of the enemy and to inform our responses.
Thanks, David. Yes, more of the stories need to be saved and should be more commonly known. The number of victims - like Carrie and my mother-in-law - is massive. Dr. Freeman created legions of victims every place she was superintendent.
Transcriber B and others have saved many of these stories for future historians.
That is excellent to hear about the archiving. I have extensive work I did on organizational mobbing---which often is involved in capturing and solidifying control of institutions. I have a chapter that I have that needs some dusting off.
I am familiar with Transcriber B. I will revisit that site.
Yes He does! I am so thankful he brought you all back to our area! I have been sharing several of your articles on my FB page and know some people have read them! Keep up the good work you are doing! We need more journalists like you!
Thanks, Karen! I can't even get on Facebook any more. You sharing my stories should help me reach my best "target audience" - people who actually know me. Hopefully, they remember I'm not a complete "wacko" or "kook."
The vast majority of my friends - in Troy or anywhere - don't even know I publish a Substack newsletter. Most, probably don't know what Substack is.
I will continue to share because you are not “wacko”! You are doing a great work! Keep it up! And tell your wife I have great admiration for her and her mother for what they did at Pike Road schools! I believe that she and our daughter would be great friends and have much in common not only as fellow educators but in their courage and convictions! I am so grateful there are people like y’all that are raising their children right and helping others see the truth about what is happening in our country!
I just found this letter to the editor I sent to the Montgomery Advertiser on May 10, 2017. This was after the Pike Road School board named Dr. Freeman's successor. Not surprisingly (to me), this letter was NOT published.
Dear Editor:
Another “Boo!” for the Pike Road Schools Board of Education which seems to have just hired its new superintendent while providing no opportunity for the public to ask this “candidate” questions.
At a “public interview” Tuesday night, the board asked Dr. Charles Ledbetter some questions in his “job interview” but it turns out the board had already made its decision. Audience members could only ask the candidate questions in a “meet and greet” prior to or after the event.
None of the board members’ queries addressed specific areas of great importance to Pike Road parents such as myself. Questions such as will Pike Road continue with the “innovative” Pike Road Way? Will students be tested on a regular basis? Will they receive traditional grades and GPAs? Will they use textbooks? Will the unprecedented utilization of “project based learning” continue? Will the controversial “FreshGrade” assessment software be dumped?
That such questions were not asked (nor answered) confirms to me that the status-quo “Pike Road Way” will continue.
In the past 20 months, large numbers of parents have withdrawn their children, staff attrition has been eye-opening, the school’s first ACT Aspire results were embarrassing. None of these facts carried enough weight with the board to change directions or demand major changes. Unbelievable.
Via the school’s website, The board did publish Dr. Ledbetter’s application letter as well as his answers to questions the board submitted. Anyone who reads Dr. Ledbetter’s answers will quickly conclude that he enthusiastically endorses all the reforms that make PRS unique.
On a positive note, Dr. Charles Ledbetter is not Dr. Suzanne Freeman. While his education philosophy mirrors Freeman’s and he seems to be one of her admirers, it is hard to imagine anyone being a more inept or polarizing administrator than his predecessor.
This reminds me of the Bret Weinstein / Evergreen fiasco. It’s still the scariest thing I’ve ever watched. Bright young teenagers turned into violent, rabid animals in about a year. This is part 1 of 3 part documentary. https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk?si=neSaB3SMuaSimZEb
Me too. I was just dumbfounded by what took place there. It was a real lesson as to what is going on in education and now wider society. However this indoctrination has occurred it’s sure to make life much more miserable. Minds that addled cannot create anything good.
A few excerpts from interview sources in Trussville (where Dr. Freeman was superintend before her contract was terminated.) I easily found numerous sources, people those “vetting” Dr. Freeman for the same position in Pike Road apparently never spoke to:
“I think she was a cancer on our whole education system.”
“She left a trail of tears in our town. She split the whole community.”
“She got rid of at least 15 (teachers) at my school alone,” said one teacher. "Many teachers were so unhappy. They were subjected to constant criticism and felt so much fear. (Freeman) made their lives miserable.”
One math teacher friend was routinely “harrassed. Frreman picked on her every afternoon in one-on-one counseling sessions."
Those who might not have agreed with her philosophies were viewed as a threat and were basically “run-off.” These were people who “had not drunk the Kool-Aid.”
(Note: My wife and mother-in-law also didn't drink the Kool-Aid.)
A small group of parents began investigating the Schlecthy “Working on the Work, learner-centric” model.
Their quick conclusion: “These were shaky, unproven theories being tried on students. It was like our children were going to be guinea pigs. I remember I kept asking to see the data to support these ideas." No such data was presented to her satisfaction.
There's never any data, and never any quantifiable objectives that can be used to hold the cult to account. Ever.
This is, perhaps, its biggest weakness in a corporate context. Ask for measurable goals and accountability in writing, just as is the case with everything else (market share, product quality, customer satisfaction, etc, etc).
When you don't get them, ask if the objective is really just a form of affirmation and validation for its practitioners, and ask if it truly belongs in a professional context, or at a therapist.
The "march through the institutions" is possible because no real journalist can march into a mainstream news room and produce important real journalism.
Hi Bill--Was this person running a prototype experiment on how to implement 'woke' agenda into non-brainwashed (more traditional) states/communities? Did she have connections to the federal government? Very interesting post examining the micro level of how we got to where we are today ~ Ginger Breggin
She was - and might still be - the most conspicuous champion of these ideas. She'd been attending these "education leadership" seminars for probably decades. I have no doubt powerful people and companies were pushing these reforms.
In Part 2, I'll get into why so many parents - in a conservative Southern, affluent community - went along with these radical "California-like" reforms. I think "confirmation bias" - similar to what we see with the Covid shots - largely explains this. Once people "buy in," they are afraid to admit they might have been sold a bill of goods and were wrong on such an important subject to them and their family members.
When I covered the school system in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the nineties I saw a trend where that system and others fell into the habit of hiring "star" superintendents who promised to transform schools in various ways, in return for huge salaries and lots of other goodies.
In some cases these "star" superintendents didn't even live in the districts they were hired to transform.
It was a scam, straight up.
Bill, accolades to you, your wife (and mother-in-law) for demonstrating the courage and fortitude it took to bring such educational malpractice out of the shadows and into the light. What I really appreciate is you operating in the local trenches to fully expose one version of the long march through the education institutions below the university level. If it was happening at Pike Road outside Montgomery, imagine how many other local school systems have adopted similar practices and elevated and encouraged superintendents like Dr. Freeman. It’s absolutely frightening to think about the impact this can have at an individual, community and national level. The letter you received from the very disenchanted student (“leaner”) was a beautiful catalyst to completing your investigative reporting. Have you thought to share this with Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute? His focus on these practices would be further informed by your first hand experiences.
Thanks, Mark. You and other readers get the point I hoped would come across - this is a wide-spread and coordinated program. Thanks for the suggestion on forwarding this to the Manhattan Institute. A retrospective study of what happened in this school system would be just the type articles the Manhattan Institute specializes in.
Bill, I appreciate your work here - and want to help spread the word your work represents.
That’s why I suggested sharing with Chris Rufo in particular - because he is all about identifying institutional takeover as you have - but also taking specific counter actions. If you don’t already subscribe to Chris’ Substack I strongly recommend you do. You two share a strong frequency.
[Corrected version.] Bill, in my area I have two library systems--which work hand in glove with the education system in implementing a collage of the implicit and explicit principles and guiding "fruits" of Vladimir Lenin, John Dewey's Pragmatism, and the genocidal project of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford: 'Authoritarian Personality'---a powerful tool for destroying European, Christian civilization mischaracterizing it as proto-fascist. But I imagine that you have investigated a lot of this. Of course, there are many other bad actors and their works. Back to the libraries, both systems have removed essentially all of the mathematics books. By "essentially all," I mean all except one or two useless works. At the Carnegie system, once a great system for elevating the American common man, the librarian struggled to find where the mathematics section should be and had to go back to the desk to look it up on the computer and then resorted to the head librarian in the office. But they had plenty of trashy sex magazines targeting young girls. In the other system, the librarian explained that a woman comes from the central [library] of this system and periodically remove[s] books that "were not of interest," and mathematics are just not interesting to young people now. One of the systems was parking, by agreement, their bookmobile in a Baptist church parking lot. I visited it once. The driver tried to draw my attention to a book he was pulling off of the top shelf ---the topic was homosexuality. When I signaled [m]y rejection, he quickly re-inserted it into its shelved position. This is the kind of filth that we have allowed to "march through the institutions." It is non-governmental organizations that have, of course, long ago penetrated the various levels of government: Federal and, variously, many if not most state and local governments as well. With that accomplished, and with the education system up through higher academia producing the now-reigning Marxo-corporate leaders, they have established a system that has already purged, like Communists do, any potential dissidents. Of one thing I am sure, the degree to which I am deliberately ignored on social media sites, even here for the most part, is blaring and glaring testimony to the fact that someone wants me silenced. And wherever censorship is, there are also agents of soft-soap distraction come to fill in the vacuities. Look at the symbolic spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, or the Democrat convention and even parts of the Republican convention and you can see the agenda. As a good acquaintance of mine of thirty years explained to me once in a frank moment, when I asked him what bothers Jews about European Christians, he answered: "You're too uptight." Well, of course, he meant "too uptight" about sexuality. This is the big rub---that, and of course the idea that some have that Chrisians are not equivalently human, or ensouled. Th[at] latter thing makes the vicious genocidal slaughter and re-location of civilian Palestinians, men, women and children (including significan[t] numbers of Christians), and upwards of 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and many civilians and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers (almost all Christians in both camps) matter little. What did Jordan B. Peterson say, something like, "Go get 'em, Bibi?" Good God, what a foul thing to say. Make no mistake, through banking, the Press, Hollywood and pseudo-academia, these forces have diminished the Christian character of America and the West and have targetted the cultures of restrained sexuality. The consequences are all around us. The end goal is ominous, for corroboration look up Barbara Spectre's well-known, infamous warning (if not threat) to ethnic Europeans. I recently invited Naomi Wolf to a discussion regarding Israel. She avoided the invitation and two subsequent reminders that the offer still stands. I suggested that it was time for the Jews to apologize to the Christians for what has been done. It is indeed time for Jews to be introspectively critical, publicly remorseful and to see themselves a co-equal and valid with every other ethnic group. I was a long-standing philosemite, and am still respectful of their excellences as each ethnic group has an adaptive excellence. And we each have our propensities for abuse as well. It is time for Israel to join the family of nations, not as an overlord, but as a friendly nation. No, Benjamin Netanyahu getting--as is typical--nearly 60 standing ovations in Congress for a 60-minute talk is disgraceful and as Representative Massie exposed: 'prima facie' evidence of the massive, treasonous bribery of U.S. politicians along with likely blackmail (or possibly worse). Our government [ ] presently does not serve American Citizens. The United States and the European nations, Christians--especially Catholics--have many enemies and many around the world whose 'ressentiment' and infiltrative and migratory power can be utilized against them. In the early days of the COVIDian mania, early December 2020, I began podcasting. As a biologist, I early on recognized that what was going on was a very sophisticated type of predation, and I introduced along with that idea the notion of vigilance as the counter to the accusation of "conspiracy theorizing." (I was well familiar with this concept from my graduate school days where we employed exercises for students in Animal Behavior teaching labs to study vigilance in birds.) Some of our biggest threats are not external, however. They are internal. The DNC convention, soaked in Marxism, should be evidence of that, as the outworking of decades of the dissolution of our culture and its "immune sytem" of Christian consciousness [is manifested and celebrated]. Now we return to the issue of your school system and its deliberately imposed dys-educational pathology. It is g[ua]ranteed [that] students with excellences and gifts will be discouraged and disadvantaged---especially males. It is guaranteed that white Europeans will be disadvantaged by the authoritarian, in-your-face implementation of "progessive" systems, policies and contrivances. It is guaranteed that deconstruction of Catholic, Christian and Western sexual restraint will be integral to present, or soon-coming, indoctrination. Sexual restraint, family building, strong and loving husbands and fathers as leaders of the family, intellectual excellence as a value (a real bonus that Catholic schools previously provide[d] for Catholics and non-Catholics of all races for social advancement), these are the things that build civilizations and keep them strong. No[w] who would want to counter these things as "hateful?" And by the way, Dr. Naomi Wolf, if you read this, the offer still stands for you and me having a public discussion on how we can build a more peaceful and secure world for everyone, Jews and Gentiles. It should be fun and, God willing, a charitable blessing for everyone.
Thanks for sharing these views and observations, David.
I think "they" don't like Reader Comment Sections either. At least those they don't "moderate" or control.
Government screwel is tantamount to child abuse. Woke parents won't spank their kids, but will cut their nuts off. Parents are to blame for having allowed the commoditization/indoctrination of their children... ignoring that the system and the professional acceptance of the system is one big fraud. Marxist 'workers' act like they're doing something to be paid for - and the government acts like they're paying them to do something - but neither are true.
The most obtuse leaders - espousing the "craziest" or most radical reforms - often end up in positions of power and authority. They end up in these influential positions because they get sterling recommendations from other leaders who attended the same conferences, retreats and "leadership seminars."
Nobody in the press covers these education/leadership symposia .. or, if they do, the journalists agree with all the reforms that are being pushed.
.... clubs/guilds hold their meetings in secret - and our silence gives them consent. JFK said, ".... secrecy is repugnant in civilized societies." Education is just one small slice of the bureaucratic 'stolen and redistributed' pie... among the countless criminal government enterprises they'd have us believe are legit.
🤣🤣Never heard it put that way before “…won’t spank their kids, but will…” So apropos for the sensibilities of the woke!
Munchausen By Proxy Syndrome - any attention is good attention to the sociopathic.
Great article Bill!
Every town needs a Bill Rice.
Thank you, Howard. I agree; every town does need at least one real journalist. I would say about 1 in 2,000 towns have one.
1 in 2,000 strikes me as generous, alas.
The school boards who intentionally hire these superintendents need to have their feet over the fire. When the community responds to the woke reformers, it is the taxpayers who have to, pay the buyout contracts and again pay the finders fees. Salt Lake City, where I moved to five years ago, had this happen twice within two years. Though most families are passive or plain busy paying for food and shelter, there must be enough citizen involved to push back on the harmful and overly progressive school boards.
You are absolutely right in pointing out that this problem and many others would not go under the radar if journalists and media companies were doing their part as a true fourth estate. They are one of the main culprits of all our problems.
I also learned no reporters ever covered the Pike Road school board meetings - until I started attending. The only reason I attended is that no member of the school board would grant me any interviews. The lawyer for the school system threatened to throw me out of a meeting after I attempted to ask a few questions at one meeting. (Details to come in Part 2).
I got the minutes from all these school board meetings and learned the board had never rejected a Freeman proposal/recommendation. The minutes were a joke and included virtually no important details.
You could propose to the school board, that the meetings be
*video-recorded*...and *archived* in the public interest.
Man, I wish that meeting had been video-taped. It was something. I've never had a lawyer and entire school board threaten to throw me out of a public meeting before ... for asking questions they didn't like ... when I am a journalist.
….because you’re a journalist.
I fixed it for you!
Names of superintendents in salt lake school district since 2019
Based on the provided search results, here is the list of superintendents in the Salt Lake City School District since 2019:
Lexi Cunningham (resigned at the end of the school year)
Interim Superintendent Martin Bates (appointed after Cunningham’s resignation)
Elizabeth Grant (officially became the new superintendent on July 6, 2023)
Timothy Gadson III (selected as the district’s top administrator on December 20, 2023, making him the first Black superintendent to lead a Utah school district)
Brave, microsoft, and google search engines are being very squirrely and evasive when I posed the question of SLC superintendents since 2019. That by itself is very interesting.
Excellent work Bill!!! Kids need ADULTS to be there and watch over them. Not to use them as puppets in their theatre of life. About 3yrs ago I was at my 6rd old niece's bday party and she kept parroting, "I don't want to be normal!" Then a month later I was back at their house for another party and heard a younger friend (maybe 5?) singing the same sentence while roaming around the yard. I asked my sister what she thought it meant and she said, "Oh I don't know, they're telling them to basically let their freak flags fly. Let their inner weirdness out." I wasn't shocked but definitely concerned. Seemed like a weird concept for a kid under 10 to embrace, but who am I?
I just read the autobiography of the leader of the Foo Fighters, who used to be the drummer for Nirvana. He uses that "freak flag" language all the time. His mother encouraged him to let it fly ... and it worked out for him!
He became an author in 2020 when the experts and authorities banned all concerts. He had to have something to do - so he wrote a best-selling memoir. (I enjoyed it).
Go here. Five minutes and this guy nails it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z42pqeCicIY
Wow, Bill! Very similar to my experience teaching elementary school for 30 years in No. Calif. We had more than one “Dr. Freeman” as both superintendents and school principals. Then “equity education” and COVID came down the road, and many parents began to see the “useless eaters”/so-called “educators” for what they were (and still are) and some even began to move their children to private schools…but no real reform in spite of some very colorful school board meetings. Tragically, nothing permanently changed and the district is as “woke” as humanly possible.
God graciously allowed me to retire and move to my husband’s smaller hometown before total madness became the district norm. No looking back for me, though now with grandchildren enrolled in nearby school districts we are becoming aware of the evil DEI disease trying to creep into our previously RED (now purple😮) community, and are looking to support a wonderful conservative young father who is running for school board to help stop this insidious encroachment.
Thank you for this article, and for the bravery shown by both you and your wife and family. 🙏
Thanks, Judy. As I'll show in Part 2, I learned that 140 students left the school system in its first few months - and more after this. People were voting with their feet - and were willing to pay expensive private school tuition to get away from "The Pike Road Way."
Even the first PTA president resigned and sent her kids to a private school.
Good luck to that school board candidate. I now believe even more in elected school board members - not the ones that Suzanne Freeman herself appointed (to be her "boss.")
Totally agree, Bill. 👍 Looking forward to Part 2.
The "this pdf document" link at the close currently goes to www.apple.com.
It does appear that journalists no longer have the time or budget to investigate misdeeds in local government.
That link works - or my long, main story pulls up - after I Google "Dr. Suzanne Freeman Pike Road Way - The Wetumpka Gazette 2016."
It's disheartening to me that this story - multiple stories actually - are not easily accessible or archived on the web. I think links to these stories could help prevent Dr. Freeman getting hired as superintendent in other towns or expose some of these radical reformers .... but not if the stories are gone.
The bottom-line to me is that education reformers like this harm children, who receive an inferior education. So they should be stopped.
Pike Road students should score in the Top 10 percent of all School Systems in the State on annual state-mandated assessment reviews. This is because this is a very affluent suburb and school districts with similar demos almost always have the best test results (like Auburn, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, etc.) PIke Road students score average or below average on these test results.
Thanks, "PIke Road Way" and Dr. Freeman.
Bill, I never knew about this since at that time we were living in Dothan and our daughter was out of college. I so appreciate the courage of your wife, mother in law and you for doing all that you did to expose this. Having a husband and daughter as well as many in the family who are educators, I cannot thank you enough! Cannot wait to read tomorrow’s article!
The Lord works in mysterious ways. After Carrie was fired, she applied for teaching jobs in Montgomery, Autauga and Elmore Counties, but nobody would hire her. One educator told her, "Carrie, you have a giant 'Do Not Hire" sign on your head right now."
Fortunately, Troy City Schools needed an English teacher and I was friends with chairman of the education board and put in a plug for Carrie. Troy City Schools hired Carrie, which prompted us to move back to Troy.
The teacher Pike Road Schools and Dr. Freeman fired (my wife) was later named "Teacher of the Year" in Troy.
Here, here for Carrie. There are so many casualties in this war that are unlikely to be celebrated by even the alternative press. But it is not being celebrated that matters to such virtuous people. What I regret is that such stories of wrecked jobs, ruined family finances, derailed careers, whistleblowing, scapegoating by organizational mobbers, destroyed reputations, political assassinations, etc. are not entered into the compendium of necessary stories that we get to know about, to learn from, and to inspire us and to educate into the strategy and tactics of the enemy and to inform our responses.
Thanks, David. Yes, more of the stories need to be saved and should be more commonly known. The number of victims - like Carrie and my mother-in-law - is massive. Dr. Freeman created legions of victims every place she was superintendent.
Transcriber B and others have saved many of these stories for future historians.
That is excellent to hear about the archiving. I have extensive work I did on organizational mobbing---which often is involved in capturing and solidifying control of institutions. I have a chapter that I have that needs some dusting off.
I am familiar with Transcriber B. I will revisit that site.
Yes He does! I am so thankful he brought you all back to our area! I have been sharing several of your articles on my FB page and know some people have read them! Keep up the good work you are doing! We need more journalists like you!
Thanks, Karen! I can't even get on Facebook any more. You sharing my stories should help me reach my best "target audience" - people who actually know me. Hopefully, they remember I'm not a complete "wacko" or "kook."
The vast majority of my friends - in Troy or anywhere - don't even know I publish a Substack newsletter. Most, probably don't know what Substack is.
I will continue to share because you are not “wacko”! You are doing a great work! Keep it up! And tell your wife I have great admiration for her and her mother for what they did at Pike Road schools! I believe that she and our daughter would be great friends and have much in common not only as fellow educators but in their courage and convictions! I am so grateful there are people like y’all that are raising their children right and helping others see the truth about what is happening in our country!
Bravo, Mr Rice! Excellent work.
I just found this letter to the editor I sent to the Montgomery Advertiser on May 10, 2017. This was after the Pike Road School board named Dr. Freeman's successor. Not surprisingly (to me), this letter was NOT published.
Dear Editor:
Another “Boo!” for the Pike Road Schools Board of Education which seems to have just hired its new superintendent while providing no opportunity for the public to ask this “candidate” questions.
At a “public interview” Tuesday night, the board asked Dr. Charles Ledbetter some questions in his “job interview” but it turns out the board had already made its decision. Audience members could only ask the candidate questions in a “meet and greet” prior to or after the event.
None of the board members’ queries addressed specific areas of great importance to Pike Road parents such as myself. Questions such as will Pike Road continue with the “innovative” Pike Road Way? Will students be tested on a regular basis? Will they receive traditional grades and GPAs? Will they use textbooks? Will the unprecedented utilization of “project based learning” continue? Will the controversial “FreshGrade” assessment software be dumped?
That such questions were not asked (nor answered) confirms to me that the status-quo “Pike Road Way” will continue.
In the past 20 months, large numbers of parents have withdrawn their children, staff attrition has been eye-opening, the school’s first ACT Aspire results were embarrassing. None of these facts carried enough weight with the board to change directions or demand major changes. Unbelievable.
Via the school’s website, The board did publish Dr. Ledbetter’s application letter as well as his answers to questions the board submitted. Anyone who reads Dr. Ledbetter’s answers will quickly conclude that he enthusiastically endorses all the reforms that make PRS unique.
On a positive note, Dr. Charles Ledbetter is not Dr. Suzanne Freeman. While his education philosophy mirrors Freeman’s and he seems to be one of her admirers, it is hard to imagine anyone being a more inept or polarizing administrator than his predecessor.
Bill Rice, Jr.
Pike Road
This reminds me of the Bret Weinstein / Evergreen fiasco. It’s still the scariest thing I’ve ever watched. Bright young teenagers turned into violent, rabid animals in about a year. This is part 1 of 3 part documentary. https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk?si=neSaB3SMuaSimZEb
Me too. I was just dumbfounded by what took place there. It was a real lesson as to what is going on in education and now wider society. However this indoctrination has occurred it’s sure to make life much more miserable. Minds that addled cannot create anything good.
Well said, Kittykat.