Arizona Legislators Propose Communist-Style ‘Community Schools’
By Kimberly Ells
May 27, 2022
Published February 13, 2022
Primary Publisher: The Daily Signal
Article Link: https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/13/arizona-legislators-propose-communist-style-community-schools-2/
A twentieth-century Russian communist said, "Children, like soft wax, are very malleable…We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family… From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools… To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state—that is our task."
How was this to be done? The government would provide comprehensive care centers for all children. In these centers, children would be “supervised by trained pedagogical and medical personnel” who would fulfill all the children’s educational, physical, social, and emotional needs.
Arizona is the latest entity to move toward embracing a communist-style education model called "community schools" that is gaining traction around the globe. Last week, Arizona lawmakers introduced a bill that calls for the development of community schools. These schools will "partner with one or more community-based organizations to coordinate academic, social and health services" for children and their families. The bill would transform participating schools into increasingly full-service community centers.
The National Community School’s Agenda
The National Education Association is both an architect of and proponent for the community schools movement. The association’s "What Are Community Schools?" webpage says, “Community schools provide free healthy meals, health care, tutoring, mental health counseling, and other tailored services before, during, and after school." It goes on to say, "The Community Schools Model… should be replicated in every community, no matter how big or small," and that "it’s time every child gets the community school they deserve."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also actively promotes community schools in the name of children’s health. On the CDC’s "Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child" webpage, it lays out the plan for raising up the next generation of children based on the "Whole Child" education paradigm. It says there should be "greater alignment" between "education leaders and health sectors to improve each child’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development."
The CDC’s "Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child" model focuses on 10 components: 1. physical education and physical activity; 2. nutrition environment and services; 3. health education; 4. social and emotional climate; 5. physical environment; 6. health services; 7. counseling, psychological, and social services; 8. employee wellness; 9. community involvement, and 10. family engagement.
Note that family falls dead last on the list. This is not a trivial accident. While "parental and family involvement" are given robust lip-service in such initiatives, the main thing the community school model does is reduce the influence of parents and exponentially expand the role of the state-run school.
Schools as the 'Hearts of Family Life'
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama, said in 2009, "The more schools become the hearts of family life, the better our students are going to do." He said, "Children desperately need some sense of stability, they need some anchor in their lives, community schools are huge, huge ways to do that."
He doesn’t see the home as the hub of stable family life, he sees “community schools” as "the hearts of family life." I can think of few things more distasteful than that.
He says schools should focus on the physical, social, and emotional aspects of children’s lives. Duncan specifically says we must be "thinking about attaching health care clinics to schools and having them be one-stop shops. The question is how do we make that experience the norm rather than the exception." He concluded that "every single school" should be a "community school," and that they would be "a big part of the answer" to saving our children.
School-Based Health Centers
Arizona’s bill, like others around the nation, says participating schools would offer "a variety of programs and services" including “health and social services” for children and their families. What kind of health care services might be available at schools?
Well, Planned Parenthood has been quietly assisting in attaching health centers to schools for years. At least 13 clinics "in Seattle-area public high schools and middle schools offer long-acting reversible contraceptives, including IUDs and hormonal implants, to students in sixth grade and above at no cost," according to state officials.
A Medicaid spokesperson for Take Charge, a government program that provides free contraception to low-income individuals, confirmed that underage students serviced in these clinics are eligible for a "full array of covered family planning services." Could a sixth-grader get an IUD implanted without parental consent? Take Charge says yes: "If the young person is not choosing abstinence, she would be able to select a LARC and have it inserted without parental consent."
Bear in mind that long-acting reversible contraceptives are associated with serious side effects, including perforation of the uterus and infection. Could school-based abortions be next? I’m sure Planned Parenthood hopes so.
Dethroning the Family
This is, of course, not the first time school-centric, anti-family legislation has been proposed. President Richard Nixon vetoed a proposal called the Comprehensive Child Development Act in the 1970s on grounds that it would commit "the vast moral authority of the national Government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing over against the family-centered approach."
The administration said,
We cannot and will not ignore the challenge to do more for America’s children in their all?important early years, but our response to this challenge must be… consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization. Good public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children.
Rather than "cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization,” the Biden administration is firmly on board with the community schools movement. In July 2021, the Department of Education “announced that $443 million of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan would invest in community schools” to transform schools into communist-style community centers.
The Global Community Schools Agenda
The community schools concept has global origins. A 2017 U.N. document proposed that governments promote “policies and initiatives regarding the construction of national care systems" that would provide "accessible, affordable and quality childcare and care facilities for older persons, persons with disabilities… and all others in need of care," which would potentially include all children.
The U.N.’s 2015 global education document called The Incheon Declaration dubs the Global Partnership for Education as a key player in the "global coordination mechanism." It seeks to establish schools that are educational facilities, nutrition facilities, and medical facilities all under one roof, and they are currently focused on funding such schools in developing nations.
While presenting community schools as a convenient, one-stop-shop location to tend to a child’s every need, in reality, they are primed to become centers of indoctrination into radical and abusive ideologies. An infographic showcasing Global Partnership for Education’s grand vision for full-service schools specifically cites comprehensive sexuality education as an essential part of school health programming, beginning at elementary-school ages.
Comprehensive sexuality education is an ideology that sexualizes children, exposes children to pornographic material, introduces them to gender ideology, and undermines the parent-child relationship.
UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank all sit on the board of directors for Global Partnership for Education. The push for community schools is enormous, well-funded, and will barrel forward unless parents and policymakers stop it.
The community schools movement is exciting to people such as anti-family activist Sophie Lewis, author of "Feminism Against Family." She is thrilled that "there have lately been powerful calls for counter-familial institutions and communist centers" to "meet all humans’ basic needs for the first two decades of their lives." This would move the world closer to her communist vision of widespread "family abolition."
It is becoming clear that the "artificial mother" communist and socialist activists of previous decades dreamed of is now knocking vigorously at the door: It is the state-sponsored, full-service, globally connected "community school." Don’t let it in.
