Stories from the Battlefield

Each week, we will showcase the excellent work of one of our NLTE chapters (you can find your chapter here). This week we are highlighting the Virginia chapter, led by Yael Levin. Here’s what Yael had to say:

What brought you into No Left Turn in Education?

About two and a half years ago my county, Henrico County in Virginia, started a process of school zone redistricting. I began organizing parents to go to school board meetings and attend redistricting committee meetings and even used my skills as a data scientist to build better redistricting maps. When Covid shut our schools down, I organized parents in my county to petition to safely re-open schools in September 2020.

We quickly discovered that the true obstacle to reopening schools and to any improvement in our public schools was the teachers’ union. It was around this time that I stumbled upon an interview of Dr. Yaron-Fishbein on the Dana Loesch show, and immediately knew I had to contact her. I got in touch with her and started the Central Virginia Chapter in April 2021. We officially launched our chapter with an outdoor event on May 18, 2021!

Yael (middle) with No Left Turn in Education Virginia members.

What are your biggest accomplishments as a chapter?

In just 6 months since we launched NLTE in Central Virginia we formed nine school divisions!

We have successfully gotten the School Board of the largest school division in Central VA (Chesterfield County) to vote to ban CRT. We have also been able to get pornographic books pulled out in several school divisions.

A FOIA request of ours was honored which revealed information about Covid funds being funneled to school divisions to implement Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and for universal masking through 2023. Multiple teachers in Virginia have provided us with training materials and pictures from classrooms that violate school board, Virginia, and even Federal policies and have used those to file formal complaints with various area school boards.

We were instrumental in educating parents about the radical indoctrination, sexually explicit materials, and disempowering curricula being taught in Virginia schools. We empowered parents to make their voices heard, engage with elected officials and neighbors alike, and be the change Virginia needed.

And finally, we have been hard at work widely exposing the harmful material and pedagogy being used in schools in Virginia, which includes CRT and sexually explicit materials. We have been educating parents and the public about the harm this inflicts on our children. We are empowering, engaging and mobilizing parents to stand up and speak out to voice their objections to this outrageous issue. Our efforts have contributed to making education the central issue in the recent Virginia election. The newly elected leadership has pledged to honor parental rights and restore high quality education in Virginia schools.

We are just getting started!

Yael with Virginia's newly-elected leaders: Lt. Governor Winsome Sears & Governor Glenn Youngkin

Who are the people that join your state chapter?

We are seeing people from diverse personal and professional backgrounds involved in with our chapter. Our most active members are mama and papa bears and grandparents. We have woken up a giant that transcends every social and economic strata.

Flier from a NLTE VA chapter meeting in September.

What else should people who want to join NLTE know?

We are a diverse group of common-sense Americans who want for our kids to be learning reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, and the love of our country. We want all kids to get the resources they need in order to thrive in schools. For that reason, we believe in equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes.

All of our history must be taught, including the dark parts. But we believe we also have to acknowledge how far we have come since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is a lot more to improve, but we also want to celebrate our accomplishments.

We believe in modeling to our children that we need to focus on what brings us together, rather than what sets us apart. We believe in being culturally responsive and aware, without tearing down American culture and values. We believe, as cliché as it sounds, that children are our future, and they deserve the path we set for them to be bright and free.

Chapter heads like Yael are the types of fighters we need in our movement. We're thankful for her and for the work her chapter in Virginia is doing.

— The NLTE Team

About NLTE: No Left Turn in Education is a 501 c(3) non-profit, parent-led organization that seeks to revive the American K-12 education system based on the fundamental discipline of critical and active thinking based on facts, investigation, logic and sound reasoning. We have active chapters in 27 states, and growing! Get involved at noleftturn.us.

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