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Washington Post columnist James Hohmann tweeted the news Friday the newspaper’s poll shows “education” is now “the No. 1 issue for Virginia voters in the governor’s race, edging out the economy.”
“In September, education voters favored McAuliffe by 33 points, but now they tilt toward Youngkin by nine points,” Hohmann wrote.
According to the Post:
The Post-Schar School poll, which was conducted Oct. 20-26, finds a larger share of voters saying education is the top issue in their vote compared with the September poll, with fewer citing the coronavirus as the biggest factor in their decision. The survey interviewed 918 likely voters reached by professional interviewers on cellphones and landlines, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The Virginia gubernatorial race between former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin comes as parents are fully engaged in local education issues, many battling against woke school boards and local school officials promoting the teaching of concepts associated with Critical Race Theory (CRT) and LGBTQ activism, and insisting on mask mandates for all children in schools.
If education is the primary issue in the governor’s race, it may boil down to a view of who is ultimately in charge of children’s education.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe stated emphatically during a debate with Youngkin.
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” the Democrat asserted.
But Youngkin countered, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
While McAuliffe has accused Youngkin of spending campaign time “focused on banning award-winning books from our schools & silencing the voices of Black authors,” Youngkin observed the former governor vetoed a bill that would have required parental notification of books available to children that included sexually explicit content.
Consequently, controversial books that were kept on the shelves in Virginia schools included Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, which contains explicit illustrations of sexual encounters, including oral sex and masturbation, involving children.
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Another book, Lawn Boy, contains graphic descriptions of sex between men and children.
In late September, the Fairfax County school district finally removed these two books from its libraries after parents protested.
The governor’s race is down to the wire as Loudoun County Public Schools continues to make headlines with multiple scandals.
High school students chanting “Loudoun County protects rapists” held a walkout this week following a decision by Juvenile Court Judge Pamela Brooks that found a high school boy, dressed in a skirt, is guilty of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio in a sexual assault on a girl in the girls’ bathroom.
The same boy has also been charged with a more recent sexual assault this month of another girl at another Loudoun County high school.
However, Scott Smith, whose daughter was assaulted during the first incident in May, became a central focus of the story of parents’ struggles with school officials when, on June 22, he was dragged out of a school board meeting and arrested after hearing school officials supportive of transgender bathrooms deny there had been reports of sexual assaults in these spaces.
LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler also stated he was unaware of any assaults happening in the bathrooms.
As Breitbart News reported last week, Ziegler later acknowledged, following parents’ outrage, the school district has “failed” to provide safety for its students.
Smith and his wife are demanding an apology from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) for characterizing parents who are outraged about actions taken by their local school boards and school officials as “domestic terrorists.”
The NSBA letter was crafted by Chip Slaven, NSBA’s interim executive director and CEO, and Viola Garcia, the association’s president, who, emails obtained later revealed, informed the association’s board of directors they had worked with the White House prior to sending their September 29 letter to President Joe Biden, requesting federal law enforcement use the PATRIOT Act to target parents voicing concerns at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.”
Another report yesterday, however, by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office indicated yet another investigation is underway following multiple reported incidents of a male student inappropriately touching students at a district middle school.
Former President Barack Obama, who was in Virginia last weekend campaigning for McAuliffe, dismissed the issues parents have raised at school board meetings as “fake outrage,” and “trumped-up culture wars,” as Breitbart News reported.