PearlS | The Average Pearl

Post School Board Election

Well. I’m ba-ack!

It’s been more than a little difficult getting The Average Pearl back up and running. Somehow I was able to pretty much make it disappear from my view but completely accessible to the world at the same time.

Joke’s on me! Internet, you truly live forever, as long as there is electricity and computer-cloud storage somewhere in a huge warehouse in Texas.

If you don’t live locally (or get Google alerts on me, as one dear friend did and texted me, concerned from two states away)—I ran for District C Director for our local school board.

Post November fourth I was hoping two weeks might be enough for me to figure out the blog re-emergence and get my feet back underneath me. I met probably thousands of wonderful, supportive people, but not enough to overwhelm the voting booth, or here in Durango, the mailbox. Such happens with voting at-large for a particular district and hidden progressive agendas in the school.
(Also, to be honest, my freshman efforts at campaigning with zero experience ever asking for donations nor ever having been involved in politics in any way.)

Stacked against me was an incumbent board that has sold their souls to grievance politics and social-constructionism, and financially and vocally backed by the Democratic party bent on destroying my character and dragging my good name through the mud—an ironic combination considering their attacks were incredibly hypocritical.

Imagine this: a group of people writing policy that crows about their inclusiveness and commitment to diversity and equitability—yet smearing my Christian faith in newspaper columns, social media, and on Reddit. You see, it is hard to live up to your own subjective DEI standards when you actually, factually hate people with different worldviews who have the guts to speak out against the rhetoric.

The ever pious Durango Herald, never one to let a conservative alone without a public verbal spanking, moaned and fretted and simply couldn’t recommend two mothers to serve on the board with *gasp* religious backgrounds. Again, ironic. The religion of faux-inclusion, implicit bias training, and sexualizing children reigns supreme! Let’s continue with a good thing!

The big, shocking news was that I had put my blog to sleep and was “hiding” something… Something that must be uncovered and exposed to the world. A right-wing wacko, that’s what I was. A smiling face hiding an extreme agenda, said another op-ed.

I don’t want to hash all this ugly out. Truly it was fairly enraging and supremely stressful, not to mention dangerous for my family. I could not eat for days on end. I was hurt by lies told and misrepresentation of my character. Friendships I valued were severed because of careless people who cared about nothing more than to destroy me.

Up till this campaign I had lived a quiet life with my family. When I decided to offer my skillset, time, and resources—my good intentions were met with disdain and pure hatred.

As a Christ-follower I know better than to let emotions rule my life. I know my duty to forgive my enemies and to pray for them. I know that the nastiness of people is nothing more than an untamed tongue and nothing less than spiritual warfare.
I know, even writing this, that to be persecuted for my faith is to sit in solidarity with a great cloud of witnesses and Jesus Himself.
I have realized that to be a Christian, a true Christian, is to live a life of joyful, persistent, and sometimes painful truth-telling.

Maybe you will roll your eyes at this, reader, because how can running for school board be such a big deal?

And I hope you might be fool enough to do it yourself, then.
(I will surely be fool enough to cheer you on.)

I will write more of my experience and the unbelievable things taking place in our schools—let’s just say our issues are bigger than poor test scores, classroom behavior, and blatant transgender indoctrination.

Remember,

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
1 Corinthians 13:6

Thanks, of course, to the 4100+ voters who filled in the circle for my name: generous donors, countless prayer warriors, conservative stalwarts, concerned citizens, friends, neighbors…We did not lose. Our winning happens by continuing to expose dark deeds by shining the light on them.
Unfortunately, our tax dollars still support the current school board’s mission to indoctrinate, divide, and sexualize children. As long as progressive activists wield the power to write policy, our children’s rights and protection are at risk.
Keep standing up for kids!

Pearl

Law of Diminishing Return Your Cart to the Corral: Policies for the no-gooders.

I have started and abandoned a dozen posts since my last school board update post.

The short of it is this: school is out for the summer.
I’ve been in meetings that established some things—meetings where I’m welcome and meetings where I am not. Of course it’s never fun to be explicitly uninvited, and it puts me in a position to feel a bit insecure—a natural instinct of mine.
So I’ve been quiet, thinking.
Ought I be involved in policy? People I know, love, and respect refuse to be involved. Is speaking up a worthless endeavor?
Should I post about it on the internet? If I post about it on the internet, will I lose ground in the uphill battle?
Are intimidation factors at play? If I am publicly and vocally honest, do I forgo any future influence I might have as a parent in this culture?

But as I keep telling myself—I don’t have much to lose that I haven’t already lost. I don’t have a resume to speak of—I have chosen to raise my kids instead of following a career path (props to a bread-winning husband).
I have no other agenda than protecting kids, advocating for parents, and proclaiming the gospel. I can be utterly transparent with a school district and expose “dark deeds” without worrying if I will lose my job.

And here is the risk you take, Christian friends, if you should choose to follow Jesus in the public arena (which, let us clarify, is simply the world—unavoidable in our human existence):
You risk losing face, losing friends, losing respect. You risk time, money, family, freedom, dreams.

It should either encourage you in your steadfastness or prompt you to abandon faith completely, because this is the story of Christians throughout history: unless you are willing to risk everything in this world, you cannot be a disciple of Jesus. (Luke 14:26-33)

Christians are in the business of counting the cost and losing what is valuable to find what is precious. What good is it, my brother, if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?

Then I consider this: if rules are to be made and enforced, then someone reasonable needs to be drafting them, not people who are willy-nilly on behavioral expectations, or folks that won’t think past their own, most base desires.
One of the reasons I became a Christian was because it is loads and loads more reasonable than putting faith in some iteration of humanism where “people are mostly good.”

A friendly acquaintance of mine parroted this and I sat there, stunned, because if people were mostly good we wouldn’t be in this troubling situation. People are entirely not good.
People, left to their own devices, destroy themselves and other people and call it freedom (see abortion—murdering unborn infants,
see cheating and divorce–ripping apart families,
see covetousness—looking, lusting, despising on the internet for hours,
see pride—wanting and consuming in excess and bragging like it’s the American Dream).

If we draft policy that assumes people are mostly good, we intrinsically assume we as policy-makers have the moral upper hand—that we replace Divine Law—what a Christian might say is God, or what an atheist may say is Science.
We allow people to become perverted versions of themselves, to act like animals, for criminal behavior to invade society, for evil to prevail. We, thinking ourselves gods of a sort, begin to assume wild notions like it’s only kind to let men and boys use the women’s restroom. Or, the right sort of non-girl will use the women’s restroom with the proper intent. You can see where this leads. People get hurt, kids, abandoned, futures, destroyed. Society decays, and folks that desire what is selfless, pure, and Good are hiding in their locked houses while outside, chaos reigns.

I was learning about water treatment with one of my kids on a fifth grade field trip. A student asked why the facilitators wouldn’t add more chemicals to the water, if, as they had just said, chemicals were good.
“Great question,” the engineer said. “There’s a thing in science we call the Law of Diminishing Return. You see, we can add chemicals to a point, but then we find that continuing to add more doesn’t give us a better output. So we stop.”

I love that—the reasonableness of it! A law of nature, tested by nature. Here is the line, and we cannot pass it and achieve a better outcome. Lawmakers in civil policy ought to follow suit.
Bathrooms separated by gender, and not gender identity: meet Law of Diminishing Return. But progressive lawmakers ignore this law of nature and prefer to think of people as generally good, and themselves as lowercase gods.

If we draft policy that assumes people are mostly not good (and what I mean by good is this: of an others-first, ethically moral persuasion)—however, that not good people still have the capacity to understand the benefit in having rules and consequences
(you shall not murder, murderers go to prison,
you shall not steal, thieves get arrested,
you shall not drive recklessly, you will be ticketed, etc.)—
then our freedom is greater, and the spirit of the law (which imparts positive or negative consequences to our actions) imprints on our conscience as good.
Isn’t it convenient when people aren’t running red lights when your light turns green?
Isn’t it a relief when a murderer is no longer on the streets, murdering?
We do like laws!

I sat in the parking lot of my grocery store early one morning last week and watched as a dozen people passed a stray cart—one that had been shoved, I’m guessing, toward the cart corral, but not quite delivered. The entire lane was blocked by this cart. Either a car was going to hit it and send it crashing into other parked cars, or some human force of goodness was going to roll it out of the way.
Not a single soul bothered to move the cart.

And this is what is wrong, but I suppose we already knew it from our Good Samaritan lesson in Sunday school where the guy goes out of his way to stop and help someone who can never repay his kindness.
People who think they are good (but are, in fact, not good) also think they can avoid or look past the thing they ought to do— the cart that is in the way–because it isn’t really their problem.
When we stick the “good person” tag on our lapel yet have this entitlement of avoiding civic responsibility (that which benefits the greater good of all people), we establish rules that are fundamentally biased.

The I’m-a-good-person progressive agenda says, me first, my desires, my wants; now put it into Law.
Divine Nature and Wisdom say, learn to submit to Law, then you will begin to understand freedom and true compassion.

This is fantastically spelled out in Scripture, over and over. God’s Law was given to His people, which ultimately showed them His holiness. Jesus came, perfectly followed and fulfilled the Law, and extended His love by self-sacrifice, but also pointed out that the Law itself ought to make us humble, not proud. His Law is reasonable and just, yet makes room for forgiveness as well as generosity of spirit that compels a person to return their shopping cart (and maybe someone else’s, too).
And Jesus, God-in-flesh, Father of compassion issued the challenge: Will you follow me?

He didn’t mean follow Him into a “love is love” bumper sticker sort of freedom, He meant will you follow me even if it costs you everything?

Your job. Your family. Your friends, your health, nice house, good paycheck, cushy bank account, easy lifestyle, the car you’ve always wanted, cute Insta account, your methods of raising kids, cultural traditions, organic food preferences, your control issues, your identity.

So this is what I’ve been pondering in regards to school board.

I’m praying my progressive-leaning friends will also think this through, how our policies must have firm boundaries because the truth is, we are not fundamentally good. None of us naturally wants to go out of our way to return someone else’s cart to the cart corral. All of us need to be reminded of diminishing return—our permissiveness will be our doom.

And I’m praying for my more conservative Christian friends, too, that live a “good” life, and find their identity there, instead of in Christ. May we loosen our grip on the things we think we control.
Did you truly count the cost when you declared you would follow Jesus? How often do you place yourself out of the picture instead of painting a world around you? The big, bad, dangerous world holds no fear for the person who has given King Jesus the reins.

It’s pretty freeing to play by the Rules.

March school board update and the “Leviathan of Trans”

Over the past couple months I’ve had the fortune (or divine appointment, you could say) to get on a couple accountability boards within the school and district. I don’t know how this happened so easily, except to say that God generally bulldozes a straight path for his children when they ask him to (John 14:14). Please continue to pray for me, that when I open my mouth I will be fearless and speak the words I ought (Ephesians 6:19).

You probably read how the school board offered the “social constructionism” viewpoint after I raised questions on the ethical dilemma of their new gender policy.
Truly, I feel offended when this was offered as their reasoning. After all, slave owners in the 1800s felt entitled to oppress/rape/abuse their slaves, even though it was objectively wrong and morally reprehensible. If slave owners could justify what was “real” and “right” based on their “perception” and according to what was “acceptable” in that time period, and if no one at that time balked or questioned the obvious violation of human and civil liberties—would this ever make slavery in America okay?
Of course not!
Why not? Because some things—and especially the things that involve life on this earth and the souls of human beings—are objectively precious and worth protecting.

But this is what the school board and progressive culture is doing: they are saying that the nicest, kindest, most empathetic and inclusive thing you can do is let people make up their own truth, no matter how much it hurts or takes advantage of others.

Social constructionism, and every social theory that promotes entitled, irrational thinking is for the lazy. It is for the selfish, the entertained, those willing to excuse their habitual indulgence with a notion that you can get away with what you want if you label it just so.

I responded with some criticism of this theory along the lines of if morality is negotiable these days, explain to me why qualified professionals are necessary, or why school is necessary, or why standards are necessary, etc.

They could not answer, just simply replied,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspective. We have voted on the resolutions and do not have a plan to revisit them at this time.

Sincerely,

Durango Board of Education

Can you believe it? This was the response from a school board to a parent of four kids in the district, and this is how I read it: We don’t really want to talk to you anymore. You aren’t important and nothing you say will move us to reconsider the ways this policy might damage kids and families.

To say I’m disgusted is a massive understatement.

It isn’t a checkmate or even a stalemate, but I left the scene for awhile as it is so entirely aggravating to me that actual grown adults refuse to defend basic morality, reality, responsibility, and proper action.
Do I want to sue the school board? Absolutely not. Do I ever want to be seen in court? No way.
Do I think we ought to hold those in authority accountable to students and their constituents? Absolutely.
Do I think Christians who claim to know Truth ought to be in outrageous pursuit of speaking out on matters that hurt children? Always.

I was compelled to go to the open forum on Tuesday, but my husband was conveniently out of town and I have mucho extracurricular kid activities on Tuesdays. I think God is putting his hedge of protection around me by forcing me into a life of unpaid Uber-dom, ha.

I realize I could go on offense and say I am a Christian and the school board’s worldview and policy are in stark contrast to my own, thus my children are not being accommodated (this is very true), but I was hoping I wouldn’t have to get to the point of tossing pearls before swine. (Jesus says to not do this—otherwise the swine will not only trample the pearls—speaking of what is most precious to you—but then turn and trample you, too. I am not saying the school board is swine, but there were plenty of pigs attending these big meetings wearing masks to hide their rage. They would love to turn and trample me. I’d like to avoid them.)

This is the problem with the guy who railed against the Denver Public School board when they went off the rails of education. His argument was for a Straight White flag to be erected along with progressive pride. Well, shoot, buddy, you’re missing the point entirely. The point being kids’ right to an excellent education and kids’ right to be kids.

In the meantime, I have been participating in school accountability meetings and doing my research on the “leviathan of trans”—a terrible beast, and demonic, if I may say so, with tentacles that dip into the waters of pedophelia (now called paraphilia to reduce stigma, thanks to a perverted doctor by the name of Dr. John Money, who preyed on children via funding from the NIH—please read this articles with caution as it is beyond PG-13 material) and other unspeakable evils.

Here are some major points worth highlighting, especially if you follow my writing and have resorted to a permissive, let-sleeping-dogs-lie approach to your Christian faith:

Parents, the primary authority in a child’s life, are ultimately responsible to God to shepherd their kids through the growing up process. However, parents are giving in to the radical, bullying, “affirming” ideologies by fear tactics of bleeding heart trans activists and exploitative clinicians.

Kids are increasingly overwhelmed by social contagion elements to assimilate to the “trans” culture. Met with resistance to their agenda (easily tested by one’s conformation and/or hesitation regarding “proper” pronouns), activists identify and shame those who don’t willingly acquiesce as being bigoted or hateful, non-inclusive, and a threat to the well-being of “trans” people.

Pharmaceutical companies that make and sell hormone drugs have a cash cow in the new “trans” ideology and identity politics and take full advantage of the “school to clinic” model of identifying potential minor patients. Clinics regularly move to aggressive treatment before mental evaluations. Parents often cede their rights and concerns to physicians who are in high demand (as the number of children claiming transgender identities has exploded over the last few years).
Pharma companies lobby politicians, support non-profits such as Trevor Project, and put money into the pockets of doctors prescribing chemical castration/puberty blocking methods.

Gender “reassignment” is NOT essential care, no does it save lives. Newer studies are finding post-op patients are just as likely to commit suicide. “Reassignment” and hormone therapy will never change one’s biological blueprint. If born male, he will always have all male cells. If female, she will have all female cells.

Pretending to be another sex is possible, but sex change is not. Pretending to be something is not a civil right, and ought not be compared to historical civil movements.

Puberty blockers cause irreparable harm, as puberty is an essential part of growth for a human being. During puberty, the brain and body are going through massive change that will forever affect bone structure, maturation of organs, personality, intelligence, etc.
Puberty is a human right, one that we must protect for children (who are psychologically and physiologically unable to understand and must rely on their parents’ care).

This all boils down to one crucial point: we must protect children. The most vulnerable among us must be valued, and we are tragically complicit when we look away.

Encourage the parents around you!

If you want to catch up on what is going on at Durango schools, you can read my previous posts (in order: first, second, third, fourth, fifth) along with the drafted policy regarding gender ideology, flags, and “safe spaces”.

Social Constructionism and Gender Dysphoria: “widely accepted” by few.

I am so thankful to everyone who has encouraged me over these past weeks as I continue to defend kids’ rights to our local school board. I want to emphasize the absolute fact that I am totally dependent on Jesus to help me.

It has been interesting to say the least, especially with the things you are hearing in the news with regards to executive orders by our new president. I have not encountered a trickle-down effect where I am now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. I am not associated with various organizations like Parents Defending Education, but I totally agree with the sentiment of its founder, Nicki Neily, who said in a recent article,

DEI was never about ‘equity’—it was about enforcing ideological conformity and institutionalizing discrimination. Shutting down these wasteful, divisive programs is a win for every student.”

My own school district board would beg to differ. I am still committed to the debate because I do think that intelligent unbelievers (I cannot assume they are Christians) also appreciate an opportunity to self-correct when they have misspoken.

However, in their most recent response to my emails (which I will post at the bottom of this blogpost), they played the so-called “widely accepted” social constructionist card, which if you aren’t familiar with it, I will distill it for you per their cited source, the UMass gender studies department:
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.

It is very hard to play by the rules when rules are open to interpretation. I am pretty sure 100 out of 100 board game makers and NFL referees and kindergarten teachers would agree: rules are a must for order.

But I am doing my research anyway, even if words like “peer-reviewed” and “scientific” are off-putting to the social constructionist crowd.
My best hope is that one of the board members’ eyes will widen in interest when they see a chart like this one, where gender dysphoria referrals more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. Something is majorly wrong.

Graph from SEGM, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, data collected from GIDS in the UK (which is now shut down “due to concerns concerns over the safety of its clinical approach based on the “gender-affirmative” model, as well as general operational failures.”)

Here is what I have learned: teenage girls are coming out in exponential numbers as gender dysphoric as social media replaces family connections and general body-mind-social issues are already at a head because of puberty. It’s a phenomenon that especially goes hand in hand with kids who have preexisting mental issues, but is prevalent in girl friend groups that collectively decide to claim other “identities.”
The beauty-at-any-cost, anorexic, bulimic, cutting, self-harm fad just took on another damaging flavor.

SEGM and L’Observatoire La Petite Sirène held a conference the summer of 2024 addressing things like the science of “trans” and reality of its social implications on kids and their future. Some researchers detailed the major resistance they faced when attempting to publish evidence-based articles. Those in opposition did not want to be seen as anti-LGBTQ—fuel for activists who take up transitioning as a “human rights” issue and press care providers to “affirm” them in their rights to mutilate a perfectly healthy body.
(This eye-opening paper written on the conference is incredible and should be read by anyone who cares about kids.)

To be honest, I never intended to dive this deep into the rates of gender dysphoria or among youth to prove my point that the school board ought to keep progressive ideology out of public schools.

But I am not unhappy it led to this, because kids are drowning in this stuff and begging for help. Any exposure or learning we can do around helping kids is valuable.

Did you know the 9-8-8 suicide hotline goes straight to the LGBTQ-funded Trevor Project to the tune of tens of millions of tax payer money? (Still waiting on Elon to dig up that story.)
Do you know you can’t even find non-LGBTQ help for these youth on the Google because Google is also putting tons of money into Trevor Project’s pockets?
Kids who desire human attention fall for the transgenderism lie with no hope of getting out apart from LGBTQ activists who tell them this is it, this is the plan for their life.

This, dear children, is not what life is about.
No life is so one-noted. No life is boiled down to sex, gender, and teenage emotions. No life requires a label, no life requires you to have it all figured out. You have every right to be a kid, think like a kid, act like a kid, love being a kid.

I am sorry there are grownups who are out there pushing such nonsense when you just want to be loved, protected, safe, known. Every advocacy group is a sorry excuse for Jesus. God did not make a mistake when He created you.

Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.
Psalm 82:3

The Myth of “Reliable Research” in Pediatric Gender Medicine does a great job explaining how we went from zero to a hundred miles an hour offering gender “affirming” care with little to no evidence.

And here’s recent communication with the School Board:

February 10 2025

Dear Pearl,

We have not found any evidence that the data from the Trevor Project is not reliable. They have received a 100% 4-star rating from Charity Navigator. Moreover, their numbers reflect what we see locally in our own data.

The concept of gender and sexuality being social constructs is a widely accepted. You can read more about it here.

Social Constructionism

Sincerely,

Durango Board of Education

February 11 2025

School Board,

Thanks for your response.

That the Trevor Project has a 100% 4-star rating from Charity Navigator does not indicate it is a reputable, unbiased research source. It merely points out they are responsible with their funding to their organization. Being fiscally responsible ensures they will get increased funding from donors that support their progressive, anti-parent, sex-based agenda.

Regarding the hyperlinked article you sent that explains the theory of social constructionism according to the liberal arts school UMass gender studies department, the author concludes, “this perspective is especially useful for the activist and emancipatory aims of feminist movements and theories.”

Social constructionism is an extremist belief that reality and knowledge are made-up. It challenges fact-based logic by arguing that undeniable facts are negotiable.

With this logic, I might very well ask “Why have a school board? Why care about children? Why send my kids to school? Why have expectations, standards, and testing in education? Why hire qualified staff?”

This is, at best, problematic for you.

It is easy to see how, through the lens of social constructionism, you might misunderstand gender dysphoria (and other psychopathology, and how it leads to hopelessness, depression, and suicide ideation). These kids need clinical help, not a pat on the back and three cheers for inclusion.

I am disturbed this is the angle you are playing in public education.

Families like mine should not have to endure your constructionist agenda when we are entitled to a free, fair, equal, unbiased, excellent education.

Families should not be forced to leave school for fear of indoctrination, compelled thought, modern psychology and transgender theory.

Please look at this peer-reviewed study that offers an explanation for the decline in mental health and parent-child relationships in youth with gender dysphoria:

“Parents reported subjective declines in their AYAs’ mental health (47.2%) and in parent-child relationships (57.3%) since the AYA “came out” and that AYAs expressed a range of behaviors that included: expressing distrust of non-transgender people (22.7%); stopping spending time with non-transgender friends (25.0%); trying to isolate themselves from their families (49.4%), and only trusting information about gender dysphoria from transgender sources (46.6%). Most (86.7%) of the parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both.”

Also, check out this study that details the bias in gender transition and reassignment studies:

“Another unique aspect of the gender medicine field is that a number of clinicians tasked with caring for gender-distressed have taken on the role of political campaigners—and in doing so, have traded wisdom and nuance for blunt activism (Kuper et al., Citation2022; McNamara et al., Citation2022). Their insistence that today’s gender-dysphoric teens are tomorrow’s transgender adults, and that their future happiness and mere survival hinges on early access to gender reassignment, is demonstrably false. While still reported as “rare” by the gender medicine establishment (Coleman et al., Citation2022; McNamara et al., Citation2022), the rate of medical detransition is already 10%-30% just a few years following transition…

The scale of the potential harm can be fully appreciated if one considers that an astounding 1 in 10–20 middle school, high school, and college students in the West currently claim a transgender identity.”

Once again, I ask that you rescind this unconstitutional, agenda-driven policy in our schools.

Pearl

Find local and national news releases on the school website. You can read my previous emails here and here.

And here is where it all started…

“Whereas we believe gender and sexuality are social constructs…”—and other words that don’t belong in public school policy.

Well, I have spent about as much time as I’d ever want to writing emails to our local school board.

I’m not the most efficient person when it comes to getting thoughts down on paper. I generally do research, looking for graphs and data and peer-reviewed studies, or I check out books by old philosophers and psychiatrists, sifting through tomes to back up my thinking with more sagacious thinking (and sometimes looking for inconsistencies). I’m just a mom, after all.

I’m not a Twitter/X person, I don’t like visibility, and posting on Facebook terrifies me (I sometimes do it and then go underground for weeks so I don’t have to face the responses). (I’m trying to get better; I realize putting a face with words goes a long way in building trust.)

But I want to make this drama a little more public, only so that others know thinking has been done, letters have been written, efforts have been made. (Also, please feel free to borrow anything I’ve written if it is helpful in your own communications with school boards and such. Or if you are Jay or Jordan Sekulow and can bring some legal advice—give me a call, ha!)

It is so very easy to watch the news and tsk, tsk or mutter about the state of the world, then go on and ignore it. What speaks most loudly to me now is the silence of folks who say they are believers and yet whose faith does not compel them to do anything but watch Rome burn around them.

Christians: Y’all—we are all in Sodom and Gomorrah. All of us should be feeling uncomfortable here. Pray that God finds you faithful when He comes to visit.

Keep reminding your young people that God didn’t make a mistake when He made them. God doesn’t make mistakes.

Love your enemies genuinely—enough to tell them the truth. Evangelism is nothing magic, and it isn’t a dirty word. It doesn’t require a degree from seminary or a flashy personality (in fact, those things aren’t usually helpful)—it’s just telling the truth. More kids and parents need to know how much God loves them.

Thank God that He opens doors, and pray for my humility to walk through them in the footsteps of Christ. Pray we are salt and light and the aroma of life to folks who need Jesus.

February 5 2025

Hello School Board,

You are hearing from me again, a concerned parent. I have not heard any answers from you regarding questions I have posed.
How has your legal counsel changed so drastically from the October response of eliminating flags from school as an unnecessary distraction to your January unanimous approval of unconstitutional sectarian policy?

It seems obvious that you respond quickly and positively to protestors touting progressive ideology but not to responsible, caring parents who have walked the trenches of child rearing, pay taxes, support schools and teachers, and desire a fair, quality education.
I have read through your drafted policy and am deeply disturbed by the language presented.

“Whereas we believe gender and sexuality is a social construct”—in what world is gender and sexuality a social construct? How are babies made? Gender and sexuality are foundational to our existence—go ask your mom and dad. Our kids (who are kids, as we understand by the science of maturation and brain studies, not through “social constructs,” feelings, or other ambiguous factors) deserve a future where they can individually make decisions of their own about what they believe as they grow up.

Clearly there are two or more sides to every political and social argument, yet you claim your views are higher, better, safer, more important. The Trevor Project, a biased research source, was founded by LGBTQ activists. Their studies are made on confirmation bias that seeks to propagate more activists, not to solve teen suicide.

Trevor Project and therefore, you, willfully and purposefully engage in a grossly immoral narrative that pushes gender and sex ideology on kids. This inappropriate, hopeless agenda increases the chances of suicidal behavior among children—minors, who, under the constitution, deserve to have their rights protected. Their right to life, their right to safe, neutral learning spaces is paramount in a school setting, where parents trust they will not be propagandized or persuaded by a sectarian agenda.

Your proposed “safe spaces” where parents are not allowed speaks of your willingness to ignore our constitutional rights as parents. But perhaps constitutional rights fall under your understanding as a “social construct”.

Please do your research instead of spinning a narrative of inclusion that revolves around an agenda that hurts our kids.

We await your response.

Pearl

February 6 2025 (response by school board)

We understand and respect the fact that you disagree with our actions and would like to assure you that we have no agenda other than ensuring every student feels welcome in our schools. We take the mental health of all our students very seriously and are providing resources for all our students. If you have concerns about curriculum or your student’s experience in school, please reach out to the principal.

As to your question regarding our legal counsel, the Board sought legal counsel after the district made the decision to remove flags, so we cannot speak to any differences. We can assure you that we take legal liability very seriously and followed legal guidance based on previous cases in Colorado.

Sincerely,

The Durango Board of Education

February 7 2025

School Board,
Thank you for your swift response, although you did not answer my questions about the wording in your drafted policy or the questionable Trevor Project sources you cited.

I have, as you mentioned, been in face-to-face meetings with school teachers and administration regarding curriculum and my students’ experience in school, which is why I have began addressing you—I was encouraged by them to speak out on these matters. I will continue to be intentional about my involvement and accountability with the district.

We know in schools our goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), so I am wondering how you intend to measure inclusivity if sexuality and gender are just social constructs.

If your legal counsel is following the directive of schools such as Denver Public Schools, I would like to remind you the civil liberties battles they are embroiled in for the gender policies they have implemented, as mentioned in the the recent Wall Street Journal article I have attached. One student succinctly commented, “They took a space away from me that I felt comfortable in. While they were trying to serve one community, they took it away from another.”

What I am hearing you say is your perception of mental health in schools is more important than all students’ rights to an unbiased education in a neutral school setting. You wrongly assume I do not care about children’s mental health. It is for this very reason a political agenda should not be in schools.

Do you understand ethics and the importance of structure and behavior in school classrooms?
Here is an example: two days ago my daughter’s third grade teacher sent out a message to all parents with a strong, clear message: “do not let your children bring gum to school. It is distracting and causes our classroom to become littered.”

This was simple—she rightly assumed parents were responsible for their kid’s behavior, she made a reasonable request, and she gave examples of how education is hindered when the rule isn’t followed.

If my response had been to take offense, or ignore the message and not talk to my kid about it, or to assume the teacher is stupid, or that gum isn’t distracting and my kid is an exception to following the rules, I would be wrong.
Schools must have unambiguous rules to maintain order, and simply because a parent or student doesn’t want to follow them does not mean they have the right to disrupt the learning process. No—if a student disrupts learning, there are consequences, because learning in school must continue.
Now the parent may throw a fit that their child got in trouble for bringing gum to school and losing recess because of it, but the school has ethically done nothing wrong—a great standard for tax-payer funded entities.

Furthering this analogy, what if a teacher or student is finding child-inappropriate sex/gender/political messaging a distraction in class to real, unbiased learning? Oughtn’t the administrators tell kids/teachers to leave it at home? Oughtn’t there be consequences for disrupting the learning environment? Oughtn’t there be consequences for folks who continually promote activism which distracts from neutral learning?

This is what you are doing, school board.

While the schools themselves—administration, good teachers— are focused on becoming the number one school district in Colorado through portrait of a graduate values, focused academics, merit-based performance, consistent testing and measurable goals—you, School Board, are bringing in wads of gum to pass around.
It is reasonable and responsible for parents to ask you to keep it out of school, yet you have insisted it is necessary for kids to feel safe. This is your idea of mental health—ignoring the SMART goals of public education to accommodate progressive ideology.

This is ethically irresponsible, no matter what political views you take. If mental wellbeing of students is your motto, please look into the mental illness factor of students that is leading to their self-destructive behavior. Identify and get these kids and parents the clinical help they need, do not slap labels on kids and call it “inclusion.”

Again, I appreciate your communication and await your response.

Thanks,

Pearl

You can read my previously sent emails here.

Under the flag of inclusivity.

If you are following my Durango school drama, welcome back! Ha. Do I have an update for you… Yes.
Please help share and expose what is going on in our district—it is both unconstitutional and unabashed thought reform.

Our most recent district school board meeting ended with the board voting unanimously to advance a new flag policy, one that takes advantage of responsible, tax-paying constituents to codify their culture of inclusivity.

The meeting was attended by the rainbow-carrying, mask-wearing crowd, and the only ten community members that spoke in the open forum were advocates of the new policies.

Let me stop here and explain why it was only supporters who spoke: most of us wouldn’t be caught dead in a crowd of people who are so hateful.
We have kids to cart around to various extracurriculars and kids to come home to—kids we wouldn’t dare bring to a school meeting where the vitriol is high and the discussion is sexual. We are busy keeping kids off screens and TikTok, busy cooking supper and washing clothes and filling our lives with good, grounding, family, kid things. We are parents who think these current school board discussions are R-rated, inappropriate, disgusting. We are trying to protect our kids, and they shouldn’t be a part of a school board meeting that wants to write up anti-child policies.
We aren’t ignoring the issue; we are living quiet, wholesome lives, and I don’t need anyone to follow me to my car in the parking lot, hurling insults. (But they’re very kind and inclusive, they say.)

The school board praised the speakers for their “bravery”—people who, I think, have so abandoned their kids to cellphones, addictions, and the lies of culture (and blamed their children’s suicide attempts on the school) that they ought to be in jail.
You know what I think is brave? Not giving in to getting your kid a smartphone when they’re thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…
Not heading to the pot shop for your weekend pick-me-up, even though smoking pot is legal. Brave is trying to make it to every single one of your kids’ basketball games even though you work till five, gas is expensive, and you would rather be home on the couch.

Yet this is the culture, this is who has the microphone, and the school board will get lots of hugs and affirmation from these folks after they approve the new policies…well, at least until they come up with a new identity that isn’t yet represented by the LGBTQIA2S+ alphabet-calculator salad (which used to be simply represented by an American flag, and covered the rest of us too).

I have been writing thoughtful emails for some time to these board members—but I do not think I’ve been strong enough. I refuse to drag my own children into the arena to display them like some scarred warrior—even if that is what they are—because that is the game the other side is playing.

My kids are getting hurt because of this, and you don’t care.

See, we have the same argument, but I am trying to point out, with reason, that the other side is heavily influenced by a selfish, nasty agenda that destroys kids, and I am just a mom who wants kids to have an excellent, non-agenda-aligned education.

What I’d like the board to hear and understand is this:

You say in your inclusion policy that “gender and sexuality are social constructs”—well, prove it.
At what point is a child capable of even believing a boy is not a boy and a girl is not a girl unless it is modeled to them or they have been conditioned to think it?
Science says female and male are distinct and separate, and nature tells us life and procreation cannot happen outside of these rules. Gender and sexuality are two of the most unmovable, inflexible facts of life—just ask any three year old.

“Gender and sexuality as a social construct” is ideology, and that, rooted in nihilism—a sectarian belief (which are unconstitutional in schools) that meaning and moral principles be abandoned. To clarify, nihilism is a value system in contrast to morality, and gender and sex are therefore nebulous and “made-up.”
If there is anything more worthless and dangerous to project upon our kids and in our community, it is this destructive agenda that parades as “inclusive.”

Want to see teen suicide go up?
Teach them that truth is ambiguous, that no one truly understands them, and that they are oppressed by their assigned gender. Train them to offer compelled answers instead of thinking critically, to blame and expose those who disagree with them as racist, transphobic, hateful. Offer “safe spaces” where their parents are not trusted or welcome. Fly flags that ostracize the rest of the community that holds traditional family values. (It’s all very Mao Zedong, but what does history know? We can revise it!)

Oh, right. It’s already happening.
The reason teen suicide is going up is because of this phony agenda to be inclusive.

Recently my little girl with potty issues had a bathroom accident because a man walked into the womens’ restroom at the airport and I refused to send her in after him. Did he identify as a female? Do I care? Shouldn’t a little girl be able to use a womens’ restroom before a man? There was no line to the mens’ room! I hope he felt “safe” and “accommodated” as my child suffered wet pants the rest of our journey.

This is how backwards it is getting: kids’ basic rights—to be a kid! To innocently use the potty! To go to school and call a boy a boy and a girl a girl! To think without input from the thought police! To grow up at a pace allowing them to clearly understand the world!—are getting trampled.

Kids are not small adults. They cannot and do not reason as grownups. They cannot synthesize information without scaffolding. Their brains are not fully developed. They are vulnerable because they are kids. We have to protect them.

The truth is this: kids want to be in a safe, loving family. The school community is no substitute, even though I rely heavily on wonderful teachers and administrators to teach my kids. Kids want to feel safe, with boundaries that create scaffolding for understanding the world as they grow up—and this only comes from a moral-based, child-valued, family-centric foundation.

The folks that you, the school board, called “brave”? They had already failed at their job of protecting kids; they only wanted someone to push the blame on. You took the bait under the façade of “inclusivity.” It makes you look good now, gives you the pat on the back you want.

The “trans” message that is so strong and appealing to young teenagers who seek attention—is devastating.
How will these future adults feel in a few years or decades when they realize everything they ever knew and believed was a lie?
How will they ever live a satisfying life where gender and sexual confusion doesn’t tint every decision they make?

This new “freedom” or “right” to be whatever they want to be is awfully constraining.

And you could’ve let them just be kids.

The underlying, unsaid malevolence in your policy is that you are using children to promote a lifestyle that is, at best, hopeless.
Your reasoning behind these policies are predicated by political and ideological bias, not constitutional rights, which is your MO as a school board.

You could’ve let them just be kids.