By: Anna Miller and Scott Yenor

In 2020 Mayor Lauren McLean’s platform for “A More Equitable City” endorsed “racial equity, white fragility and implicit bias training or book readings” and establishing “sex education at pre-k level – 12th.” Her plans for Boise are coming to fruition through the adoption of a federal grant program for early childhood education. 

Mayor McLean and Boise City Council have given the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children (IDAEYC) a $3 million federal grant to establish a child care incentive pay program. The IDAEYC, an early education non-profit, promotes the sexualization of children and critical race theory (CRT). The group tried to hide its true intentions from the Legislature and the public. Now the city of Boise is funding their radical agenda with federal money. 

IDAEYC is a subsidiary of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which trains educators to cultivate transgenderism in children by using gender neutral language and creating gender confusion among children. Both groups have arisen to pursue the Democrat agenda of getting children out of the home at ever earlier ages to better wrestle their minds away from parents. 

The public previously called on the Idaho Legislature to stop funding the IDAEYC for their teaching of gender ideology and critical race theory-aligned ideas to toddlers. The Legislature rejected a $6 million federal grant to the IDAEYC in 2021. 

In a last ditch effort to save the federal grant, the IDAEYC removed resources and links to the objectionable content from its website. Beth Oppenheimer, executive director of the IDAEYC,  chastised legislators in the Idaho Statesman for mischaracterizing what IDAEYC does to “serve their narrative.” She flatly denied that IDAEYC teaches children “critical race theory or social justice.” 

IDAEYC removed resources directed teachers and parents to read Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, 10,000 Dresses, A is for Activist, My Princess Boy, and About Chris, among other books, to children. The group held workshops for educators, including “Boy? Girl? Both? Neither? What does that mean in our classroom?” 

The IDAEYC has spent years promoting the NAEYC’s efforts to offer white and black children different educations. For example, the NAEYC’s flagship book on anti-bias education quotes Carol Brunson Day, “White children definitely need anti-bias education. So, too, do children of color, although the specific work differs from that of White children.”

The IDAEYC has invited radical speakers, such as anti-bias advocate Lisa Porter Kuh, to train teachers at its conferences. It directed conference attendees to Porter Kuh’s anti-racist blog, Somerville Early Education, as a curriculum resource. The blog takes one down a rabbit hole of anti-racist education resources. For example, one resource titled “They’re not too Young to Talk About Race,” claims that “children as young as two years use race to reason about people’s behavior,” and “by five, black and Latinx children in research settings show no preference toward their own groups compared to whites; white children at this age remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness.”

Hiding this controversial material after questions from the public were raised demonstrates the corrupt ideological intentions of the IDAEYC. This radicalism is the crucial infrastructure the IDAEYC seeks public subsidization for and that the Boise city council has granted. 

The Boise City Council’s resolution gives the IDAEYC $3 million through the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). All five members of the city council supported the resolution. The ARPA included $39 billion in new child care funding, including $24 billion for child care stabilization grants to providers and $15 billion in supplemental Child Care and Development Fund Discretionary Funds. Accepting this federal money required Idaho to further the Democrat Platform by using “at least 90 percent of their ARP Act stabilization allocations for subgrants to qualified child care providers.”

The Boise City Council allocated funds to IDAEYC to establish a child care incentive pay program. According to the city’s contract with IDAEYC, the group will use the IdahoSTARS RISE platform, a statewide database and training program, to recruit and train child care workers. Child care workers who are recruited by the IDAEYC will be trained through the RISE platform in gender ideology and CRT pedagogy. Children under the age of five will, as a result, be educated in “sexual orientation or gender identity and expression” and in the tenets of CRT through teaching techniques like implicit bias and cultural responsiveness. 

Federal money passes through Boise directly to left-wing groups specializing in left-wing indoctrination for young children. 

At least a dozen left-wing education non-profits operate in Idaho’s K-12 public schools. When state departments of education or the Legislature do not cooperate, for example when the Idaho legislature rejected the $6 million federal grant applied for by IDAEYC, these groups work with local school districts and city councils to achieve their transformative goals.

Lawmakers should defend against this corruption at the local level. Legislators could pass a law prohibiting schools and localities from contracting for teacher professional development, recruitment, childcare, curriculum or consulting with providers who promote the sexualization of children or racially essentialist doctrines. Legislators could cut off funding the city receives from sales tax revenue sharing. 

Federal money means adopting the values of the federal government. Idaho should be different. This means forging our own path toward a future without the divisive and sick ideologies everywhere being peddled by the education establishment.