Sexual Grooming is Nothing New in Wisconsin's Public Schools

The Capital Times did a great job last week in exposing widespread child grooming practices in public schools across Wisconsin, but as the MacIver Institute has documented over the years, this is nothing new. Here are some of the examples we’ve reported on.

In 2017, the MacIver Institute stumbled upon a series of YouTube videos from an eighth-grade English teacher at Madison's O'Keefe Middle School. Her students were reciting erotic poetry to their classmates that they'd written. One girl described her LGBT relationships, while a boy described what it was like having sex with his girlfriend. This wasn't a one-time lesson. It was an ongoing program for which the teacher recieved grant funding to promote continuously. She took her class to a poetry slam in Milwaukee where middle school students from all over the state shared their own erotic poetry.

In 2019, the Madison School District produced a special, 8-minute long video for National Coming Out Day last month featuring middle and high school students talking about their sexual preferences and identities. Some say they came out while still in elementary school. Teachers in the video said they make a special effort to encourage these children to be their “authentic self.”

In 2022, Wauwatosa Schools introduced a new Human Growth and Development program that ensures children as young as kindergarten age are exposed to radical trans ideologies. There are special blocks of instruction for every grade up through high school.  For kindergarteners, there are five to six days of instruction. By lesson two, they're supposed to be learning about transgenderism, with the teacher reading "Sparkle Boy," about a boy who dresses like a girl.

Parents in Milton got a shock during the 2022 school year, when local police announced that they had wrapped up their investigation into an 8th grade math teacher who was trying to hook up with his students. He had been hitting on at least three girls over Snapchat. Police said there was nothing illegal about it, and the school district allowed him to resign.

In 2023, the Eau Claire Area School District held a mass student assembly so that the orchestra teacher could tell elementary and high school students all about his upcoming gender transition surgery. When parents inevitably learned about this, the school refused to share his comments with them. Withholding that document violated the state's open records laws, and parents had to sue for it.

One school district finally did the right thing in 2023 after doing the wrong thing. Menomonee Falls made the decision to pull almost three dozen titles out of the school libraries because they included “sexually explicit language and/or images which may be considered inappropriate for students.” Liberal parents in the schools threw a fit.

The Sun Prairie School District's new shower policy landed it in hot water back in 2023. An 18-year-old man claiming to be transgender took a shower in front of four traumatized freshman girls after swim class. The girls' parents subsequently filed a Title IX Complaint with the US Department of Education. It's still under investigation.

The Waukesha School District is a great example of what happens when schools try to reign in teachers who seem to be grooming their students, but how it's worth the effort in the long run. A first-grade teacher wanted her students to sing an LGBT anthem song called Rainbowland at the spring concert. Administrators told her to pick something less controversial, but she refused and went national. When the district fired her, which created a firestorm among national LGBT activists and celebrities. She subsequently raised $53,000 on GoFundMe to sue the district for violating her First Amendment Rights. She lost that lawsuit earlier this month.