It was the restrictions and regulations regarding masking and the COVID vaccine that caused Kristin Grubbs to start attending Lee’s Summit school board meetings last year.
But it took several meetings for the wife, mother, and small business owner to make sense of the industry language board members were speaking.
“The way they were making choices implied you either comply or you will not be allowed at school and that's not freedom,” Grubbs told the St. Louis Record. “It felt like they were taking away parental authority.”
Like a loose thread that unravels a knitted sweater, the more Grubbs attended school board meetings, she said the more she disagreed with the direction in which public school is heading.
“It's been frustrating to see how much play the federal government has in this,” she said. “To receive COVID relief funds, we have to have certain things in place like an equity policy or a mask mandate or quarantine policy. We must have that. So, in my opinion, don't take the federal money.”
As of Nov. 2, Missouri social services, including elementary and secondary education, received $2.83 billion in federal COVID relief funds, according to the Office of the Missouri State Auditor.
Grubbs thought that the strings attached had become so radical that she and her husband withdrew their four kids from Lee’s Summit schools and now home-school them.
“I started looking into the Panorama surveys that were coming up again for my kids and the Panorama research I did is what really opened my eyes to things,” she said. “Panorama has basically open student records and parents never gave permission for Panorama to have the information, yet they have it and it's on servers in Virginia.”
Panorama is among the education companies that gather data and sell curriculum back to schools based on that information, which can include political beliefs, income levels, racial identity, sexual behaviors, and mental health.
In June, Attorney General Eric Schmitt opened an investigation into the use of student surveys at Lee’s Summit R-7 and six other districts.
“Subjecting students to personal, invasive surveys created by third-party consultants, potentially without parents’ consent, is ridiculous and does nothing to further our children’s education,” Schmitt said in a statement online.
Grubbs has since written a 225-page expose about Lee's Summit public schools called Deep End of Public Education.
"We are homeschooling because I am not comfortable with the way our district is doing things," she said. “If you want your kids educated, you want them to know how to read and write and have basic knowledge, that's not what's happening right now."
One of the chapters in Grubbs’ book is dedicated to the school board unanimously voting to retain a book in three high schools called All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson after a parent flagged it as having inappropriate content.
“I did find it to meet the legal definition for the state of Missouri as pornography for children and so I do believe that that particular book would be one of several that should not be in our school libraries yet it is being provided to children,” she added.
Grubb's book can be ordered on Amazon.com