Two Moms Fought against Left-Wing Indoctrination. Their Kids Paid the Price

How families have been torn apart amid accusations of bullying, racism and leftwing social justice indoctrination at a prestigious Ohio prep school.

Amy Gonzalez had concerns about her daughter’s school before the “Justice in June” email.

She worried about stories of Columbus Academy teachers pushing left-wing politics in their classes. An advocate of celebrating diversity, Gonzalez questioned the increasing number of insular affinity groups popping up around the school. And she was concerned about the motivations of the school’s diversity director, who, she say, openly described the elite Ohio private school’s history as “110 years of white supremacy.”

But it was the “Justice in June” email, she said, when she knew things had finally gone too far.

Sent to parents in the wake of George Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day in 2020, the “Justice in June” program was designed by Columbus Academy’s diversity staff to offer parents daily activities that could serve as “step one to becoming an active ally to the black community.”

The daily activities read like a left-wing social-justice wish list. Read about white privilege, the 1619 Project, and the case for reparations? Check. Donate money to progressive organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the Southern Poverty Law Center? Check. Advocate to reallocate city budgets by defunding the police? Check.

To Gonzalez and others, it all seemed very one-sided.

There was no suggestion to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. There were no readings about the one-time American ideal of color blindness.

Gonzalez and fellow concerned parents were learning  that their private school, which they once viewed as a refuge, was not immune from the battles over social-justice indoctrination that have convulsed public-school boards across the country this year.

Concerned Parents Organized. Their Kids Paid the Price

Concerned about what she saw as the increasing racialization and politicization of the school, Gonzalez, the mother of a rising sixth-grader, joined forces with Andrea Gross, the mother of a rising sixth-grader and a rising junior at Columbus Academy, to openly campaign for changes.

The moms networked with parents, students, and alumni who shared their concerns, and they got them to write affidavits laying out their grievances. They formed a coalition, Pro CA, and launched a website where they aired their concerns.

“We believe that separating kids and faculty by the color of their skin is segregation, and that’s moving backward. We want to move forward,” Gonzalez told National Review.

Said Gross: “We wanted to heal our community. We wanted to move forward with positive ideas. We believe open dialogue is the best way to solve problems and to move forward, and everybody’s voice is important.”

It turns out, the fight between leaders of Pro CA and the school has been anything but positive.

There were the right-wing podcast hosts who described the school’s leaders as “bad people who want to do bad things to your children” and who called for “bringing pain to people that deserve it.” There was the Columbus Academy high-school student — the teen daughter of a teacher — who posted a Tik Tok video in which she called for members of Pro CA to “suck my fat f***ing (equine male genitalia) and choke on it,” her middle fingers raised.

There have been allegations of bullying, racism, and online sabotage. And there have been plenty of lies. Both sides accuse the other of dishonesty, twisting facts, and gaslighting. Gonzalez and Gross said the school has essentially ignored their coalition’s concerns.

In the end, both Gonzalez’s and Gross’s children were dismissed from the school. Gross said it was for simply daring to “ask questions about the things that they’re doing.” Columbus Academy leaders, on the other hand, say it was because the two moms publicly waged a campaign against the school, through “a sustained, and increasingly inflammatory, series of false and misleading attacks on the School and its leadership,” according to letters the moms received informing them their kids were being dismissed.

Columbus Academy leaders declined to answer specific questions submitted by National Review via email, choosing instead to provide a general statement from school spokesman Dan Williamson. There has been no effort to chill discussion at Columbus Academy, Williamson said. The school did respond to Pro CA’s concerns. They weren’t ignored. “There is a difference,” he said, “between not listening, and listening and not fully agreeing.”

A recent write-up in the Columbus Dispatch painted the fight between Pro CA and Columbus Academy’s leaders as the latest dust-up over critical race theory. That’s true, to an extent, but this fight has always been broader than just disagreements over CRT.

At its heart, the fight at Columbus Academy has been about power. Who has the power to determine the direction of a school? Who has the power to choose how controversial topics are taught? And, ultimately, who has the power to decide which kids and which parents get to be part of the school body in the first place?

‘A Pattern of Marginalization’

Located in Gahanna, Ohio — a suburb of Columbus — Columbus Academy was founded in 1911 as a school for boys. Specifically, wealthy white boys.

It opened its doors to non-white students in 1963, more than a year before the Civil Rights Act, according to school documents, and started allowing girls in the mid 1990s.

Along the way, the school has gained a reputation as one of Ohio’s premier private schools. Annual tuition runs over $30,000 for high-school seniors, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

The Gross and Gonzalez families have been committed to the school for years. Gross’s husband attended, and it was one of the great loves of his life. Gonzalez abandoned plans to live full-time in her husband’s native Mexico just to send her daughter there. Gross coached lacrosse at the school. Gonzalez helped launch the school’s Hispanic Outreach for Latino Awareness group. The school has a small Latino population. The group was open to everyone. To Gonzalez, it was simply a celebration of Latino culture.

But Gonzalez and Gross said it appeared to them that the school’s leaders — specifically head of school Melissa Soderberg and diversity director Beckett Broh — wanted the student body to self-sort into ever more restrictive affinity groups.

The tribalization that Gross and Gonzalez say the administration has embraced only intensified after the death of George Floyd, when the school released a nine-page “United against Racism” statement, announcing its new “ongoing anti-racism education.” Teachers were urged to tune in to online lectures by controversial anti-racist advocates such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The school didn’t answer a question posed by National Review asking what, exactly, “anti-racism” means at Columbus Academy — does it mean simply opposing racism, or does it go further to include things such as justifying racial discrimination to achieve racial equity, as Kendi has described?

The school also began the process of changing its longtime logo to phase out the caravel ship, an innovative 15th-century exploring vessel. According to an August  email to families, the ship was a problem because it had been “used to transport enslaved African people and by colonists responsible for great violence against indigenous peoples in the Americas.” Some parents felt the ship was an important part of the school’s history, and they had no say in the decision.

Gonzalez and Gross started hearing from other parents worried about the school’s direction. Many said that they, too, had approached school leaders to express concerns, and they left with the impression that “they were the only . . . one who feels like this,” Gross said, adding, “What we’ve found is a pattern of marginalization, isolation, and then intimidation.”

Gonzalez and Gross started collecting notarized affidavits from parents, students, and even some teachers. They shared several of them with National Review. The complaints, many of which are impossible to verify, range from the politicization of classrooms to the lack of accommodations for kids with learning disabilities. That is one of Gross’s complaints.

They complained about teachers who openly expressed their disdain for former president Donald Trump and pushed left-wing politics in their classes. “On the very first day of school, my freshman child was told by his English teacher that, if any students support President Trump, then he prefers not to know or else he does not believe he will be able to speak with those students,” one parent wrote. Students complained about feeling the need to write essays in line with their teacher’s politics, and feeling pressured by teachers to participate in a school-approved walk-out and civil disobedience on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Students reported being called racists by their peers for not participating. A middle-school counselor gave “big ups” on Facebook to the Black Organization of Students for leading the walkout.

One of the affidavits allegedly is from a teacher whose husband is a police officer who was on the front lines during last summer’s unrest. She resigned from her job, she wrote, because of what appeared to be advocacy on behalf of the school’s leaders to defund the police during “Justice in June,” and because of the racialized trainings being pushed on teachers.

“I felt like I was on an island,” she wrote. “Needless to say I went down a rabbit hold that I am just climbing out of.”

Concerned Parents Find Strength in Numbers

Armed with the complaints and with plenty of documents that showed, in their view, the school’s leftward drift, Gonzalez, Gross, and other members of their coalition began writing a letter to the board of trustees in which they laid out their concerns and recommendations for change. At the time, they claimed that more than 160 families were part of the coalition.

Gross said they had initially wanted to appear before the entire board of trustees and read their letter, but they were not allowed. They ended up emailing it to as many board members as they could find email addresses for. They did participate in a Zoom meeting with four board members and with Soderberg, the head of school.

“We were trying to show the best way we could that this is not two people. This is a lot of people,” Gross said. “These are just people who are part of your community who want to actually have an opportunity to have questions asked and to be heard. We just wanted to talk.”

Instead, say Gonzalez and Gross, the board didn’t answer their questions, and ignored them.

Williamson insists that the school did respond to the parents’ concerns. Their letter was shared with every board member and was discussed at three board meetings. The board committed to ensuring that classrooms are places where diverse opinions are welcomed, and to improving student interactions in and out of school.

In a March letter to the school community, the board wrote that while Columbus Academy “can sometimes miss the mark,” and “individual students and families may have valid complaints in certain instances, the Board does not believe there is a culture of retaliation, indoctrination, or intimidation at Columbus Academy.”

Columbus Academy also denies that it teaches critical race theory, or that it specifically endorses Kendi’s teachings, the 1619 Project, or defunding the police. According to a message to parents about the school’s curriculum, “Justice in June” was an optional program meant simply to generate discussion and understanding of “very sensitive and important issues.”

The school does not consider its “cultural competency expectations” to be political, and it adds that “empathy, awareness, and sensitivity are not partisan in nature.”

Private Schools Are Not Exempt from Social-Justice Waves

Private-school parents may believe that their children will be insulated from the politicized curricula handed down by state education departments and woke school boards, but many private schools are influenced by a governing body that shares a similar progressive worldview.

“Just because a family sends their child to a private or parochial school doesn’t mean those institutions are necessarily ‘better’ on political indoctrination than the public-school system,” Nichole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, an anti-indoctrination organization, wrote in an email to National Review.

Columbus Academy is one of about 1,900 schools that are part of the National Association of Independent Schools, and Soderberg is the president of the Ohio association. At its annual conference in February, NAIS included panels on “Whiteness: Identity, Power, and Privilege” and “Exploring Truth and Transformation,” which purported to delve into truths about race that “many white people are unwilling to face.”

Part of the problem, Neily said, is that many schools, before families sign enrollment contracts, aren’t forthcoming about exactly how they address hot-button issues. “If parents decide to send their child to Social Justice Country Day and do so eyes wide open, that’s one thing,” she said. “It’s another thing altogether if the school commits to delivering a certain experience  . . . and doesn’t actually provide that.”

Private schools also usually are not democratic institutions. That’s the case at Columbus Academy. At public schools, parents can campaign to replace school-board members and can speak out loudly and publicly about their concerns. That’s not necessarily true at private schools, where even large and energized groups of parents have limited ability to change the composition of a board. And, as Gonzalez and Gross were to find out, the schools often have the power to boot inconvenient families from their community.

Gross and Gonzalez Go Public

The standoff between the two sides became increasingly bitter. Gross she was accused of hacking into the school’s Twitter account, an accusation she denies. At one point, the school’s  admissions director crashed a Zoom meeting of Pro CA parents.

“We had members on that call who were scared,” Gonzalez said.

Convinced that they still were not being heard by school leaders, Gonzalez and Gross brought their concerns in early April to a broader audience — they were invited as guests on The Blunt Force Truth, a conservative podcast hosted by former game-show host Chuck Woolery and businessman Mark Young.

Young described the school as a “cult,” called school leaders “lunatics,” and compared the student body to “Hitler Youth.” Woolery told the mothers that they were “in a street fight.”

The podcast turned into a sort of public strategy session on how fight the school, the kind of thing that would probably be better off conducted behind closed doors. Woolery suggested protesting outside the school. Young threw out the idea to “cripple them financially” by having coalition members funnel their school payments into an escrow account and withholding the money until things changed at the school. “How do you hurt them?” Woolery asked. “We’re all about bringing pain to people that deserve it,” Young said.

School leaders claimed they felt physically threatened.  They pointed to that podcast specifically in the letters they sent to Gonzalez and Gross in June informing them that their kids were being dismissed. While the podcast hosts had allegedly engaged in the most extreme rhetoric, the letter faulted the parents for failing to push back.

Gonzalez and Gross deny they were threatening harm. That’s just an effort by school leaders, they said, to distract people from the real issues. They appeared on the podcast twice more and posted links on the Pro CA website. When asked what she thought about the way the podcast was handled and whether it may have been a wrong turn in their efforts to change the school’s direction, Gonzalez demurred, saying they were just trying to get their message out.

Williamson said it was the podcasts and other public videos containing controversial allegations that led to the dismissal of Gonzalez’s and Gross’s kids. They violated their enrollment contract, apparently, by putting the school in a bad light. It wasn’t because they asked questions about their children’s education, Williamson said, noting that the school continues to have discussions with other parents who share some of Gonzalez’s and Gross’s concerns, and “none of those parents have received dismissal letter.”

However, in a July message to Columbus Academy parents addressing the controversy, Soderberg warned that any other parent who chose to mount a public campaign against the school would meet a similar fate.

Politicians Intervene

Jeff LaRe, a Republican state representative from the Columbus suburbs, heard about Gonzalez’s and Gross’s predicament, and is pushing for action at the state level.

One of his colleagues in the House, Representative Don Jones, recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the teaching of concepts related to critical race theory, similar to bills making their way through statehouses nationwide. LaRe, who is running for congress, said he is pushing Jones to amend the bill to include a provision that would withhold state funding for private schools that punish children for the opinions of their parents or guardian.

The state of Ohio sends about $70 million per year to private schools across the state.

“In my opinion, that’s not fair to the children who have gone to that school for I don’t know how many years,” LaRe said of Gonzalez’s and Gross’s kids being dismissed. “It really comes down to the children being punished for the actions of their parents, and that’s just not fair.”

Both sides of the fight claim to have the backing of the majority. Pro CA leaders say they have more than 400 supporters, including parents, student, and staff. Williamson said that, despite the controversy, enrollment and financial contributions are up at Columbus Academy. More than 650 people who support the school included their names in an ad that ran recently in the local newspaper. Why, they ask, won’t Pro CA backers be similarly transparent, ignoring that the people who back the school have no reason to fear retaliation from the school’s leaders.

Gonzalez and Gross said they are scrambling to find school accommodations for their kids. They had no idea that school leaders were even considering dismissing the kids.

“We did not receive any warning at all,” Gross said. “It just came via process server.”

When asked whether they were considering legal action, Gross would say only that they are going to “protect our interest.” They’ve been “literally defamed to the entire community.”

Being dismissed from school has been particularly hard on their kids.

“When I finally did tell my youngest daughter, she actually looked at me teary-eyed and asked me, ‘What did she do wrong?’” Gross said. “And I said, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.'”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Columbus Academy was not involved in producing or running the ad in the local newspaper that included the names of more than 650 supporters of the school.