August 2022
The start of the new year is always exciting and wonderful with new intellectual challenges for our kids and logistical challenges for busy parents. We welcome all the new faces in Lake Highland’s faculty and staff and remain grateful for their hard work making LH such an amazing school. LH leadership has a new president, and we wish him success. The board of trustees remains essentially the same. Unfortunately, our concerns and questions about the subtle, but significant changes made by LH leadership amidst the 2020 Covid lockdown and detailed at LHPSWatch.com remain unanswered. These include:
-embracing and adopting the recommended “Best Practices” of the Washington DC based organization, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), by creating a LH Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Director and a DEI Advisory Committee tasked with top to bottom “programmatic and curricular changes to all schools” and mandatory “sensitivity training” based on group identity ideology, all while simultaneously redesigning LH’s website so that parents can no longer view their children’s curriculum nor the books on LH’s library shelves as before.
-sending LH’s faculty and students to demonstrably racist, segregationist NAIS seminars (People of Color Conference/Student Diversity Leadership Conference) for “leadership training” and adopting the NAIS’s formal policy of race based “Affinity Groups” which exclude non-group member students.
-promoting a scientifically absurd Gender Studies class for upper school students while prohibiting kindergarten teachers from using the phrase “boys and girls” when referring to our little ones.
- replacing of the words “Christian Values” with the mantra of “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” (DEI) in LH’s self-description on its website.
-all the above-and more- without any notice or opportunity for discussion or input from LH parents and while refusing, to this day, to answer any questions or provide any explanations for these radically transformative and significant changes.
These are only some of the concerns and questions which LH leadership has refused to answer, but which LHPSWatch.com will continue to ask and discuss. Look for our blogs on these and other issues in the future. Given the new school year we also thought it a good time to remind LH parents to vigilantly watch what their children are being taught. As far as we can tell, LH leadership is moving forward with the “programmatic changes” in every aspect of LH, including its curriculum, as recommended by the NAIS. LH continues to affiliate with the NAIS, hire faculty thru this organization and send both faculty and students to its conferences for “leadership training”. Because of the 2020 removal of the Atlas class syllabus browser from LH’s website, parents remain blinded as to what the school is specifically teaching children in any class but the one your child is in. Parents can and should access their parental portal weekly, if not daily, to review what their child is being taught in his or her class.
LH leadership continues to refuse to transparently and publicly discuss the controversial changes which flout the principles of our mission statement and honor code. Pay attention to your child’s course content. Look for Woke buzzwords, like those discussed at LHPSWatch.com. Look for new terms, strange jargon and one-sided political handouts advocating ideological dogma and doctrine in course materials and class discussions. For example, the mantra of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. As we demonstrate on the website, DEI does not mean what you think it means. “The Woke share our vocabulary, but not our dictionary”. If you see one-sided proselytizing in your child’s classroom (i.e., LH’s Gender Studies course in the Global Online Academy electives), or policy changes (i.e., the LH DEI director’s edict to kindergarten teachers prohibiting their use of the words “boys and girls” to describe young ones) then let us know. One purpose of the LHPSWatch.com is to enable concerned parents to communicate and share what is happening at LH with other parents. LH leadership continues to refuse to transparently and publicly discuss these controversial changes which flout the principles of our mission statement and honor code.
We are aware of a small, but growing group, of LH parents who are asking the new president to create a public-school board type forum at LH where any LH parent can ask LH leadership any question or raise any concern. Modeled after the existing bi-monthly public county school board meetings, this would be a monthly forum open to every parent and recorded so all parents can listen later to what is concerning others. This group has no specific issue other than simply creating at LH what every public-school parent has: an opportunity to transparently communicate directly with LH leadership in a brief Q & A session and hear what concerns other parents. In other words, establish communication between parents and leadership about their child’s education. If you think a school board type forum is a positive, helpful and necessary change and wish to support this effort let us know and we can connect you.
Sincerely,
Concerned alumni, parents and grandparents