Here I am trying everything I can to raise my young daughters right, vigilantly monitoring the assault of content they consume.
What are they watching? What are they listening to? What are they scrolling through? Is it appropriate?
Then along comes Kipps Beyond Middle School, the Harlem charter school that I was originally thrilled our preteen would attend.
And all my protective efforts were brazenly violated.
No, my 12-year-old girl wasn’t peer-pressured into exploring sexually explicit content.
She was assigned to do so by her 7th-grade English teacher — without my consent or knowledge.
“Aristotle and Dante Explore the Secrets of the Universe” is a wonderful title for a book.
The Van Gogh-inspired cover appeared in a slideshow on curriculum night, implying our children were embarking on a philosophical, cosmological journey that would open their minds to a new level of literary and intellectual inquiry.
Sneaky, sneaky: Only after students were done reading this book did parents get wind of what was actually between the covers.
“The boys in the book masturbate to each other a lot,” my daughter’s friend blurted out as several families dined together at a restaurant.
We thought our children were being exposed to philosophy, but at last discovered that the book merely featured characters named after philosophers — who obsess about exposing themselves.
Not to mention the causal heroin use, a 15-year-old hiring a trans prostitute and a prison murder, among other similarly wholesome elements, all featured in the book assigned to my underaged daughter.
Remember how the city cleaned up Times Square to make it family-friendly? It seems everything they swept away has been regurgitated onto the pages of books my child is being assigned to read in class.
If this same sexually graphic content were shared at most jobs, a human-resources SWAT team would be scrambled and heads would roll.
Lawyers would be licking their chops over million-dollar harassment lawsuits.
Why should we look the other way when teachers assign explicit books to children?
“But the book won awards!” the school’s teachers pointed out, when we parents protested.
It doesn’t matter that parents don’t approve, as long as somebody who doesn’t know or care about our kids has slapped their golden seal of approval on the book.
Meanwhile, the English Language Arts director at Kipps Beyond has openly questioned whether Shakespeare is still relevant or should even be taught.
Poor guy never won a diversity award! So naturally classrooms should deprioritize the Bard in favor of lesser authors who check the right social-justice boxes.
A word about the word “diversity”: It is not synonymous with sexually graphic material, nor does it grant immunity to teachers who sexually harass minor children by assigning such content.
After six months of protests, meetings, emails, texts, phone calls and Zoom calls with the principal, teachers, staff and regional directors, what was the response?
The founding principal, spitting in the face of parental values and objections, announced 7th graders would next be assigned “The Poet X,” a book that’s even more explicit and sexually charged.
My daughter’s teachers were repeatedly assigning outright erotica to 12-year-olds.
After one of my endless emails to officials throughout the NYC Department of Education finally got somebody’s attention, the school finally relented and agreed to assign “Lord of the Flies” instead — at least this year.
But the chief schools officer at Kipps NYC subsequently emailed me to affirm that her charter school system is still fully committed to teaching the books we objected to — as well as other sexually explicit books — in the future, because they align with its “core values.”
It amazes me that in the wake of #Metoo, so many educators still don’t understand that no means no.
Nor do parents deserve the educators’ repeated insinuations that our objections must be based on bigotry.
My own family abounds in diversity of every kind, from pronouns to pizza toppings. So spare me the tactical gaslighting.
Am I just one of those parents — a book banner? Hardly.
As a journalist, author and entertainer, none of my professional pursuits are possible without the full employment and defense of the First Amendment.
But I identify first as a father.
That’s why when it comes to accepting that any adult or institution, teacher or school system can violate the boundaries of my young girls and my values as a parent, sorry, this papi don’t play dat.
School systems engaging in these predatory practices will never cop to it.
But if a teacher is providing explicit sexual erotica to a child, somebody should call the cops.
Laws and policies exist at every workplace to protect adults from being harassed by unwelcome sexual behavior, including being presented with sexual content in a book.
The standard should be higher when it comes to schoolchildren, not more permissive — and parents must speak that truth loudly to the Diversity Industrial Complex that’s running our schools.
Bill Santiago is a stand-up comedian and author of “Pardon My Spanglish.”
