2024 Spring Newsletter

Spring Newsletter Cover

It’s been a busy year so far. Seven columns by PCE’s Executive Director, seven television appearances, meetings with politicians, numerous local talks, course offerings, and coaching sessions. Between meetings, writing, and researching, it is high time to inform you of all that is going on.

In the News

So, let’s start off with the craziest thing we’ve seen this season. The Alberta Teachers’ Association, apparently in collaboration with SOGI 123, has announced that they will fight school board elections. They also demanded more government spending and more taxes – not just in education, but in everything. They’re spending big, big dollars on advertising. The strangest thing? Apparently, they are planning to fund activist groups to try to “cancel” the United Conservative Party – and have already tried to do so. We wrote a report, Alberta's Teachers Go to War, on the ATA's efforts to cancel a meeting held for parents concerned about their children. You can also view the presentation, What is Happening in the Classroom, given by our Executive Director, John Hilton-O'Brien at that meeting.

Just before that, the Public School Boards Association of Alberta produced an official-looking report by their in-house economist, which argued that we should eliminate all forms of education but theirs, so that they could have the money. It is notable that it largely matches the ATA’s demands. You can review our analysis: Greed, ambition and the Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta.

Since our last newsletter we have published seven columns in the Western Standard. You can catch up on any that you may have missed on our publications page, or possibly listed below with some great articles from other people..

After the Premier’s announcement of her parental rights policy, we had a flurry of interviews and we are grateful that we were able to represent our supporters with common sense in the face of outrage by special interest groups against Premier Smith’s announcements. Here are seven reports by major media that came out of those interviews.

Forming Leaders to Help Alberta Families

Groups of concerned citizens have been forming across Alberta, targeting school board and municipal races. Many have taken our workshops, and been galvanized into action.

We have also been called upon to provide coaching on advocacy. We’ve consulted with a large number of individuals who turned to us privately for help with issues they had at their children’s schools, plans to run awareness campaigns, and further help with implementing strategies they learned at our election workshops.

We’ve given a number of presentations. Some of these were election workshops, and others involved speaking on a topic chosen by the group that invited us. For instance, the "What is Happening in the Classroom," was hosted by the United Conservative Party's Calgary-Lougheed Constituency Association at their "Let Kids Be Kids Town Hall."

You, too, can invite us to speak on issues relating to educational policy or parental authority.

We can taylor a talk to your group's needs and have given talks on the following topics:

How to elect better trustees and councilors - and how to be a better board member.
How to advocate for your child
The Education Establishment, Curriculum Reform, and Wokeism
Critical Theory, Diversity and Inclusion, and other topics in educational philosophy
We can also give talks about ethics, human rights, and how to start your own advocacy organization

Please contact our executive director, John Hilton O'Brien, at [email protected].

We Need Your Support

So, here’s the hard bit. We’ve been able to do all of this because of the generosity of our donors. Most of our donors give us a little bit every month – together, it is just enough to keep the lights on.

But we are ambitious to do more:

to help more people in Alberta mobilize to fight elections,
to publish a more frequent newsletter,
to spend more staff hours on the kind of investigation that breaks stories like the ATA’s new political project,
to reorganize our website to make resources easier to find, (and we have lots of new material to add)
to start making our own videos.

If we had enough money, we’d even be able to counter the ATA’s third-party advertising spending.

If you’d like to help, all it takes is a monthly donation. – anything between $10 per month and $100. We’re hoping to add $2,500 in monthly donations to bring up our staffing levels and start making videos. We hope that you can help us get there!

Before we go, we’ll leave you with some interesting articles written by us and others, below. We hope that this reading material will be entertaining and educational for you!

Thanks for reading!

The Parents for Choice in Education Team