California MassResistance parents force online public charter school to remove all LGBT propaganda books.

School officials strongly resisted, but finally caved in to parents’ demands.

Officials also agreed to find out who brought the books in!

November 5, 2023

Screenshot of second grader's online class lesson - which the mother thought was supposed to be an academic subject.

It’s difficult enough for parents to confront their local School Board over pornographic books. But taking on a corporation running online schools presents even bigger challenges. But our California MassResistance parents succeeded!

California Virtual Academies (CAVA) is a group of nine online public charter schools located across the state (Fresno, Kings, Los Angeles, Maricopa, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Sonoma, and Sutter). The schools are entirely online, i.e., “virtual” schools.

CAVA schools get their online curricula from a national company in Virginia called Stride (formerly named K12). However, CAVA has some flexibility to decide what it uses and what it doesn’t.

Why enroll in a virtual school? Parents enroll their children in an online school such as CAVA for various reasons. For example: They are tired of the “woke” indoctrination and unreliable academics in the public schools. They move a lot and want consistent schooling. They have a child who is in the hospital or convalescing at home. Their child was being bullied at school. And during COVID it was a better alternative to their public school’s online experience.

Books pushing LGBT indoctrination

Last fall, a mother of a second-grader in a CAVA school contacted MassResistance. She was very distraught. She had noticed that many of her child’s online classes were readings from children’s books containing explicit and objectionable LGBT themes, gender ideology, and other radical topics. This was a clear attempt to normalize these behaviors and ideas to her child.

More screenshots of indoctrination for second graders under the guise of "social studies and history," using LGBT children's books.

She also saw that CAVA’s online collection available to the students had MORE of these kinds of books.

The mother found many more from CAVA's online book collection for second graders ...

And she noticed that LGBT themes and instruction (often using the books) seemed to be mixed in with several subjects throughout the school day.

Fighting back

When the mother contacted MassResistance for help, we got right to work. We helped her organize a small group of CAVA parents which soon began to grow. The virtual setting and corporate backing brought new challenges. We began investigating ways for the parents to force changes.

We noticed that the CAVA administration held virtual “coffee” Zoom sessions for parents. That seemed like a good place to start, so the MassResistance parents began attending. They brought up the perverted and objectionable nature of the curriculum and demanded it be cleaned up.

That certainly wasn’t what the local CAVA administrators wanted to discuss, and they reacted with hostility, attempting to deflect and curtail that criticism. The parents were told to “give their phone number and be contacted later” or “use the link to provide feedback.” But complaints submitted that way were dismissed or ignored.

The parents persisted. More conservative parents shared their comments and their email addresses in the chat areas during the sessions. So the local administrators reacted by disabling the chat of the “troublemakers,” shunned them, and told them they needed to address the “policy makers” in the company instead.

Taking it to the corporate level

So the parents began working their way up the ladder. They began complaining directly to CAVA officials in the statewide office. To justify the books, the CAVA officials used a common technique by leftist educators: They told the parents that CAVA needed to include this LGBT material for second graders to conform to the California Social Studies Frameworks. However, MassResistance informed them that the “Frameworks” are merely a recommendation based on the actual required Social Studies Standards – which do not mention LGBT issues at all.

Parents flooded CAVA’s head administrator with phone calls and long descriptive complaints. We also considered filing complaints to the California charter school licensing authorities.

From there, the parents contacted Stride’s national corporate offices. They submitted lots of feedback on the Stride website. They complained bitterly to Stride’s Director of Curriculum. All this began to get attention higher up the corporate ladder. The corporate leadership could see that the parents weren’t quitting.

And finally success!

Eventually, a Stride VP got involved and agreed to work with the statewide CAVA VP to make changes to respect the various cultural backgrounds, family values, and religious beliefs of all the parents, not just a few leftists.

Within months, CAVA removed ALL the inappropriate books! They also created a committee to investigate who purchased them and to analyze the curriculum.

Final thoughts

This email to MassResistance from the mother who first contacted us says it all:

Thank you to the whole MR team for the amazing and so needed work you do on a daily basis.

I will be forever grateful for the support my family received when our son started encountering indoctrination at California Virtual Academy. Other groups and church leaders to which we reached out did nothing and simply encouraged us to homeschool.

Thanks to MR's guidance and the participation that you had attending those meetings and speaking up against their practices, it has stopped. They removed those inappropriate and graphic books. CAVA's VP started an investigation to identify who purchased those titles and who made them available to children.

I hope you all will continue to have the strength and the courage to carry on.