In rejecting grant, Idaho Republicans ‘voted against families and local communities’

The Idaho Freedom Foundation strikes again.

The right-wing lobbying organization helped convince enough Republican legislators to reject a $6 million federal grant that simply helps families get their preschool children ready for school (the horror).

The Idaho Freedom Foundation suggested that this federal grant would be used to “indoctrinate” Idaho’s children with “social justice ideology,” “critical race theory,” transgender rights and teach them how to be “activists.”

“The central idea of these activities is that young children are increasingly acclimated to becoming activists and will be comfortable organizing for progressive leftist causes as they get older,” Idaho Freedom Foundation’s education policy expert Anna Miller wrote in a piece posted just a few days before the vote.

Sound familiar?

“The goal in the long run is to be able to take our children from birth and to be able to start indoctrinating them and teaching them to be activists,” Rep. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, said on the House floor in a successful bid to reject the funding.

We’ve come to expect this kind of paranoid fear-mongering and conspiracy-theory peddling from certain legislators, who seem incapable of thinking for themselves and need scripts handed to them from the IFF.

But we had held out hope that there would be enough reasonable Republicans in the House to not fall for this nonsense.

We were wrong.

Rep. John Vander Woude, R-Nampa, was one of the Republicans who fell for the ruse and voted against the funding — even though he had just visited his constituents in the Kuna School District days before the vote and saw firsthand how the money would help there.

His vote against the funding hurts the very people he represents. The House’s vote does harm to Idaho.

I hope that Idaho state officials can somehow save this grant and keep this program going. A lot of work by a lot of people in a lot of communities has gone into this program already. To see it disappear because of an ill-informed boogeyman argument would be tragic.

Background of the grant

The federal funding is part of a multiyear grant that started under the Trump administration. Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who has set early literacy as one of his top priorities, approved Idaho to pursue the grant in 2019.

Idaho’s Republican U.S. Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo support the grant and voiced that support in a joint video statement in February.

The $6 million in funding that legislators rejected last week is the latest phase of the “preschool development grant,” which organizers say is a misnomer because Idaho is not developing a pre-K program. Rather, preschool means just that, helping children before they start school.

Idaho already received $3.3 million in grant funding in 2019 to establish local collaboratives in 15 communities around the state, from American Falls, Idaho City, Coeur d’Alene and Murtaugh to Juliaetta, Kuna, Fremont, Kendrick, Nampa and more.

The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children was designated as the state’s grant facilitator.

Even though the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children is affiliated with the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the two are separate, individual nonprofit organizations, said Beth Oppenheimer, Idaho AEYC executive director. Connecting the two organizations, apparently, is what set off the Idaho Freedom Foundation in looking for any whiff of wokeness.

Idaho AEYC is not “governed” by the National AEYC, and the National AEYC does not dictate curriculum, resources or training to Idaho AEYC, Oppenheimer said.

“They don’t dictate to us what we have to do, we don’t dictate to them what they have to do,” Oppenheimer told me in a video interview. “We all have our own operations, board, everything. They don’t give us money, we don’t give them money.”

The goal of the grant is to improve literacy and prepare children ages 0-5 for school. It’s as simple as that.

“The whole focus of the grant is family engagement and supporting families with young children,” Oppenheimer said. “This is about school readiness and literacy. Nothing more, nothing less.”

In Idaho, the local collaboratives make decisions on a local level on how best to achieve those goals, Oppenheimer said.

“We’re not coming in and telling these communities what to do,” Oppenheimer said. “We’re coming in and helping them navigate leaders within their community to develop early learning communities.”

Kuna’s example

In Kuna, for example, a committee of local leaders from the school district, the library, the chamber of commerce, the Grange, the city, parents, teachers and more decided to focus on reaching preschool students who fall in a gap in which families make too much to qualify for Kuna’s Head Start program but can’t afford a high-quality preschool.

Kuna’s program, “Get Ready to Learn, Kuna,” partners with private preschools, religious organizations and child care centers to help them with resources, materials, curriculum and training to provide high-quality educational opportunities for children wherever they may be, according to Kuna superintendent Wendy Johnson.

“I would say the approach is very Idaho,” Johnson said. “It’s very local. What does the local group do? And every collaborative is so different, because the challenges in their community are different.”

In American Falls, the grant funds a community-led initiative called “Read, Talk, Play” that involves the library, the school district and the business community, and “Ready! For Kindergarten.” Every Wednesday, participants wear T-shirts with the slogan, and the city put banners on their flag poles on Main Street, Oppenheimer said. Nampa started a program called 2C Kids Succeed, involving 50 business leaders, educators, government leaders, legislators, health systems, non-profits, and others.

One aspect of the Kuna program screens children for proficiencies, analyzes the results and then makes recommendations to the parents on what they can work on at home to improve their child’s school readiness, such as active learning, reading tips and everyday activities that incorporate learning.

“We’re not taking over,” Johnson said. “We’re not taking over the role of mom and dad in this, but we are wanting to partner to help fill that need.”

Johnson said school readiness scores have fallen in Kuna, from 60% to 40% in the past 10 years, showing a need for preschool readiness programs like this one.

Johnson said when the school district partnered with day care programs, proficiency shot up to 80% within the program.

That’s good for everyone.

“The surest way to decrease the numbers of kids going into special education, to get that leg up, a good head start, is during that first five (years of age),” said Ludee Vermaas, a retired special education teacher in Kuna, who is leading the charge on Kuna’s program. “Because then they come in ready to learn, you’ve got language, you’ve got those nonverbal cues of soft skills to listen, follow two, three directions. So it’s just a great way to give our parents a really good leg up.”

Nowhere have they been given a mandate for curriculum or a requirement for social justice theory, teaching about gender fluidity or race-based indoctrination, both Vermaas and Johnson said, chuckling at the suggestion. At no time have they been told they have to do something by the National AEYC or even the Idaho AEYC, they said. All of the decisions have been made by the local committee members.

There are no mandates to not say the Pledge of Allegiance, Johnson and Vermaas said.

Business community support

At the same time, the grant works to address high-quality child care access, particularly in underserved areas. That’s one of the reasons that the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, which represents Idaho’s largest businesses and industries, supports the grant, estimating that the lack of child care options costs Idaho employers $248 million in turnover and $166 million in absenteeism annually.

IACI President Alex LaBeau wrote a letter to legislators reiterating support for the grant two days before the vote.

“HB-226 is an education bill supported by IACI. … What the bill is not is some kind of liberal conspiracy to brainwash young children,” according to the letter that IACI sent on Sunday morning, Feb. 28. “To suggest so is both foolish and does damage to Idaho’s children.”

Other concerns raised

Some legislators questioned transparency of the funding.

Because of the federal reporting requirements, all of the expenses of the program are detailed, audited, accounted for and posted on IAEYC’s website for all to see, Oppenheimer said.

“This discussion about lack of transparency and (fear that) the state board is going to give willy-nilly $5 million to this crazy left-wing liberal organization with no accountability is simply not true,” Oppenheimer said. “That is not how federal funding works.”

Another part of the debate that overshadowed the details of the program were derogatory and sexist comments by Rep. Charlie Shepherd, R-Pollock, about how the grant does a disservice because it encourages mothers to “come out of the home.”

Vermaas pointed out that many of the families in the Kuna program have stay-at-home mothers who send their children to preschool not as an excuse to get out of the home.

“They send their kids to high-quality preschool because they know that’s what gets the kids ready for kindergarten,” she said.

Further, Johnson pointed out that it’s just a reality that in many families, both parents work, or some families are single-parent families, and staying home is not an option.

“It really is the families at the heart of this work,” Johnson said. “Community is at the heart of this work. So that’s what they voted against. They voted against families and local communities.”

This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 4:00 AM with the headline "In rejecting grant, Idaho Republicans ‘voted against families and local communities’."

Scott McIntosh

Opinion Contributor,

Idaho Statesman

208-377-6202

Scott McIntosh is the Idaho Statesman opinion editor. A graduate of Syracuse University, he joined the Statesman in August 2019. He previously was editor of the Idaho Press and the Argus Observer and was the owner and editor of the Kuna Melba News. He has been honored for his editorials and columns as well as his education, business and local government watchdog reporting by the Idaho Press Club and the National Newspaper Association. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, The Idaho Way. Support my work with a digital subscription