Ciattarelli says he’ll stop ‘assault’ on N.J. home-schooling at Moms for Liberty rally
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican nominee for governor, pledged to stop the “assault” on parental freedoms such as home-schooling at a Moms for Liberty rally at Liberty State Park in Jersey City this morning.
Alexandra Bougher, the chair for Moms for Liberty Bergen County, began by asking for a moment of silence for the two children killed and 17 victims injured at a Minneapolis catholic school shooting yesterday.
“We’re here today because parental rights are being trampled on. They’re being trampled on every single day, whether it’s the curriculum that the New Jersey state [DOE] has picked for us, whether it’s by the senseless vaccine mandates that they put on parents every single day, and we’re here to say we’re not gonna stand for it any more,” she asserted.
“They’re also going after the home schoolers. The home school rights have always been kind of a great thing about New Jersey. ‘You want to home school, come to New Jersey,’ it was one of the most free states to home school in. Well that’s changing now, they are coming after us.”
Bougher, who made headlines about two weeks ago for saying that the Girls Scouts removed her for not bringing her troop to LGBTQ+ events during Pride Month, said that the state is trying to have an annual “wellness check” on all home schooled students.
She added that many parents are not enrolling their students into public schools in New Jersey because of the “woke ideology” promoted in many classrooms.
Ciattarelli, who is looking to defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-11) on November 4th, said that Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) administration has failed parents in this regard and that he would right the ship if elected.
“Over the last eight years, parental rights have been under assault here in New Jersey. This is why we have elections. It all ends come January 2026 when we win this election,” he said to applause from the roughly 50 people in attendance.
He also blasted Policy 5756, which recommends that school districts prohibit personnel from notifying parents about a student’s gender identity, as “immoral,” “indecent,” “wrong,” and “dangerous” before continuing on about home schooling.
“There are numerous bills in our state legislature make it almost impossible to homeschool your child and implement a curriculum if the home-schooling is approved, which are the very reasons why the parents pull the children out of the public school system to begin with,” the former state assemblyman declared.
“What amazes me about this is we have number of school districts all across the state, where up to 80 percent of eighth graders are not on grade level for reading, writing and math, but we don’t see legislation to improve that. But yet now we’ll have an assault on the 160,000 parents and guardians that home school more than 80,000 children all across the state.”
He also pledged to have an attorney general and commissioner of education that respects parental rights, as well as establishing a parental Bill of Rights, if elected to the state’s highest office this fall.
Civil rights attorney Dana Wefer, a former Hoboken Housing Authority board chair who now lives in Bergen County, explained why home-schooling has become popular in recent memory.
” … Many parents wish to protect their children from confusing and harmful ideologies, such as the belief that children can be born into the wrong body, something that children are taught by law in New Jersey. If a child starts to believe that they’re born in the wrong body in a New Jersey, school workers in the school will help the children present as the opposite sex and hide that fact from their parents,” she stated.