Local Parent Slams California For Alleged ‘Predatory’ LGBT Club: Children Are Being ‘Groomed. That’s What It Is.’

In October, a shocking report claimed that teachers at a Salinas, California, middle school secretly recruited students into a pro-LGBT club disguised as a “gender equality club” without their parents knowing. According to evidence presented by author Abigail Shrier, teachers even followed these kids online in multiple ways to gather information about them. In the club, school employees reportedly indoctrinated the pupils into accepting progressive teachings on sexuality and transgender ideology, even going so far as to “coach” students into changing their gender while advising them on how to hide their new identity from their parents.

On Thursday, The Daily Wire reported that parents had the chance to address the school board and speak out about the allegations earlier this week for the first time in a public setting. Both current and former guardians of Buena Vista middle school students did not hold back in their dissatisfaction with the adult behavior. One mother told the board that the teachers “took away [her] ability to parent my child” as they secretly convinced her daughter that she was actually a boy and went so far as changing her name, documentation, and gender identity within the school.

Another mom, who says her kids used to attend Buena Vista, expressed her belief that the behavior of the two teachers in question constituted inappropriate “grooming.”

“When you have basically ‘recruiting’ for the club going on, not just allowing students to come to the club organically, you have eavesdropping, you have predatory cyber-stalking, I think these are — as was already stated — predatory and again I ask what does tenure protect?” Holley Hebert said in reference to one teacher who allegedly bragged she had tenured and was essentially unfirable.

“[The teachers] are well-liked and they’re influential and — Ms. Caldeira with her Harry Potter-infused curriculums, she’s very popular and likable,” Hebert said referring to one of the teachers in question. “I worked in her classroom I like her very much. I think both of these teachers are excellent teachers.  And that’s what’s so concerning for me, is that this message of — again — it’s recruitment, indoctrination — it’s influencing very young [people].”

Next, Hebert put it more bluntly, saying, “If I’m an 11-year-old and I’m insecure and I’m facing peer pressure and a teacher tells me I’m bold and brave and smart because I was in a club, I’m going to come back to that club because I’m being groomed. That’s what that is. That’s grooming.”

“And if I’m being offered free pizza, I might show up to a club you know so I don’t know what other tactics are being used — because I’m not on campus —  but I think it’s important that the board really look at the influence of these two teachers. And yes, they’re great teachers, but you can be a great teacher with an agenda that spoils your intent, it spoils your mission because you have another agenda that supersedes what you were hired for and what the taxpayers are paying you for.”

The Daily Wire has reached out to the superintendent for comment.

As reported by The Daily Wire, Shrier claims the teachers bragged to colleagues how they would control information and follow kids’ schedules.

Caldeira was recorded saying, “We have LGBTQ kids who come to us, and they come and spend a year with us and they get all the love and the affirmation that they need. And we give them tools to be powerful and brave and bold …” She added that the kids “go hang with their friends at lunch. And they do their things. And we love them for that, but we miss them when they don’t join us. So we saw our membership numbers start to decline.”

Baraki added, “So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever … we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation.”

Caldeira reportedly stated: “I’m the teacher who runs our morning announcements. That’s another type of strategy I can give you.