An elementary teacher in Kansas recently resigned from his job after the school added mask requirements for unvaccinated teachers and pushed critical race theory. He was then fined by the school district.
Josiah Enyart explains “that was my final straw”, after the Shawnee Mission School District sent an email out late July renewing a mask mandate for students and unvaccinated employees.
Enyart, who worked at Comanche Elementary School, was told he’d have to pay a “liquidation penalty” of $1,000 for resigning after the deadline in his contract.
This is not the first time Enyart has been frustrated with the school. The district spent $400,000 on Deep Equity critical race theory training for its teachers, and in an interview with Fox News, Enyart said “I can’t believe the lack of transparency with curriculums, teacher trainings, in class activities based on the trainings, and top-down regulations used as indoctrination tools”.
Why wouldn’t the public school system want the parents to know everything that their child is being exposed to? Why aren’t the parents being asked before these decisions are being made? And when they do, why do the board decisions not match the data on the surveys.
Enyart also explained his frustration with the school during the pandemic, noting that during remote teaching, “district leaders did not give parents or teachers a sense of control or accountability where we could help students succeed”.
On top of his resignation, Enyart has decided to remove his children from the school district this year to be homeschooled.
I’m not going to continue to have my kids bossed around by these people and have no power as a parent, no power as a teacher, and for my kids to have no say.
The school district rejected his appeal to the fine, so a GoFundMe page was created to raise money for the $1,000 penalty. The funding goal has been exceeded on the page set up by Enyart’s community supporters.