DV Journal

In the wake of the DVJournal report on the lack of transparency by the Pennsbury education system, the school district voted Thursday to expand its educational software to include lesson plans for teachers.

At issue was a controversial video shown to 8th graders in the Pennsbury School District showing young Native American women saying the Thanksgiving holiday was a result of the “slaughter of Native Americans.” Concerned about the content, parents Tim Daly and Jesse Rivera filed right-to-know requests for the teacher’s lesson plan. Those requests revealed Pennsbury teachers were not filing lesson plans at all.

In an affidavit Pennsbury open records officer and district spokeswoman Jennifer Neill said that “formal lesson plans are not in wide use in recent years.”

However, the district has a policy that requires teachers to file lesson plans.

At Thursday’s board meeting, Lois Lambing, who chairs the education committee, quickly read a motion to expand its educational software to include lesson plans as she reviewed a list of other items for the board to approve.  The lesson plan component is part of Chalk, a software package the district had in place.

Lambing said teachers will begin using the lesson plan software in September.

Parental concerns about classroom content exploded during the COVID pandemic, when many moms and dads saw firsthand what their children were being taught, thanks to remote learning. Transparency about school curricula is at the center of those concerns.

For example, in the Pennsbury case, Rivera, whose lineage includes the Taino tribe, was particularly concerned that his son was exposed to misinformation. He attended a school board meeting last December, brandishing a letter from President Abraham Lincoln, who officially established the Thanksgiving holiday.

After DVJournal reported on the issue, Daly and Rivera were guests on the Dom Giordano Show on WPHT, bringing more unflattering publicity to the Pennsbury school district.

Soon after, Pennsbury school officials reversed course.

Rivera said, “I am pleased to hear the board is looking at complying with policy. It is my hope this will provide proactive lesson plans and not reactive lesson summaries. I want to see teachers are actually planning and teaching accurately and transparently and be prepared to answer the deeper questions of topics touched on in the classroom.”

“Our significant efforts to uncover the truth regarding lesson planning through right-to-know requests were a success,” Daly said. “We proved that the school district was not actively monitoring lesson plans despite many teachers at Pennsbury creating them with this new software program. The decision to deploy Chalk places accountability on the administration to ensure approved curriculum is being presented in our classrooms.”

A woman spoke about the Thanksgiving video at the June 18 education committee meeting, saying she’d heard about it on the radio.  She asked whether the teacher could show the students Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation.

“I know that lesson has gone through curriculum review and it was approved by the committee who reviewed it. It was a perspective piece. It wasn’t based on the teaching of Thanksgiving but more on representing a perspective in a writing course,” said Lambing.

Assistant Superintendent Theresa Ricci said, “That occurred in November 2023. A teacher in a language arts class was doing work with students on perspective. The video doesn’t talk about the historical significance of Thanksgiving. Instead, it provides perspective from one group of people on how they perceive Thanksgiving. It was not a lesson in history or historical context or anything like that. The purpose of the lesson was to address perspective in an English class.”

Pennsbury parent Jesse Rivera wasn’t happy when he learned his 8th-grade son’s teacher had shown the class a controversial video claiming the Thanksgiving holiday was the result of the “slaughter of Native Americans.”

It was particularly concerning to Rivera who is partly descended from the Taino tribe. So he and fellow parent Tim Daley made right-to-know requests to the Pennsbury school district asking to see the lesson plan used by the teacher who showed the video. They wanted to know what, based on the formal lesson plan, the teacher was supposed to be teaching students about Thanksgiving and American history.

After months of right-to-know requests, denials, and appeals to the state Office of Open Records, Daly and Rivera discovered that the Pennsbury district no longer uses lesson plans.

Traditionally, lesson plans were filed by teachers and reviewed by school principals. Lesson plans are key to managing school curricula and creating accountability in the classroom. They allow both school administrators and parents to gain insight into the content students are learning. They also let officials backtrack and review teachers’ decisions and strategies should students suffer a decline in test scores or other performance metrics.

But Pennsbury claims it simply doesn’t use them. And that, says Daly, is a problem. Board Policy 111 requires lesson plans be filed.

“Based on Board Policy 111, Pennsbury publicly states that Lesson Plans are required to be completed by teachers,” said Daly.

However, in an affidavit, Jennifer Neill, a spokesperson for Pennsbury and its right-to-know officer, said, “The request spurred discussion about what constitutes a ‘lesson plan’ and whether the district’s practice and policy should be updated to reflect current practices. It is my understanding that formal lesson plans are not in wide use in recent years.”

Instead, teachers upload information to an online site called “Canvas.”

“As is stated in Ms. Neill’s affidavit, these requests for lesson plans have sparked an internal discussion about what constitutes a ‘lesson plan’ and whether district practices and policy should be addressed to reflect current practices or expectations. There is no Pennsylvania law which requires formal lesson plan submission, and it is not a practice that is in wide use in recent years. Instead, teachers often create learning materials that reflect plans for instruction, but that might not be considered formal ‘lesson plans’ in the traditional sense,” Pennsbury solicitor Erin Aronson wrote to the OOR, which ruled in favor of the district on June 7.

Rivera said many Pennsbury teachers, but not all, posted very flimsy outlines to Canvas, rather than traditional lesson plans.

“They’re not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination,” said Rivera. “Some teachers are better than others.”

Through Canvas, Rivera found that last November, Pennsbury teachers taught about the Indian holiday of Diwali and the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, but not Thanksgiving. He asked about Easter and was told by Teresa Ricci, Ed.D., the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, “‘We don’t teach about pagan holidays,’ which is a huge insult to this Christian because that’s the holiest holiday in the Christian calendar,” said Rivera.

The video that caused Rivera to look into the curriculum is nowhere in the teacher’s Canvas posting, he added. While he believes it’s good to learn about various different cultures, students should also learn about American culture and holidays, Rivera said.

In December, he gave the school board a copy of Lincoln’s proclamation that officially said Americans should offer thanks to God for their blessings on the last Thursday of November.

“My main concern was when my student came home and said we learned the real reason for Thanksgiving was the slaughter of Native Americans,” said Rivera. “And it was a victory party done by Lincoln. And I was immediately taken aback. We were able to find the video from Teen Vogue entitled, ‘The True Meaning Behind Thanksgiving.’ The teacher listed it as ‘Sorry, kids, to ruin your Thanksgiving, but you probably need to know this.’”

When he asked, the teacher and principal told Rivera that students would not be given a true version of events, only the “alternative view.”

“And that’s a bit disturbing to me as a parent, especially because the video, in the process of doing that, taught an alternate view. And because the primary view wasn’t present, the alternate view became the primary to those students.

“The teacher pulled my son aside afterward and said it wasn’t true, but it was just meant to be a point of discussion.  It was never corrected for the rest of the class, who now hold that viewpoint. That’s also disturbing to me.

“The belief that’s being promoted is basically that one group of people should be indebted or judged as guilty for the actions of their ancestors. I believe this to be the very definition of racism. It is not something that should be taught in schools in that fashion,” Rivera said.

“After pressing, no one in the administration was able to comment that they saw the video and unable to say whether they agreed or disagreed with it, which I found highly disturbing as well. It’s my request that racism not be taught to my son in school. I would appreciate that it not be taught to anyone’s child in school,” Rivera told the board.

Chadwick Schnee, a lawyer representing Daly, said they will be filing a request for reconsideration with the OOR.

“I think that there is something very troubling about a school district not having lesson plans, especially when this school district’s own policy appears to require them,” said Schnee.

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A Lower Merion middle school special education teacher’s video presentation regarding his transgender experience appears to be a presentation for children and is in the form of a lesson plan. Now that the video has gone public, thanks to the social media site “Libs of TikTok,” concerned parents are asking questions and demanding transparency.

The school district, however, is not cooperating.

The video shows Ben Beaman of Welsh Valley Middle School telling his students about his process of transitioning from female to male to non-binary. The slides explain that Ms. Beaman now goes by Mx. Beaman and that, “I was born in the wrong body. Even though I was born a girl, I feel more like a boy on the inside but fully feel like either.”

After parents approached No Left Turn in Education for help, Nicole Smith filed a right-to-know (RTK) request to see the lesson plans used by the teacher.  The district denied her request, but it was approved by the state Office of Open Records in Harrisburg. The district then sued to overturn that ruling.

While the video shows slides explaining the transition process to students, the district claimed they were not lesson plans. Assistant Superintendent Alexis McGloin testified Wednesday before Common Pleas Court Senior Judge Joseph A. Smythe, Jr. that the teacher’s class has no lesson plans.

McGloin told the judge there are no lesson plans for Beaman’s Welsh Valley Middle School four-student special education class because the teacher does not follow the district’s curriculum. Instead, each student has an individual education plan (IEP), and the teacher uses that to create progress reports.

“These are highly individualized for that child,” said McGloin.

“You’re saying you have no lesson plans?” asked Smythe.

“That’s a student record,” said district lawyer Justin O’Donoghue with Wisler Pearstine.

O’Donoghue said not only does the teacher not have lesson plans, but the open records request also violates the Family Rights and Privacy Act. And the district contends the RTK request was not specific enough.

Smith did not present an argument to the court or call witnesses.

“They’re going to great lengths to keep things out to the public’s eye,” she told DVJournal after the hearing. “And if they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, I don’t know what the big deal is with releasing the lesson plans.”

Smith said the parents who contacted No Left Turn in Education, which was founded by Lower Merion resident Elana Fishbein, were afraid to file their own RTKs because the district might retaliate against their children.

They have “a real fear of retaliation,” Smith said.

From Ben Beaman’s video presentation on gender transitioning

Smythe did not rule but instead took the case under advisement.

Beaman did not respond to a request for comment.

Fishbein said her organization “has been filing FOIA (RTK in Pennsylvania) with school districts all over the country, many of them in Pennsylvania. We have been exposing a lot about the instruction, rule policy, and decision-making that results in student indoctrination or the teaching of inappropriate subject matter to school children.”

In the Lower Merion case, Beaman “was actively sharing her transitions journey to a male and then non-binary with her special education class, a personal matter of hers that should not have been a topic of conversation in a classroom, particularly among vulnerable children. We submitted our request seeking to find out what exactly she has been sharing and teaching her students.”

“Of course, LMSD has fought us tooth and nail, first claiming that the teacher creates almost 80 lesson plans a week and 3,000 a year, and thus the request was too burdensome and vague. They also claim the usual, that some of her material was copyrighted. The Pennsylvania RTK court ruled that they should share the lesson plans with us, and they filed a lawsuit to reverse that ruling.

“The Lower Merion community should be informed about the wide leeway that the local schools are permitting teachers in regard to the ‘instruction’ (or in many cases, indoctrination) they are divulging to their charges,” Fishbein said.