[applause] so glad you came. Good to see you. [applause] good evening everyone. I want to welcome you to the public charter school. When im unable to handle the winters here, you can tell me what to do b i started coming int was cold. It just stayed cold and stayed cold and stayed cold. So im enjoying the ward warm weather but i know you are ready for the cold weather. Today was the first day of school for Founders Academy. Lets give Founders Academy a big round of applause for hosting us tonight. [applause] its been a long day for kathy. Theres no doubt about it. Moms for liberty is a nonprofit grassroots organization. Our mission is to educate, empower, parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government. Thats exactly what we are doing. Had a wonderful roundtable with education advocates, a lawyer and some mothers. We talked about some of the issues affecting you and New Hampshire. These are not unique issues to just New Hampshire. You guys are struggling with educational failure, issues about secrets being kept from parents happening all over our country. Knowing that you are a champion for moms and dads and you are really keeping the pulse on this issue and tackling these issues headon, we appreciate that. We are excited to hear from you today. Tiffany is what i hope every american realizes they can do is when she saw a problem, when she saw the issues happening in schools, she didnt just say something. She rallied all the parents saw the same problems and how many members do you have . We have over 120,000 members. We just added idaho. When they say one person cant do something, look at what she did and thank god you did it. Im going to give credit. Tina is the cofounder and we have an Amazing National team that helps and its the moms and dads on the ground. The truth is im a mom of four and i serve on the local school board and i realize Public Education was broken. Running for office as a woman and a mom was a big responsibility and now you are running for president of the United States of america. Give us some thoughts. What were your thoughts on the roundtable today . Its always insightful but i come to this as a mom. We have one job as parents. Thats to make sure we keep our kids safe, we raise them in a way that they can make the most of their life and be successful. Thats our number one job. When i see whats happening in schools now, we have to end this chaotic cycle. No parent should ever wonder whats being said or taught to their child in the classroom. We need full transparency in the classroom always. We need parents to be able to decide what schools their parents go to. You look at kathy and this amazing charter school. Having opportunities like that when you know all kids dont fit in the same old, making sure they have options that matters. We are coming off of the situation where kids were mandated to wear masks. Think about the kids in kindergarten where a lot of what they are learning his facial expressions and you couldnt see the teachers face. Then you wonder why we are having this social anxiety because the kids got scared through that. They didnt know what it meant, they just knew they had to do it. It was a really scary situation for them. Then we learned what happened when you did online schooling, what a mess that was. God bless the teachers, the teachers did the very best they could. Teachers are giving so much this year now they have to be the pastor and the nurse and the guidance counselor and the teacher and they teach to the test. All these pressures are there but you have these School Bureaucrats and teachers unions. What bothers me is there trying to take custody of our kids. We cant allow that to happen. They are our kids. We make the decisions on what happens in their daytoday life. To see the slippery slope suddenly feel like were falling off a cliff, its going to take all of us to fix this because our kids deserve better than they are getting. I was talking to a senior at New Hampshire school the last time i was here. At the end of the town hall, she took me aside and she said in every class i go to, they talk about transgender. She said its fine but i feel like im walking on egg shells because i dont know what to say and im scared if i say the wrong thing people will get upset. Thats the last thing i want her worried about in school. I want her thinking about how she is comfortable in her skin, i want her growing her confidence. I want her trusting in her ability to think for herself. I want kids reading math, science, history. Not all these other things. What i think this is doing that they did an amazing job started, lets not let it and. Now we are seeing this creep back in. I didnt have sex ed until seventh grade. Even then you had to have a parent sign before you could take the class. My dad wouldnt sign it so i had to sit next door. But thats the parents role. Thats not for the schools to decide. Now we are getting to a point where the schools think they know better. We cant have that happen. What were doing here today is to talk about the strengths of people who stand up and say we are going to do something about it. All of us using the powers of our voices but correcting this and making sure we reverse this trend and put parents back in charge where they belong and make sure our kids are healthy and safe in the process. Absolutely. We have a saying, we do not coparent with the government. A message to president biden, we do not coparent with the government. Its time for parents to stand up and push back. Weve asked parents to sign them something called the parent pledge. If you know someone running for office, you can go to our website you can download this. You can go on the website to see if your elected official or candidate has signed it. What we say is we are asking you to pledge, to honor the fundamental rights of parents including but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. It seems simple. The pledged it advanced parents in decisionmaking involvement, defend against government overreach and secure parental rights at all levels of government and we would just love if you would sign the parent pledge for us. Absolutely i will sign it thank you but i want to say this too this is not a republican or democrat issue every parent regardless of their education regardless of where theyre from knows whats best for their child i trust every parent. When you give birth or youre the spouse that have been with the woman thats given birth you know all of that process. When that happens we are literally we have it ingrained in us what we need to do to protect that child and so i trust every parent i dont think government needs to judge every parent i dont think that this should be republican or democrat and the reason why i bring that up is joe biden just attacked me saying that i was being a maga extremist for doing an event with moms for liberty. And if joe biden thinks im being a maga extremist for being a mom for liberty then count me as one of them because we have to be extreme when it comes to our kids. Thank you for that nikki we appreciate it. So were really excited to take some questions i hope you brought your questions tonight. We talked about a lot of different issues in the round table that are affecting you and your families and your community and so im sure were going to have some really interesting questions thank you nikki for assigning that. Wonderful thank you so much for that. Of course and we will take questions there is nothing we wont answer so dont be shy because if youre thinking that someone else is thinking it too andrew has the mic miles has a mic and so well let yall go ahead and start. My name is rachel i noticed that in 2014 you reallocated around 200 Million Dollars in South Carolina from um other places to your k12 systems with that education reform what does that look like at scale at the federal level. So we it was actual education reform and what we did at that point was we knew if a child couldnt read by third grade they were four times less likely to graduate high school. And we saw a lot of our kids were not able to read by third grade and they were pushing them forward. So what we did was we created a system where we held those kids back we brought in reading remediation we brought in their parents and we set them up for success and it was the fact you cant keep pushing these kids through just to say check i did it because guess what at the end of the day if these kids cant read theyre not going to be able to get a job theyre not going to be successful theyre not going to be able to contribute to society the way they deserve to be to the way they deserve to be successful. So we did reading remediation i think we need to do that all over the country especially since whats happened with covid but more than that being a governor i saw that a lot of what happens in d. C they come up with these big ideas and they push it down to the states and say if you teach this well give you this much money if you teach this well give you this much money if you teach Critical Race Theory you will give you this much money thats the wrong approach. What i will do is we will take those funds from the department of education and send it to the states. Lets take away the power of the federal government reduce that size of the department of education and empower the parents on the ground empower the people in those states that way youre getting it closer to the kids more money is actually going to teaching and then you can control whats being said and taught to your child in the classroom. You know i strongly believe we have to bring vocational classes back into the high school. In South Carolina we were teaching our kids to build the things we were making we had apprenticeships all over but guess what vocational classes in South Carolina would look different than vocational classes in New Hampshire so send that money to the states and let New Hampshire decide what that vocational class looks like. Let every state decide that think about that when it comes to special education think about that when it comes to reading programs think about that what that means in terms of innovation think about what that means in terms of all of these issues that we want our kids to excel at when we suddenly reduce that Big Department of education and you use that money that youre paying for to actually go to the kids that we want it to go to instead of pushing boys into girls sports and things of that nature because theyre not really giving a choice anymore theyre just mandating. I think that its incredibly dangerous when we look i will always fight for girls i have said as long as i can remember strong girls become strong women strong women become strong leaders and i will continue to say that and every time i hear someones got a daughter i always say raise a strong girl raise a strong girl because its important and the idea that youve got these girls whove worked so long to get to the point in their High School Career and then have a biological boy step up whos physiologically going to be different have them step up and take over all that hard work that theyve done and then youre gonna go and say oh and they get to change in your locker room. My daughter ran track in high school i played tennis in in high school i dont even know how i would have that conversation with my daughter. How do we get them used to biological boys in their locker rooms you cant and so why do that to them why focus on that. And so you know the priorities have been lost in our Education System and its really simple you go back to the basics we need to focusing be focusing on beating china beating india making our kids smart enough to topple them not sit there and worry about whether were hurting someones feelings thats not what this is supposed to be. So my question is in our educational setting right now our special Needs Children are being left behind drastically. They do not have their oneonone help. Their ieps are not being met. We have children who are behavioral we have children with autism we have children all over the spectrum who arent even getting an ounce of what they need into our Public School systems. What is something that you could bring forth thats going to help these children thrive instead of redistricting these children because these School Districts cant handle them. Or even having to move these kids to another state you know if you have a child with autism and we know that those therapies early on can really make a difference with those kids if you dont have those therapies think of what a family goes through when they want to do as much for their child and they have to look at moving because your state doesnt provide it a lot of that is look at the waste thats going to dc and think about if we actually had that money go to support the child that they need. Every child is different and special in their own way and whatever challenges they have. Parents need to feel like theres a support system not just one teacher. You need to feel like youve got a guidance counselor there a reading support there youve got someone who can help them if theyve got dyslexia youve got someone who can help if theyve got challenges someone whos its all about prioritization. This is not rocket science. We are parents. We know what our kids need. Its just get that support around them. When you got so many bureaucrats that are so detached from what it is, they are sending down what they think is scholarly to tell you but they are not sending down what is the practical help that you need . When that money is sent down not with Strings Attached but with the idea that states have a basic right to give you support for any child that has a special need at the full level, not at a personal level, they have to have the environment for that child to thrive, they have to teach the basic academic of mass, reading, science, history, they have to set you up for a job, not just to go to a college or university because thats what youre supposed to do, that they actually go and teach kids how to think, not what to think, thats where we need to go. This isnt going to be that hard. But what it does take is you have to clean up the department of education and you have to clean it out completely and when you do that, that is when magic happens. When i was governor, everybody said, what legislation are you going to do . Thus the wrong question to ask thats the wrong question to ask. I went to all of my agencies and replaced the head of every agency and then i sent people into every agency to clean it up, pull down bureaucracy, pull down red tape, get rid of problems, streamlined it down and create benchmarks to prove to the taxpayer that they were getting a return on investment. Some agencies, we tweaked, some agencies, we gutted. But guess what . Then the legislature saw what we did and they knew there was a new tone. When Congress Sees us do that same thing with these agencies and they see we are pushing down these block grants to the state, it will set a new tone in d. C. To let them know that government is meant to work for the people, not the other way around. Moms for liberty endorses and school board races. What you just talked about is going to make running for School Board Even more important. Doesnt matter if you dont have kids in schools. You need to get involved, if you are going to run for office, run for school board. The change happens in our own backyards. As that money comes down, we are going to need some liberty minded people in Office Spending in a way that respects parents and puts parents in charge. The first line of defense is your school board. Go to your School Board Meeting and see how few parents are there. Thats where all the decisions are made. Those decisions are being made without you. Use the power of your voice to say something. I will tell you when we were looking to do education reform in South Carolina, i met with all the groups, teachers, superintendents, principals, i met with teachers unions, and we met with School Boards, the group that was the hardest, the most stubborn and the most close minded, School Boards. They didnt want anything to change. They thought they knew what was best. If they didnt want you to question the spending. They didnt want you to question their programming. They didnt want you to question anything. Thats why we need real normal people to run. Im a big proponent of normal people running for office. They are going to be so happy you called me normal. [laughter] you are normal. School boards are the first line of defense. You are exactly right. It was actually here in New Hampshire, there was a gentleman who came to one of the events, he was helping us with security, and he said, im running for school board. And i said, you are . I said, good for you. I said, why . He said because they canceled the father daughter dance, and he said, and i had enough and i decided to run. I loved that. Because he was making a point to do something about it, not complain about it. Our state deserves a lot of credit because they got enough money to offer the letters training for all teachers, and parents, grandparents and volunteers to learn the proper way to teach, because we have kids that dont get help until they are behind two years which is a lifetime for a little kid. The other thing i want to ask you is, what are you looking forward to in the next debate . It were stunning when you called out you were stunning when you called that ur a couple of people that screwed up. Well, first, do you want to answer the first question in terms of education . You are right. Training the teachers properly and the science of reading so every child can read. 95 of children have the ability to learn to read but we have in our country right now two thirds of children that are not proficient in reading. There is no greater Security Threat in the u. S. Than a nation of illiterate people. When they maskes up masked up those teache