The Daily Signal - Louisiana Teacher: Why I Spoke Out Against Pushing Gender Ideology

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Louisiana high school teacher Jonathan Koeppel spoke out recently against the gender-identity ideology being promoted at his school. A video of his remarks at a school board meeting quickly went viral. During the meeting in April, Koeppel played an audio clip for the school board from an education app the school uses, called “BrainPop,” in which students were advised to refer to individuals as “they” if the student didn't know that individual's "preferred" pronouns.  "I would have thought that this is only happening in California or in New Jersey, New York, and the more progressive—what I would call—progressive states," said Koeppel, who teaches in the St. Tammany Parish Public Schools system. Not only is the school allowing a far-left ideology to be pushed on children, but it’s also teaching students incorrect grammar, he said.  Koeppel joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why he chose to speak out and how the school board, parents, and other teachers responded to his remarks.  We also cover these stories:  President Joe Biden gives a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on closing the racial wealth gap.  Former President Barack Obama says that Biden is finishing the work of his administration.  In a message for gay pride month, Biden calls out former President Donald Trump and conservative states for passing legislation that banned biological males from participating in girls and women’s sports. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, June 2nd. I'm Rachel Del Judis. And I'm Virginia Allen. Gender ideology, it's making its way into more classrooms across the country. Louisiana high school teacher Jonathan Coppelt decided to speak out against the gender ideology being taught to his students during a school board meeting this spring. Jonathan joins us today to share why he decided to speak out and what exactly students at his school were being taught. And don't forget, if you're enjoying the same. podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage

others to subscribe. Now, onto our top news. President Joe Biden gave a speech on Tuesday during a visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma on closing the racial wealth gap. In his statement, the White House announced that the Biden administration will be taking steps to help narrow the racial wealth gap and reinvest in communities that have been left behind by failed policies. Specifically, the administration is expanding access to two key. wealth creators, homeownership and small business ownership, in communities of color and disadvantaged communities. The speech marked the 100th anniversary of the Black Wall Street Massacre, where hundreds of black people were killed by a white mob in the Oklahoma neighborhood of Greenwood

in the city of Tulsa. Former President Barack Obama says President Joe Biden is finishing the work of his administration. In an interview with the New York Times released Tuesday, Obama said, I think what we're seeing now is Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job. Obama indicated that the policies of his administration had contributed to the economic growth under President Trump's administration. He told the times that if, for example, a Democrat, a Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton, had immediately succeeded me, the economy suddenly has 3% unemployment. I think we actually have consolidated the sense that, oh, actually these policies that Obama put in place worked. Obama added that he hopes the Biden administration

will continue to encourage the next generation to embrace left-leaning policies. In a message for Gay Pride Month, Biden called out former President Donald Trump in conservative states for passing legislation that ban males from women's sports. In his statement, the White House said, after four years of relentless attacks on the LGBTQ plus rights, the Biden-Harris administration has taken his story. historic actions to accelerate the march toward full LGBTQ plus equality. The White House added, from protecting the civil rights of every LGBTQ plus American, enabling all qualified Americans, including transgender Americans,

to serve their country in uniform, ensuring that LGBTQ plus Americans are leaders at every level of the federal government to protecting and defending the human rights of LGBTQ plus persons around the world, the Biden-Harris administration is a consistent and reliable partner in the fight for equality at home and abroad. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation Tuesday, barring biological men who identify as women from competing in women's sports. DeSantis explained during the signing of the bill that the legislation is intended to protect opportunities for women and girls per Fox News 4.

So we believe that it's very important that the integrity of those comprehensive, competitions are preserved, that these opportunities are protected. And I can tell you this, in Florida, you know, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports. That's what we're doing, and we're going to make sure that that's the reality. Student athletes in Florida can now only compete on the team that matches the gender on their birth certificate. Florida Democratic State Representative Carlos Smith called the bill appalling in a tweet Tuesday

writing, the first day of LGBTQ Pride Month and Asantis signs SB 1028, which bans trans kids from school sports. FHSAAA has allowed trans kids to participate in Florida since 2013 with zero problems. This fuels transphobia and puts vulnerable kids at risk for no good reason. Now stay tuned for my conversation with high school teacher Jonathan Cople, as well as we discuss why he chose to speak out against the gender ideology being taught at his school. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American politics speak? The Heritage Foundation host webinars called Heritage Events Live. These webinars are free and open to the public. To find the latest webinars and register, visit heritage.org

slash events. I am joined by Louisiana high school teacher Jonathan Copel during a school board meeting in April. Mr. Copel spoke out against the gender identity education being taught to students at his school. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, I'm very just humbled that you guys would have me. So your school is using an education application called Brain Pop. You, discovered that this product is teaching students about gender identity and you decided that you were going to speak out. So let's go ahead and take a listen to the video that you recorded and posted on YouTube of what you had to say at your school's board meeting back in April. They're teaching incorrect grammar to give a kid whatever gender pronoun they want.

Psychology tells you that when you're talking about sexuality with kids, their brains are not developed. You have to raise a child. You're rear a child. they don't know about sexuality. When an adult pushes some kinky sexual ideas upon them, it winds up grooming them to believe whatever the adult tells them. So this is the video by Brain Pop that our kids are spending hours in front of. This is what they're telling them about the pronouns. And the ACT already gave the kids the opportunity to choose their own gender

when they took the ACT. I got pictures of the forms. Moby and Orbot. They are my best friends. Actually, yeah, they can be used as a singular pronoun too. Like if you said, I'm going to see my friend, I can ask, where do they live? Since I don't know your friend's gender identity. And some individuals prefer they as a pronoun.

Like meet or bot, they are my best friend. We got kids that can't read and write and then we're going to teach them incorrect grammar. I mean, it's ridiculous, okay? Who gave permission to talk about this? There's two genders. If you're born with a penis and you have testicles, that's just anatomy, you're a male. If you have a vagina and ovaries, you're a female. A man cannot menstruate and breastfeed a child. You cannot give birth if you're a man. If you want to be an adult and do whatever you want with your life, I'm okay with that. Don't push this ideology on children. I'm not going to work in a district that's okay with that. You need to make a clear statement on how many genders are there because parents, they're already pulling their kids out of public school. They're doing homeschool. options, they're going online. It's going to increase as this liberal ideology comes into our schools. This isn't a political indoctrination camp. Okay, it's public education. We want to teach education, not left-wing ideas that aren't backed up by facts or science. Thank you.

All right. So Jonathan, could you just give us a little bit of context here? What is this app brain pop that your school district has students using? Yeah. So to give you guys some context, In Louisiana, we have what's called a parish. Every district inside of a particular parish, where I'm at in St. Tammany, we have, I think, 13, maybe 14 school districts in that one parish. And there are, we have like six high schools. It could be seven. I don't quote me on that.

But we have a lot of schools, a lot of elementary, a lot of middle schools, junior highs. We have a ton. And at my school, we don't actually use Brain Pop because Brain Pop is more of a children. program and it's used for children. I discovered it a year ago when I worked for an aftercare program and I remember the lady I was helping out, I was working with, brought the kids to a computer lab and said, okay, guys, if you're done your homework, get on Brain Pop and watch some videos and that's what the kids did for 30 minutes. They just watched a bunch of different videos on Brain Pop. The elementary schools where I'm at in my parish use Brain Pop or used past tense because from

What I understand, some schools are actually getting rid of brain pop. They're not using it because the parents were not happy when they found out the stuff that was being taught by that particular company. It's like a web platform that makes videos, educational videos, and sometimes the videos are great, but the company does have their own agenda and they push it to children. And that's really what kind of got me upset was when I realized they were pushing this gender identity. issue where you could be whatever gender you want to be apart from male or female, which to me is ridiculous. And then they were telling kids about systemic racism, is wiping out a chance for a black child to be successful in life and making that kid think he's a victim or she's a victim at such a

young age. I thought that was just unbelievable. So that's really what caused me to do what I did. Well, I think it's interesting that, you know, at any age level, whether that was, you know, younger kids or high schoolers, I think that would be like, okay, this, you know, this isn't okay. But the fact that this is targeted at such a young age demographic is pretty disturbing. Yeah, you're right. It's sick. It really is sick. When you think about it, I spoke again at another board meeting because there's some other things going on as well. But when I think about this, it's like they're not targeting me as an adult in trying to convince me of what they believe in their agendas. They're pushing what they believe in their agenda onto children who have minds that are like sponges and just absorb, absorb, absorb.

They don't have a developed frontal lobe. They can't make decisions on their own just yet. And it's really sick. When I think about it, and I guess when you think about it, too, it just doesn't make sense. Why would they target children with this? So what was your motivation to say, okay, I'm going to speak out at the school board meeting and be really honest and open about my thoughts on this? Well, somebody like myself, I would have thought that this,

is only happening in California or in New Jersey, New York, and more your progressive, what I would call progressive states, I didn't think that it was where I live. I didn't realize that. And as soon I did, I said, oh, my God, I don't think anybody around here has a clue that this stuff is already in our schools. And I guarantee you that's not the only company. That's not the only curriculum. that's not the only educational programs that are pushing this on kids. I found another one. Kids came to me and showed me one that was used in the high school where I work at that was pushing like this left-wing agenda to teenagers.

And so it's so common and prevalent today that, you know, somebody's got to sound the alarm. And I said, you know what, that's me. I'm going to do it. I don't have a problem with it. You know, whatever happens happens. But somebody's got to do it. And what better person that's somebody from the classroom from within the school system?

Yeah. Well, you've received a lot of press for choosing to speak out. You did a fantastic interview with the daily caller discussing this issue. But what feedback have you been receiving from students and parents at your school and in your school district? The parents have been awesome. I've gotten emails from parents. So in South Louisiana, church is a big deal. Everybody's connected. We know somebody from this church or that church or family, cousin, whatever. It's just it's a small community. I'm finding out that different people in Bible studies that somehow know my mom or go to the gym with somebody that I know, they're all talking about it and praying for me and just telling me how much they support me through other people. So from parents and the community, community, it's been great. The kids at the high school, I can't be very, I can't be specific about it, but a lot of the kids are very hyped up about it. When they saw my video go viral, they were the ones who told me it was viral. I didn't know it was viral until they told me. And it was very difficult to get their attention because they were just so infatuated with the fact that their teacher was this like internet sensation. And so I had had a couple days where I couldn't I couldn't really get them to focus well because they just would not stop

talking about the video. But from what I've seen, you know, a lot of the kids have been kind of supportive of the message. Of course, there are kids who are maybe of the other thought process where they were not in agreement with what I said and they, I can't really tell you what they do, what they don't do, but there's kids that were happy with it and kids that were not happy with it. And what about the school board or your colleagues that you work with? Have they said anything to you about it? Are they glad that you've spoken out? So what's really interesting is at first, nobody said anything.

And the past, I would say two weeks, people have been coming to me like in secret almost. Or if they saw me, like when nobody was around, they kind of look and say, hey man, I appreciate what you said. That was great. Shake my hand, whatever. Like, we're with you. You know, if anything, if we need to do something together, like you just let us know, we'll step up. So I've been getting a lot of like this secret love, like secret support from my colleagues because I guess they don't want to be maybe labeled or marginalized by other colleagues.

So that's been interesting. Now the school board, I thought it was so weird. The superintendent reached out to my principal for my principal to reach out to me and ask me, where did I get this information from? I'm like, why didn't you just contact me directly since I'm the guy with the evidence and I can tell you where it came from. It seemed like some members of the school board were not happy at all that I spoke up. And then when the video went viral, somebody passed a motion to end public comment at school board meetings to get rid of that ability to speak openly to the school board. And yes, somebody was not happy about it. There's two members in particular and then some consultant. And then a couple of them were wanted to vote and move forward with it. It did get shot down.

but some school board members not happy at all. So do you think that that's probably the individuals who are really driving this kind of ideology and are the ones probably, yeah, really kind of maybe intimidating others to move forward with some of these really progressive ideas? Well, I don't know if it's that or if it's the fact that they just want total control

and don't want the community to really be involved in decision-making process. I don't know if it's because they want to push this, woke curriculum to kids. I don't know that. I can't speak for them. I can say that when you want to shut the mouths of the people who voted you in, that says a lot about you when you don't want to hear from an open public forum. So that's kind of my take on that. Do you think that all the members of the school board were aware that this kind of information, what was being taught on this application brain pop was what students were learning, that they were learning about,

gender ideology and these progressive ideas? To be extremely honest, I do not believe that any one of them had a clue or were aware of this. It could be possible that one or two of them may have heard something, but might have never checked it out or never investigated it. I don't think they really knew that these videos were just so blunt and just blatantly out there for the kids to see. Yeah.

Yeah. You say in that clip that we listen to that public schools should not be political indoctrination camps. What other ways do you see public education becoming these indoctrination camps? Yeah. So this is actually what I addressed in the second meeting that was last week. We have teachers dividing classrooms. And what I mean by that is, you know, you have a parent who's a police officer. and the parent's kid is at school being told that we need to defund the police and police are bad and you know there's so much police brutality and all the police are this and that and that kid is literally marginalized by the teacher and harassed by the teacher because the kid disagrees the kid's dad's a good

dad good cop and so anybody that agrees with the teacher is the teacher's friend and if you disagree with what the teacher's spitting out you become the teacher's enemy There was one specific scenario that I just, I met with the parents, I talked with them. They addressed the teacher that was spewing liberal ideology in class, just left-wing ideas, the whole systemic racism that white people are oppressing black people, black people are victims of white people. And, you know, the girl disagrees with the teacher. And then the parent contacts the teacher, wants to know what's going on. Please, can we maybe not do this in class?

You know, keep that to yourself. Well, you know, the girls' grades start changing, you know, going from an A to B student down to D's and Fs. So, and then the kid is targeted and written up as if the kid has depression. So the teacher writes to go get the kid checked out for mental problems after the parent just is trying to get involved and say, hey, I heard what's going on in class. I don't think that's appropriate for children. So the classrooms are not politically neutral right now, and teachers are using their classrooms as political platforms to push their views. And again, they don't come to me and talk to me and like knock on my door. Hey, Mr. Cople, I work down the hall.

I heard you believe this, and I believe this. Can we have a conversation about it? That never happens. They just push their views on kids, and I think it's disgusting. And they need to be held accountable because if that happened at any other job, you'd likely be fired. Like you can't work at the grocery store and start pre-executive. reaching your political views to customers. That'll get you fired.

You know, you come to work to do your job. And so what we have are teachers not doing their jobs. They're acting like political activists on school campuses. And this is across every grade level. I mean, I've heard from people not just from my area. At first it was from my area. Now I've heard from parents and students from all over the country about this stuff happening. And it's sick.

And you've been a teacher now for three years. Have you seen the school environment and the curriculum change in just that short period of time? Well, to me, you know, school has always been, from when I was in high school, I always thought it was kind of a more liberal or more left-leaning environment. And then the last place that I worked at, there was a teacher who was also the rep for the union in that region. He had toilet paper with Donald Trump's face on it. And he brought it to school and he paraded it to us to teachers. And he had it, you know, featured in his classroom for all the kids to see. So you have stuff like that that's very common where people just blatantly

let you know their political views. I'm not talking about having a, you know, if you like Hillary Clinton or if you like Joe Biden, you have a picture of them, you know, that's that doesn't, that's nothing crazy to me. That's nothing unusual. But you're talking about a guy that has the president's face on toilet paper and parading it to kids. So that, I've seen that. I've had kids come up to me and approach me about things that their teachers are telling them, that is, they're scared to talk to anybody else about because they feel like they're going to be harassed and discriminated against. So it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a hostile environment. Now, not every teacher is like that. You might have a great school with mostly great teachers,

but you have a handful of them that are just these woke activists. And since that school board meeting when you spoke out, do you know if the school board is, you know, considering, okay, maybe we shouldn't use brain. Pop or, you know, there's other, you know, avenues. We should look into different forms of curriculum or be more aware of what we're actually teaching kids. I don't know what they're doing. I do know that there was an email sent to teachers at one elementary school that that particular

school was canceling Brain Pop. They're not going to use it. They won't be using it. There's a private school near where I live. It's a big, big private school. Everything from grade school to high school. They have a lot of kids. They found out about brain pop.

They canceled brain pops. So different schools, public and private, are starting to look into that and getting rid of it. My school board, they are, if they're doing anything, it's all hush, hush. I doubt, I sincerely doubt that they're investigating or looking into that because they, they just, they don't seem very proactive from what, from what we've experienced here. So I doubt they're really doing anything intentionally. They said, when I say they, I'm talking about the super, because I can't speak for, you know, 14 people on the board. The superintendent had no idea

that this was in any of the schools and then made it sound like it wasn't even being used by any kids. When I talked to parents, people at work with their kids use brain pop at their entire elementary school and middle school. So it's a weird, it's a weird situation. Are you optimistic that public education can course correct here and that we can, you know, kind of move back to a central. point of view where we're not indoctrinating students with political ideology? I would hope so, but the problem is all the people going into the education, not, I can't say all of them, but the majority of people going into the education field happen to be these activist figures, you know, and I hate to use the word liberal, but there's a lot of liberals

in education going into education, administration, a lot of liberal administrators and principles and you know political neutrality is out of the window now it's almost as if we're living in two different worlds where we have I would say I'd say through we have the conservative the people with conservative views people with liberal views and then you have people in the middle who are kind of just oblivious and don't really care about what's going on and you know they don't want to be bothered and they're just trying to live their life well I'm just trying to live my life but you know how can I how can I do that when we have grown men and women teaching little children And I don't know if you saw the video Pranger put out where they showed the article about having knitted genitalia to give the kids to let them know if they want to change their genders or be whatever, just like 100 different genders.

You know, adults are giving kids little little genitalia parts to play with to practice being different genders. So we're living in a sick world and it's hard to say. It's really hard to say. I'm a hopeful, optimistic person, but things are getting so crazy right now that it literally feels like we live in two. different worlds with almost two warring groups of people. And I don't mean physically with like guns, but there's definitely a war, a culture war happening and a war for the minds of the youth of this nation. Yeah. Jonathan, we really appreciate you joining the show today and letting us know what's going on down in Louisiana. Well, hey, thank you so much for having me. And it's been a pleasure. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to

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