Colorado parents protecting parental rights in public education have formed a statewide network. One of their first efforts is opposing a bill giving schools much greater power over mental health for students in grade 6 and up.
State House Bill 23-1003 provides that students 12 or older can consent to a school mental health assessment—even if their parents have opted out.
That’s a problem, Lori Gimelshteyn, founder and executive director of the Colorado Parents Advocacy Network (CPAN), told The Epoch Times.
She sees the mental health bill as the schools’ latest move to push an ideological agenda—one, she says, at the expense of children’s education and mental health, and parental control in how they are raised.
Mental health services already exist in the schools. Parents opt into it, signing a form permitting their children to seek care, Gimelshteyn said.
The new bill not only turns that into an opt-out situation—meaning it proceeds automatically unless parents act to stop it—but allows children 12 and up to dictate their parents not be told about it.
Issues like this led her and others to form the state group last July.
Martin Luther King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, spoke at their kickoff event in November. Since then, they’ve grown to 38 member groups representing thousands of parents and other interested citizens.
The issue, she said, provides cover for a controversial practice: schools promoting transgender awareness—so much that they encourage children to question their own sexuality—and aiding them to transition.
The system keeps parents in the dark and encourages students to lie to them about themselves or their friends. It creates an environment, parents say, jeopardizing children’s mental health.
She said more than half the children in their school district—Cherry Creek, in Denver’s affluent suburbs—don’t meet statewide testing standards for grades 3–8.
Cherry Creek, in Arapahoe County, has 55,000 students from communities like Aurora, Centennial, and Greenwood Village outside Denver.
State data on student test scores show that 50.5 percent of Cherry Creek’s students in grades 3–8 fell below basic expectations in English language arts, and 59.8 percent missed them in mathematics.
Poor test scores in one of the state’s top public school districts make her and other parents question why administrators instead invest time, energy, and money in subjects like “social-emotional learning.”
“The Colorado Parent Action Network and Cherry Creek Parent Action Network are not school or district-affiliated parent groups, so it would be inappropriate for us to comment on them,” Abbe Smith, school system spokeswoman, said in an email to The Epoch Times.
“Social-emotional learning sounds nice,” Gimelshteyn said. “Teaching them not to be jerks or bullies. But that’s not it at all. It doesn’t teach children resilience.”
“If you’re not capable of interacting, you can rest your head and lay down and come back when you’re emotionally ready. What would you do if you were a kid? You’re having a tough day. You’re excused, and they don’t put grades in for you.”
Gimelshteyn saw the damage done by all this to her own daughter before she and her husband, Max Gimelshteyn, transferred her in 8th grade to a charter school.
“The influences around her were crippling her. We didn’t realize her soul was being compromised. Every day one of her friends is [saying they are] bisexual or pansexual, trying different things.”
There are more instances of children cutting themselves. She knew of one suicide—parents must be informed—at her son’s high school recently and two more at another high school in the district.
Explicit Cartoon Treatments
She pointed to videos by Amaze Org that discuss sex. Aimed at 9 and 10-year-olds, they feature cartoony treatments and a boyish-sounding narrator. Gimelshteyn said she found them shockingly explicit and listed numerous examples.“They are normalizing concepts like porn so that kids think it’s normal. They discuss condom negotiation and what is virginity.” They teach slang sexual terms. “It is so messed up.”
She'd witnessed an emotional breakdown in one of her children’s friends. “We’re encouraging people who are super young to do things they normally would not do. It’s being normalized.”
“Everyone’s questioning, ‘I’m bisexual this week. I’m going to experiment sexually with this other girl.’ They’re 10 years old. They then feel guilt and shame but have no mental way to deal with it. It leads to anxiety and depression.”
Gimelshteyn said she hopes CPAN can roll back the cultural tide. They aim to have groups in all 178 Colorado school districts this year.
She and Gibbons say they know opposing the bill will be difficult.
Democrats have supermajorities in both legislative houses. On the committee considering the bill, the House Public and Behavioral Health and Human Services Committee, Democrats have an 8 to 3 edge.
The bill is sponsored by the committee’s chairwoman, Dafna Michaelson-Jenet. It passed out of committee on Feb. 7 by a 7 to 4 vote. One Democrat sided with the three Republicans in voting against it.
‘It’s the American dream’
Gimelshteyn described her family’s journey. Both she and Max Gimelshteyn were bootstrappers, he was a child immigrant and she was from a working-class family, her dad a backhoe operator. They worked hard, postponed having children until their lives were stable, and wanted to give their children everything they can.“It’s the American dream. We‘d take the hard work we’d done and set the kids up for more success without the hardships.”
Max Gimelshteyn was born in Belarus while it was still in the Soviet Union. His family, fleeing communism and oppression because his father was Jewish, left the country. They found themselves penniless on the streets of Rome before getting refugee status and later finding their way to America.
He enlisted in the Air Force at 17, got an electrical engineering degree from Penn State and then a Master’s, and became an officer. He retired recently as a lieutenant colonel after 24 years of service.
Born in rural Massachusetts, Lori Gimelshteyn was the first in her family to go to college. She became a speech pathologist.
She met her husband while he was stationed in Massachusetts. They moved around with his career. In 2011, he accepted a transfer to Colorado. Their two children were ages 4 and 2.
“We made a decision very thoughtfully that we wanted to live in the Cherry Creek School District,” she said. “There were multiple places we could live, school districts that were a lot less expensive. But we chose to live in an expensive area, because the most important thing to us is to give our children an excellent education. And Cherry Creek was known as the best of the best.”
She decided after two years to move her company from Massachusetts and incorporate it in Colorado. “We planned on staying here forever.” Life was going well. Max Gimelshteyn and partners started a defense contracting firm when he retired. It grew to 40 employees.
One day not long after school reopened following Covid lockdown, Jenny, then in 6th grade, told them at dinner, “My friend Stella is now going to be River, and River is going to use he/his/him pronouns and use the boys’ room.”
“This was the first time I ever heard anything like this,” Gimelshteyn said. “Max and I were looking at each other. We didn’t even get an email. It was a big topic, I thought. I was 47 or 48 and I didn’t know what it means.”
Parents Have No Idea
“And she said, ‘Oh, no, Mommy, River goes home every day as a girl. His parents have no idea.’ That day I thought, what in the world is going on in Cherry Creek?”Not long afterward, their 8th-grade son Chris asked for help with an assignment. The assignment was “Why is your favorite hobby racist?”
“His assignment was to create an anti-racist website to find a solution to stop racism in his favorite hobby, which is skiing.”
“I said, ‘You will get an F on this paper before you lie [by] saying skiing is racist. There’s no racism in skiing.’ He said, ”Mom, you don’t understand. I have to think one way at home and another way at school.' “
They got into a fight, she said. He wasn’t willing to take an F to do the right thing.
Chris did the assignment saying the issue was not racial but socio-economic. He designed a nonprofit to help the disadvantaged go skiing.
“He got an A. I let it go. But I was pretty angry,” Gimelshteyn said. Over the next year, as the children got into 9th and 7th grade, respectively, she and her husband increasingly heard “that’s racist” or “that’s transphobic” around the dinner table.
Issues like this triggered formation first of the local organization, Cherry Creek Parents Advocacy Network, and then the statewide one. Gimelshteyn said she and others were disturbed as they learned what was going on in their children’s schools.
‘Teaching Our Children to Lie’
And much of it goes on without parents’ knowledge. Students who want to change genders can access the school system for help, with it explicit their parents won’t be told. Other students are encouraged to keep it quiet.“They’re teaching our children to lie,” she said.
It can have adverse effects on children, she said. One parent, Monica Feder, filled out a form for Gimelshteyn’s local group detailing her children’s problems.
“Both children have experienced harassment and shaming for their gender, sexuality, and race,” Feder wrote. “Both are afraid to say they are anything other than bisexual even though it isn’t true.
“Both are ashamed of being white and feel they are inherently bad, solely for their skin color. In the last year, my daughter has become embarrassed to be female because of teasing and peer pressure at school to be non-binary.”
She said, “Both children have been taught not to trust their parents or ask us for help. But the schools failed to help them when they expressed they were struggling with mental health, bullying, and academics in the schools.”
Feder wrote her daughter filled out a mental health assessment, scored poorly in each category, “and wrote explanations that indicated suicidal thoughts. Yet she scored a B on the assignment and got zero recognition from the teacher. Both children went from honor-roll students to failing classes and serious thoughts of self-harm and suicide.”
The schools failed to help her. Her daughter ran away. They found letters threatening suicide. Her children developed medical conditions, including hives and panic attacks.
One tested at a 2nd-grade level when taking a private school entrance exam for 7th grade. Feder wrote she’s embarrassed now by her school district, and they have moved their kids to charter and private schools. It’s delaying her husband’s retirement, “but it’s worth it. I’m fighting for my children to have their lives back!”
Gimelshteyn said CPAN had received about 150 reports from parents, with a quarter reporting severe adverse effects like anxiety and depression.
Private School Improvements
Gimelshteyn said Feder’s daughter, who Gimelshteyn has known since age 5, improved dramatically and gets good grades since enrolling in a Christian private school. She told her mother during the second week of school, “Mom, I don’t understand why all these teachers care about me.”Gimelshteyn said her own daughter, who suffered anxiety attacks and stomachaches daily before school, has also improved markedly since starting the charter school. She’s relaxed enough now to fall asleep in the car in the morning.
School policies meanwhile have acquired neo-Marxist overtones, Gimelshteyn said. Teachers union members coming to school board meetings sit in a bloc. At one meeting they all wore red T-shirts bearing a Marxist fist and the word “Educate” in capital letters, on the front, she said.
Pledge, then Land Acknowledgement
A politically correct atmosphere is established from the outset.On the audio recording of the monthly board meeting on Jan. 9, the chairwoman asks “those who are able” to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance, which takes 13 seconds to recite. It is followed by the “Land Acknowledgement,” noting the land under them used to belong to Native American groups. That recitation takes more than twice as long, 27 seconds.
Gimelshteyn said a community activist raised a ruckus and reported her to district security alleging assault—after, she said, she gave him a business card and invited him to a CCPAN meeting.
Opponents falsely refer to them in public meetings as “terrorists” or “white supremacist militia members,” Gimelshteyn said. She believes they deliberately tag them like that for the public record to tarnish and ostracize them.
Gimelshteyn says the parents feel the clock ticking. “We only have a short window. We have a chance to move the culture if we can get funding, get our message out to the media, and not get squashed.”
CPAN’s website launched an inequity reporting tool in December to gather evidence.
“The left says there are all these inequities. We'll stand with you, but we want to see the actual inequities. There has not been one report of a student’s rights being violated because they were LGBT and not one of student rights being violated because of the color of their skin.”
Going forward, she said, “we’re focusing on the emotional piece of restoring the parents’ voice in raising their child.
“That parents and other stakeholders are joining hands to restore that and rigorous education. We'll be connecting with people’s common sense, no matter where they fall politically.”
“Society expects to have schools teach the fundamentals of reading, writing, and math,” Gimelshteyn said. “You do not expect to have your child’s moral values corrupted at school, and [meanwhile] their basic education is failing.”
