In Nevada, Decency is on the Ballot in Clark County School Board Races

Schools in Clark County, Nevada could become beacons of normalcy or hotbeds of ideological grooming after the November election.

Conservative parents in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD) are pushing back against the leftist onslaught against their children at the ballot box. Leftists, meanwhile, are countering in support of pornographic material in school libraries and an agenda that normalizes sexual deviancy behind parents’ backs.

For years, leftist teachers and administrators managed to hide indoctrination from apolitical and conservative parents. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that as schools transitioned to remote learning. 

In September 2020, the group Power2Parent discovered a CCSD high school added lesbian author Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir Fun Home to a suggested reading list for 10th graders. The memoir includes images of sexual acts and anti-Christian themes. The high school promptly removed it, as it violated both CCSD policy and state law for distributing obscene material to minors. 

Parents, however, expressed concern that schools would adapt at hiding illicit and subversive indoctrination. Even worse soon proved true.

Parents Defending Education (PDE) discovered that six Nevada school districts, including Clark County, had policies to allow students to change their names, pronouns, clothing, and sexual identity at school without their parents finding out. PDE estimates that over 11 million American schoolchildren learn in similar environments.

These anti-parent policies and a barrage of propaganda for gender ideology is beginning to bear results. An analysis of government health surveys shows that the number of minors age 13–17 identifying as transgender has recently doubled. This can lead to tragic consequences. The American Psychiatric Association reports that while 2.3 percent of heterosexual adults and 4.4 percent of homosexual adults consider suicide, the figure rises to 30.8 percent for transgender adults.

“Pronouns are cultural Marxism to reprogram our youth,” activist Loren Biassotti said at a January CCSD board meeting. “By affirming gender dysphoria instead of treating it, you’re normalizing mental illness. Pedophilia is also a mental illness. With so much inclusivity, why would you leave out pedophiles?” 

Unsurprisingly, the board frequently had Biassotti removed from the building.

In March 2022, a Las Vegas drama student felt compelled by her teacher to recite a monologue including sexually explicit material about a girl coming out as a lesbian to her boyfriend. When the girl’s mother Candra Evans tried to read her lines at a school board meeting, her microphone was cut, as the material was deemed inappropriate.

The parental rights group Moms for Liberty (M4L) has sought to have books removed from school libraries that contain nudity and pornographic content and promote sexual deviancy.

CCSD Board of Trustees President Evelyn Garcia Morales had Clark County M4L Chair Christiane Mersch’s microphone muted during a meeting for reading from All Boys Aren’t Blue. The book, which Mersch said was available in at least 11 district schools, contains “sexual nudity, sexual assault, alternate gender ideologies, profanity, and controversial racial commentary.”

Another such book is Gender Queer, traces author Maia Kobabe’s journey accepting her asexuality and nonbinarism. Kobabe goes by the pronouns e/em/eir.

Efforts from groups like M4L have met with resounding success. According to a report by Pen America, around 3,300 books were banned in US public schools from July 2022 to June 2023—an increase of more than 1,100 books over the previous school year.

(RELATED: Teachers Union Prioritizes LGBTQ Agenda Over Education)

Taking the Message from School Board Meetings to Voters

The Clark County School Board elections present an opportunity to switch the balance of power in the fifth-largest school district in the country. The board supervises the district’s 300,000 students and 40,000 employees, hires and manages the superintendent, and approves the district’s budget. Four of the seven voting trustee seats are up for election in November. 

M4L endorsed candidates in all four seats in the primaries. 

District A

In District A, M4L’s candidate placed last. Emily Stevens, the candidate who placed first, however, was homeschooled as a child, attended a year in the CCSD, and finished at a private Christian high school before attending a Bible college. She supports school choice, her endorsement page contains no organizations dedicated explicitly to gender ideology, and her view on student discipline stands at odds with leftist Restorative Justice policies. 

Her opponent in the general election, Karl Catarata, is the Nevada state director of the Human Rights Campaign and an advisory member of the DISCOVERY Children's Museum. On September 2, he thanked Southern Nevada’s LGBTQ+ community for holding a joint fundraiser with him with an image urging voters to elect him as “the 1st LGBTQ+ CCSD School Board Trustee.” 

Catarata received the A+ “seal of approval” from the group Stop Moms for Liberty for which he thanked them on X, posting: “I will always stand firmly against the same hate and bullying that CCSD students face. - KC”

His has been endorsed by Make the Road Action Nevada, Silver State Equality, and Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund; and he spoke at the anti-Second Amendment March for Our Lives.

District B

In District B’s primary, M4L-endorsed Lydia Dominguez came in first with 30 percent of the vote and will face Eileen Eady in the general election. The school board races are officially nonpartisan, but Eady has been a Democratic operative for the past decade. Leftist organizations that have endorsed Eady include Make the Road Action Nevada, Planned Parenthood Votes Nevada, and the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

Eady dismissed parents’ concerns, telling the Nevada Current, “We have a lot more issues than the books they think are in our school.”

District C

In District C, Morales is the only incumbent up for reelection and faces Tameka Henry in the November general election. M4L-endorsed Frank Friends finished fourth in the primary.

This is a rematch from 2020 when Henry won the primary, but Morales won the runoff. In 2020, the Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America recommended Henry. For this election, she received the Nevada Impact endorsement. Nevada Impact describes its endorsements as meant “to help the LGBTQIA+ and Progressive community be better informed about candidates.”  

District E

Biassotti ran in District E and came in 2nd, making the general election by 255 votes. She is the former vice chair of the Clark County M4L chapter and founded My Children’s Advocate, an organization that opposes transgender ideology and the grooming of children.

Education or “Social Justice”?

Leftist activists in the CCSD aren’t taking the M4L counterattack to their indoctrination lightly. Some like Eady obfuscate and pretend ideological and gender identity grooming doesn’t happening. Others are doubling down in support of the propaganda, betting on voters to agree with them.

At a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris, CCSD English teacher Tillie Torres told the crowd: “Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a teacher because I saw education for what it really was: the greatest instrument of social justice in this country.”

Board Trustee Linda Cavazos—who is not up for reelection—called the Clark County M4L chapter a “cancer” that should not be allowed to spread in the community.

Board Trustee Lisa Guzman—who is also not up for reelection—and Clark County school librarian Nichole Beer told The Nevada Independent that they worry if candidates backed by M4L succeed in this election cycle, they will remove any books they perceive as inappropriate, including books that promote “diverse identities.”

“To a reading specialist,” said Guzman, “any book that makes the child want to read is a good book.”

If piquing interest in reading, however, is the “reading specialist’s” only goal, perhaps the CCSD should assign its high schoolers a steady dose of erotica.

Although only two M4L-backed candidates are on the November ballot, the group’s opponents understand that even a motivated minority can thwart their agenda to quietly use schools to remake tomorrow’s society in their image.

Cavazos rightly notes that if Biassotti and Dominguez win seats on the school board they could influence the agenda and with only two more colleagues enact conservative policies.

“We need to wake up,” Biassotti’s opponent Kamiliah Bywaters warned her fellow leftists, “because if we fall asleep, they’re going to come in like a swarm.”

The fight for Clark County’s children is not a fight between financial equals. In addition to the liberal media’s in-kind donations to socially liberal candidates, Eady outspent Dominguez more than two-to-one in the primary, and Bywaters outspent Biassotti more than 5-to-1. Nevertheless, Dominguez finished first by more than six points, and Biassotti came within a point and a half of Bywaters.

“I think it’s very telling how our numbers were in the primary,” Dominguez told the Las Vegas Sun. “If the people don’t agree with those values, they wouldn’t have voted us in.” to the general election. 

In 2021, Nevada’s Democratic trifecta passed the most liberal education bill in the country, requiring schools to teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer propaganda beginning in kindergarten. Until conservatives can win a majority in the legislature and overturn that law, it’s incumbent on common-sense parents to hold their school boards accountable at the ballot. In Clark County, they have an opportunity to make a dent in their liberal school board and save their district from radicals who want to politically and socially indoctrinate their children.

(READ MORE: Pornography in Schools, Brought to You by Harris-Walz)