It’s Tricia Cotham’s favorite phrase.

Actually, it is just an overused trite and empty two-word expression meant to polarize the public into an either/or fallacy: “if you are against what we want, then you are not for kids.”

But what people like Cotham and her puppet masters want is to simply take more funds from public coffers and steer them into the hands of private interests. Whether that means tripling the amount of money for a nontransparent voucher program, holding the budget hostage and halting nonrecurring funding for schools, or creating a highly partisan charter school advisory board to bypass the checks and balances of the State Board of Education, the claim that they are putting “Kids First!” is nothing more than a verbal veneer.

And here’s another failed “Kids First” prevarication:

“State Superintendent Catherine Truitt told the State Board of Education Thursday that state officials and school systems still have too many questions about how to comply with the law and are still waiting for answers. It’s preventing them from being able to implement the law now.

Board members also said they were hearing concerns from school systems about implementing the law and wanting for guidance to help. Truitt and the Department of Public Instruction are planning guidance for school systems, with the hope the guidance will be ready by the beginning of October.”

What that means is that the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights” was passed to claim an empty victory for people who already had power so that other nefarious items could be attached to further weaken the public school structure.

So intricate were some of the items in that Parents’ Bill of Rights that target LGBTQ+ students and the use of pronouns and names other than what birth certificate states that they neglected to offer a real plan on how to improve conditions for our students in schools.

They built a plane with no wings and sent it out on a maiden voyage with people who never wanted to be on it in the first place to a destination that was already accessible to everyone.

And they claim victory for kids.

Even the state super called out this bill for its lack of substance and lack of clarity.

Every right that parents think they may have gotten in that bill was already theirs.

Curriculum, funding, salaries, measures of school and teacher performance, benefits, per pupil expenditures, and physical school buildings are all in the hands of elected officials. More parents vote for those people than there are teachers in the state. It’s just that some of those parents are demonstrably louder than others and are openly moved when they are told that what Raleigh is doing is putting “Kids First!”

If someone thinks there needs to be more transparency in what is done in classrooms, then start looking at the syllabi and online repositories that all teachers use for students to have. Technology and social media have not only made things more accessible, but have made classroom activities incredibly transparent.

It’s never been about “Kids First!”

It’s about money.