Idaho’s 2023 Teacher of the Year is Karen Lauritzen.
Though her peers, students and superiors recognize the fourth-grade teacher’s amazing talents, Lauritzen received enough hate mail and threats that beginning next week, she’ll be teaching in Illinois.
Her offenses?
Lauritzen’s lesson plans included segments on African Americans and the United Nations and on FaceBook she “liked” a post for the expansion of LGBTQ+ protections.
In school, one lesson segment popular with students was the different kinds of food people eat around the world. 
In most countries — first-, second- and third-world — people routinely eat beetles, crickets, termites, ants, grasshoppers, and other such “bugs,” Lauritzen explained.
But instead of being praised for expanding their minds, Lauritzen was labeled a “socialist.”
Others accused the 21-year veteran of promoting “transgenderism,” for her personal support of those recently targeted.
And discussing Black Lives Matter? Clearly, only a left-wing activist can sympathize with the trials minorities face.
Instead of feeling celebrated for the esteemed award, Lauritzen said she felt pilloried by parents and citizens “questioning every decision I made,” according to a recent story in the Boston Globe.
So she left for what she hopes is a more tolerant environment.
A CULT-LIKE movement is infiltrating school boards and city and county councils where extremists are running for office on wedge issues such as parental rights, book bans, transgender athletes, and anti-vaccine mumbo jumbo.
Such platforms are used to terrorize teachers, librarians, school boards and civic leaders into submission or, as in Idaho, simply leaving.
As a result, libraries are closing and teachers are feeling their goal is not so much to grow awareness of the world, but to adhere to a circumscribed script.
BEGINNING next month, Russian high-schoolers will receive new history textbooks, courtesy of President Vladimir Putin.
The books refer to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as a fight against neo-Nazism instigated by the United States.
Not surprisingly, Putin’s version depicts Russia as the victim with him saving the day.
