How Gov. Glenn Youngkin is Fixing COVID Learning Loss and Restoring Parents' Rights in Virginia

one of the reasons that you were elected was that you would fight back on the co Madness and on the trans explosion of the insanity policies in the Virginia schools and you have lived up to your word I as a parent watched you campaign on this and watched Terry mccauliff try to say that parents don't have a say on what goes on inside the classroom and my jaw dropped you actually took office and you've done what you promised to do so let's just spend a minute on the covid stuff because it was January that Dr Anthony fouchy told us he's really not satisfied there was any learning loss at all as a result of these school closures and Randy wein Garten was featured at the DNC like she was some sort of a heroine even though she pushed these closures to go on indefinitely yeah there's there's not been uh any more detrimental and misguided policy decisions that were made during the pandemic and there were a lot then closing our schools and telling our students that uh watching a 12-in screen every day was a quality education I mean as I said earlier uh Virginia was bottom 10 in the nation and getting our schools back open and the first thing I did when I came into office was make sure that not only were our schools open but to give parents the ability to decide whether their child wears a mask or not uh we'd watched systematic degradation of expectations in our schools and so when you have students that are told that they're proficient in reading and math but they're not really proficient in reading and math and you compound that by locking them out of the school buildings you you're not surprised by the fact that Virginia was top top in the nation in learning loss in fourth grade reading in math I'm going to say that again Virginia one of the top education systems in America was number one in the nation in learning loss in reading and math and the primary reason was the fact that the foundations were degraded because of expectations that had been lowered in what it took to be proficient and second of all the kids were locked out of the classroom and this is not an indictment of teachers I will tell you teachers worked hard to try to do the impossible but that is why when we last year saw this persistent learning loss Megan we took immediate action and went and worked on a bipartisan basis with our general assembly and said we need to fund particularly in our youngest Virginia iions intense tutoring and so third through e8th graders now get intense tutoring if they failed or at risk of failing and by the way that was over 60% of our students who either failed or risk failing their standards of learning tests the results are good uh we're seeing we're seeing the test results improved I need them to improve a lot faster because we're still behind where we were pre pandemic the other area that I have been incredibly concerned about is that when policy makers and administrators and and school associate teachers associations told families that it wasn't important for their students to be in school the result of that has been huge increases in chronic absenteeism I mean giant increases where students just aren't in the classroom and if they're not in the classroom they can't catch up and so we initiated a Statewide effort to tackle chronic absenteeism we saw 15% reduction in chronic absenteeism but again that's not nearly enough so we have to get the kids back in the classroom and second of all we have to make sure that they are getting the kinds of support and intensive tutoring that they need and let me add one more thing Megan and I I I apologize but this topic is absolutely a passion of mine is that during this time period literally the left facilitated in our kids' lives massive massive use of social media and there's been no constraint and we have seen the the the uh role of of social media The Addictive nature of social media have such a detrimental impact on our young people it has damaged them academically it has caused severe mental health we have seen the rates of particularly teen girl suicide attempt and self self harm go up over 150% uh and we've got to get at this and so that's why I I signed an executive order last week uh or at the beginning of July that then translated into draft policies last week to make our schools from Bell to Bell cell phone free and we're going to make sure we work together to draw some boundaries around our kids so that they can learn better and be healthier so we're trying to help the kids who did suffer learning losss turn things around we're trying to get them off of the screens uh during academic hours and ideally Beyond uh you sign an executive order back in 2022 removing CRT critical race Theory and the nonsense that it teaches which divides us and separates us by class and um by by race and gender and so on um and then the trans Insanity was reversed by you that was being put in by your predecessor and Ralph northr and that in particular was a restoration of parental rights Virginia Virginia of all places I mean it's more of a Southern state of course used to be red but because of all the people moving to it from the blue DC area became more and more purple and now it's kind of blue was starting to say that parents didn't have the right to know if their child showed up at school and declared that he was a different gender than the one that he actually was than his biological sex you changed all that Governor why well there is a fundamental right that parents have to make the most important decisions in their children's lives uh yes education but their health and well-being right at the top of the list and we had watched parents be shoved out of their children's lives with politicians and bureaucrats and administrators trying to replace them and and how in the world could this this incredibly important impactful lifelong decision be discussed with somebody at school but not with parents and in fact there was an effort to not tell parents and so we went to work to reestablish the primary role of parents in their children's lives to put them at the head of the table so that there cannot be decisions that are made uh without parental deep involvement it is about the role of parents and children's lives it's about families and most importantly it's about the long-term well-being of kids um what we have seen of course is the reality of Virginia and I believe Americans recognize this is not a political issue it's not Republicans versus Democrats and in fact one of our observations in our 2021 campaign was that education and particularly the role of parents in their children's lives and standing strong for those rights was not just bipartisan it was universally supported and I once again believe that Republicans should be winning on this topic of Education we we hold high standards we believe in empowering parents to make decisions with their children for their children to not have things imposed on them we believe that biological boys should not be playing sports with biological girls now that's fair that is fair we have to make sure we stand up for women and the effort again that the Biden Harris Administration has made that KLA Harris has made to completely gut the progress in Title 9 over the last decades to empower women and girls in America is shameful we've got to stand up for women and girls and this idea that again we're going to allow biological boys to play sports with biological girls is just beyond beyond Common Sense okay so I just want to go over this you cut taxes stimulated business got the kids back in school removed the ma The Mask mandates restored some of the learning loss that had been imposed under your predecessor um removed CRT from the schools got rid of the trans Insanity that was governing the teachers and the students sent National Guard troops from Virginia down to help restore the Border in Texas cleaning up the voter roles to make sure it's purged of dead people and illegals and in a now blue State you have according to Rono College polling likely voters a 59% approval rating as a Conservative Republican Governor that's the model I mean a lot of people think Governor that in order to get numbers like that at the state level or the or the national level you have to be moderate you've got to be forgive me but more like a Mitt Romney type and that's the only way forward for Republicans to win the national vote and to win the electoral college you are proving that to be untrue every day of your term well first of all uh you're very kind to to offer that offer that assessment um I have to tell you when when I decided that I was going to run for governor um and after my wife stopped crying and we prayed over it um and we locked our arms together and said that we if if hired we would serve um we also committed ourselves to to try to do what's right and often times we find that there are pressures that take us off of what's right um and we've made mistakes and let me just be clear I know we have um but uh we try really hard to stick to Common Sense conservative values that work and the difference I believe today is instead of a philosoph iCal debate of what could be under one set of policies versus another set of policies we have real life case studies that show that Common Sense conservative policies work and the left liberal Progressive policies don't Virginia which had moved so far left was seeing a stagnant economy was seeing small businesses close left right and Center was seeing a 20% uh High in a 20% increase in murder rate a 20-year High we saw test scores plummeting across the Commonwealth and we were watching people move away faster than they were moving here the same thing happened at the national level we watched common sense in the first Trump Administration really demonstrate economic strength foreign policy strength border strength and the reality is this works and then you compare that to we've seen over the last three and a half years and what we have again seen very clearly is weak foreign policy Causes Chaos around the world the borders are kamla Harris's failure to do anything at the border has caused chaos across the United States I mean we have seen such travesty just in in in Virginia we have on average five Virginians a day that die from fentanyl overdoses we had two illegal immigrants that tried to Ram the front gate at Marine base quanico I mean come on they had a box truck and they tried to drive through the front gate of quanico and RAM it down we've seen young women sexually assaulted uh this is craziness uh and then finally of course when it when it when it comes to representing the core values of hard work and education and Public Safety I mean these are foundational that we want people to have jobs where they where they go to work every day and get paid and keep more of that money in their pocket if you did not vote for this economic downturn and who did well we know who did and the high inflation you 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