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Monika Bialostocka grew up under the shadow of martial law in Poland, where the government dictated how people spoke. She thought she left all that behind when she immigrated to the United States, chasing freedom and opportunity. But decades later, she became privy to a different kind of ideological regime — this time, festering within her own twin daughters’ school in New Mexico, where gender ideology ruled, parental rights were ignored, and children were quietly conditioned to accept radical dogma.

When one of Bialostocka’s daughters brought home a school-assigned novel graphically depicting pedophilia in early 2023, Bialostocka realized New Mexico School for the Arts wasn’t operating like an ordinary art school — it was waging war on childhood innocence. And when she dared to ask questions? Bialostocka said she was met with secrecy, gaslighting, and contempt from school officials.

Bialostocka and her husband moved to New Mexico in 2015, and when the time came to pick out a high school for their artistic twin daughters, Bialostocka told IW Features she thought New Mexico School for the Arts seemed “like a good fit for them.”

As she had always been, Bialostocka remained actively involved in her children’s education –– volunteering in the school library, attending parent association meetings, and closely monitoring school communications. Then came an email from the art school’s administration: a mandatory “Ungendering Language” training for teachers, hosted by an outside group called the Mountain Center.

At first glance, Bialostocka thought the organization appeared to offer therapeutic and outdoor programs. But after digging deeper, she discovered its “NM Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network,” which appeared to be an activist pipeline targeting minors with gender ideology. 

Beyond offering many resources to students on how to start “Gay Straight Alliance” (GSA) clubs at their schools, for example, the Mountain Center’s “Youth LGBTQIA2S+ Resources” document connected students with a long list of affirmation-based therapy and counseling practices, mentoring services, legal services, and even an “Equal Opportunity Services Specialist” who could “help trans students transition administratively so they don’t get deadnamed.” Its “Adult LGBTQIA2S+ Resources” document, accessible to students, even includes instructions on how to use chest binders and where to receive “free LGBT+ affirming STI testing (walk-ins).”

Disturbed, Bialostocka asked school administrators if she could attend the same training to understand what teachers were being told to pass on to her children. 

“The school refused to make it available to us,” Bialostocka said. “I even volunteered to pay.”

Eventually, one school administrator who was sympathetic to Bialostocka’s inquiries forwarded her the presentation slides. The training discouraged the use of words such as “mother” or “father,” “ladies and gentlemen,” and instead encouraged gender-neutral terms such as “parent” or “people.”

Bialostocka was alarmed, slamming this newspeak as “commie talk” and comparing it to the Soviet Union, where citizens couldn’t address people by their sex and instead had to use third-person plural pronouns similar to “they.”

But that was only the first domino.

In March 2023, one of her daughters showed her an email students received from the then-school principal about an assembly for a transgender ally group. At the end of the presentation, Bialostocka said, the students were invited to donate gently used clothes, shoes, and chest binders for a “transgender closet.”

Appalled that the administration had not only started a transgender closet on campus but was also soliciting donations from underage students, Bialostocka called out the administration during a parent association meeting for fostering divisive ideology behind parents’ backs. Other parents in the meeting reportedly hadn’t heard about a transgender closet before, either. 

This went on for months. Time and time again, Bialostocka’s daughters would tip her off to the radical ideology their school was promoting, and Bialostocka would reach out to administrators –– only to be dismissed or ignored.

Eventually, administration officials began to lash out at Bialostocka’s daughters as well. She said one of her daughters was singled out by a teacher when she stood for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Meanwhile, the school continued to promote inappropriate content without parents’ knowledge or consent, Bialostocka said. Disturbing, pornographic artwork –– including graphic depictions of sexual acts –– was proudly displayed in the visual arts department in the spring of 2023, leaving minors exposed to grotesque imagery under the guise of “art,” she alleged.

“I asked the [school] secretary, ‘Are you nuts?’” Bialostocka recalled. “You sit across from this filth every day and say nothing?”  

And yet, the most grotesque thing of all was sitting on a school-assigned reading list, Bialostocka revealed.

In 2023, one of her daughters selected a book to read for English class because its setting on the Polish-Ukrainian border many years ago fascinated her. But around 80 pages in, she stopped reading and told her mother, “I don’t think I should be reading this book.”

“She put the book in front of me, and there was a graphic scene of pedophilia between a 64-year-old woman and a 10-year-old boy,” Bialostocka said. “The woman was using him as a sex toy.”

The book Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Foer was one of four choices for a reading assignment handed down by her daughter’s English teacher. Bialostocka and her husband swiftly demanded a meeting with the principal and the English teacher. In that meeting, Bialostocka asked the teacher to read the passage from the book. The teacher was visibly embarrassed, Bialostocka said.

When the teacher attempted to defend the book, claiming students could choose a different title if they were uncomfortable, Bialostocka said her husband shut it down, asking, “You’re leaving it up to children to decide if they’re comfortable with pedophilia in their reading material?” he asked. “Why is this filth here in the first place?”  

The school refused to remove the book. Instead, administrators agreed to alert parents that some books made available to their students might contain controversial content. In other words, they did nothing, Bialostocka said.

When IW Features reached out to New Mexico School for the Arts for comment, officials did not respond.

By this point, Bialostocka and her daughters had had enough. One of her twins opted to homeschool instead, but the other stayed at New Mexico School for the Arts –– not because she liked it, but because its music department still provided her valuable opportunities in jazz guitar performance. According to Bialostocka, the teachers in that department were “really awesome people” whom she could actually trust.

Still, Bialostocka’s experience was jarring. All she wanted was for her daughters to be afforded the same opportunities she found in America when she came to the country 34 years ago. But what she found instead in New Mexico was a school system that treated parents like enemies, children like political pawns, and radical ideology like gospel. 

Unfortunately, New Mexico School for the Arts is not an outlier. It’s a case study of what’s happening all across the state and spreading throughout the country. 

New Mexico, in particular, has implemented one of the country’s most extreme laws that pushes dangerous gender ideology on children in nearly every institution, from the classroom to the doctor’s office. This dangerous New Mexican law even goes so far as to criminalize public groups or individuals who stand against the mutilation of minors through medical interventions. Sadly, the majority of New Mexicans don’t know this law exists.  

“Educators are introducing children to inappropriate things and kids feel ashamed to talk at home about it,” Bialostocka said. “They are teaching our children to hate this country.”

Like Bialostocka, many parents in New Mexico and across the country are waking up. As recent polling released by Independent Women shows, 91% of New Mexicans, including 85% of registered Democrats, believe there are important reasons to separate the sexes in K-12 schools, and 84% of New Mexicans, including 80% of Democrats, believe that sex is a scientific term only referring to the two biological categories: male and female. 

But the question is, how much worse will it get before more join the fight?