When I learned there are a significant number of parents who are concerned with the political direction that Girls Preparatory School appears to be moving, I discovered a growing number of parents who are ready for some answers. On Tuesday of this week I wrote a story, “How ‘Woke’ is GPS?’ and yesterday my computer’s in-box darn near filled up. My comments and observations were taken from a letter that is being finalized to be delivered to school Head, Megan Cover.
The fear by over 100 parents is that a liberal slant is not in the true interests of the 700 girls who attend classes there and that the school’s liberal faculty does not represent the values of the families who spend $28K-plus to send their girls to such a place.
Again, I merely quoted selected graphs from a working letter but in a smattering of the emails I received, my detractors made their views into personal attacks, which I am afraid is trademark for liberals. I did not include the sender’s name and attempted to redact any identifying information.
Mr. Postman, please commence …
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“An alumnae friend of mine from GPS just sent me this article. It is both saddening and disheartening although, unfortunately, not surprising to read. As an alumna whose two income middle class parents worked their butts off to send her there 30 years ago I can attest that I received an excellent education. However, I have been hearing many things about GPS for several years now that are beyond what is mentioned in this article. What disturbs me most is what you mentioned, the lack of transparency with parents and alumnae.
It saddens me that Christian founded institutions like GPS are being taken over by the woke mob in the name of "equality". It's not equal for a parent to pay that kind of yearly tuition and have their child be taught curriculum that is against what the school claims it stands for or be taught to discriminate against people of any color. I know many alumnae whose daughters have chosen to leave or not attend in the last several years prior to the new headmaster simply because the school has been leaning this way for some time.
I hope the parents who currently have a daughter there wake up soon and most importantly I will be sending this article to every alumna I know who is simply not aware of the change in policies. Alumnae who give money to help support the school need to 100% be made aware and I can tell you right now, it's not in the alumnae magazine they send out.”
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“Great article about the ‘wokies’ at GPS. It's incredible the board replaced the last disaster with an even larger disaster. As a parent of a sophomore at McCallie, I worry McCallie may head down a similar path.”
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“My granddaughter, Mr. Exum, lives with my wife and I. I am very concerned with the content of your letter. My entire family, including [redacted]’s parents in [redacted location] are very concerned. I pay (her) tuition and upkeep. We are ALL of a Conservative Nature. Could you share a copy of the dissatisfied parents’ letter; if not, can you tell me where to obtain a copy of said letter?” (I would suggest Clay Watson, GPS Board chair)
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“I’m just wondering, did you reach out to Megan with any questions before publishing your scathing article about her?
I have been so refreshed to get to know her and I’m absolutely relieved she is the head of the school. I have found her to be a great listener, especially as it pertains to discovering the history of GPS and staying true to that history. Your article makes me hurt for her and for GPS because I so badly want her to feel welcome and appreciated. She has already made a big shift in the feeling of girls on campus. She has brought joy back!!!
I am a conservative Christian who is very concerned about wokeness in our culture, but your unkind words have consequences for institutions and individuals. I guess you get more clicks and forwards when you write like this. Please in the future consider the good of your daughter’s institution as well as the feelings of the individual you are criticizing. A call to them for comments would be fair. If you knew Megan, I am fairly certain you would not have written about her in this way. She is a gem and I hope you will have the opportunity to get to know her.”
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“As a parent of a GPS student THANK YOU! It has gotten unbelievably nuts.”
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“Roy, You are [expletive] crazy. Best!”
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(From a current parent …) “I’d love to sign that petition!!! And do you know who I might contact to sign it too!!!”
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“As usual, Roy, your proud ignorance is on display. To have such righteous smugness about being on the wrong side of history, not to mention the wrong side of empathy and kindness, is really something to behold in your commentary from today. I’m surprised you consider yourself a Christian given how you seem to take joy in tearing others down. The kind of proud and insensitive stupidity you love to display is exactly what is wrong with this country.
Don’t like something? Tackle it head on: don’t set up some weak straw-man argument and take cheap shots from an editorial page. What you do is barely a step up from Trump’s Twitter account before he was banned and Chattanooga just frankly deserves better than the likes of you.”
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“What an excellent article! We left GPS last year due to the CRT and many other reasons you mentioned. Thank you!”
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“Thank you for writing this article. We are one of the families with girls at this school and it is exactly as you described. It is time that someone called them out for running the school into the "liberal" ground.”
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“I led the SEED program at GPS in my last two years (Cathy Barker also led it when she was there), and the program has absolutely NOTHING to do with CRT, which you probably cannot even describe in detail. Thanks for sharing your hyperbolic opinions. No need to respond.”
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“So glad you are exposing this agenda. My oldest daughter graduated in 2019 (was there from 6 - 12), and we were pleased with the school overall. However, just in the last 2 years, we noticed parts of this liberal, woke agenda being introduced. We also noticed a larger percentage of girls believing they are gay and/or transgender. Teachers had the gay pride and BLM flags in their rooms, but not the American flag.
We asked for meetings, did our research, prayed and then made the decision to pull our 8th grader and move her to [redacted] this past fall. We were very fortunate to get in as the school is absolutely thriving. It was the best decision. I hope and pray this group of parents continues to fight. The woke liberals are ruining a good thing in our community.”
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Just a big thank-you for having the guts to call out GPS publicly. I worked there [redacted] years and left because of the prior admins policies. Now it seems to have become worse. You would think the Board would have taken notice of the train wreck that occurred from the prior headmaster and found a Chattanooga/GPS alum with Christian values. My daughter graduated from the school in [redacted] under the hand of Randy Tucker. That man was a leader! I pray for the school but I’m afraid the damage might be done.”
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“Last January, we pulled our daughter out of GPS after being there for 3.5 years. A lot of what’s going on started before the new Head of School arrived. If you ever cover anything else or want any more info, I’d be willing to talk to you but only anonymously. A lot of families left last January and in the following months.”
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“I graduated in 2011 and sadly I have encountered countless men like you in my field. Let GPS girls have 7 years of critical thinking and growth in a safe environment before their lives are infiltrated by the ignorant and calloused ideals you have decided to write about in your Chattanoogan article. In short, stay in your lane.”
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“I have enjoyed your stories/articles for years, but I will have to strongly disagree with your article about Girls Preparatory School. Someone has given you incorrect information. Possibly they have an agenda - don’t know - but they have it all wrong. SEED and Belonging began prior to Megan Cover arriving as our head of school. I have 2 daughters who graduated from GPS and I was employed there for [redacted] years. The “facts” as you published are wrong and need to be corrected for your readers. P.S. I hope you have been able to see/read what Jane Henegar posted on Facebook
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“Good for you!!!!! What you said in your article about GPS is 100% spot on. You put words to what so many parents have been thinking for several years. I have a daughter who is graduating this spring and another daughter who graduated two years ago. It has been a steep descent into wokeism for the last 5-6 years, and it now has gotten so bad that parents are absolutely fed up with the indoctrination. I want to applaud you for writing the article. I am sure you will get a varied response, but your article was accurate in its representation of what is taking place.”
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My dad, [redacted], loved you and thought the world of you and I have always respected you. All I can say is that you lost my respect today! My lighthearted, always loving, and open-minded dad would have been sad and disappointed by you and your article today. And I am too! I do not know who "informed" you of many of the things in your article, but you have MANY things completely WRONG! You are better than this, Mr. ROY! I will pray today and the days to come for GPS as they deal with what you have caused and for you and your integrity (or lack of it)!”
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“My name is [redacted] and I am a senior at Girls Preparatory School. Reading your article regarding the changes that have been made to my school in the past year has made me realize several things about the future of our society as a whole. As I take history classes regarding social justice issues, a reoccurring theme within these issues is two opposing groups, pushers and pullers. Young and well-educated activists pushing for necessary changes in society and those who pull back on these changes. This group typically consists of older generations who see nothing wrong with the current issues as they do not affect them or their future.
Girls Preparatory School pushes to educate their students to be productive members of society who strive for equality, as equality is the very thing the school was founded on. They face the pullers, those who hate change although they are largely unaffected by it. Diversity at GPS has been an issue that has been ignored by our administration for far too long. The belonging program teaches students how to respect each other's differences, whether that be sexuality, gender, religion, race, or political opinions.
As a student, my peers and I understand the significance and importance of this as these are defining factors of our identities. As you have never attended one of these meetings, I understand your concern with the idea of encouraging students to think critically about their identity and appreciate others' identities. The article you have posted regarding my school does not accurately reflect the values GPS was founded on, nor the values we uphold today.”
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“Thank you so much for the article you wrote today How ‘Woke’ Is GPS? It was a fine example to my daughter, a freshman at GPS, of how to think for herself and identify someone with clout pushing their own agenda. She could clearly see that you did not have all the facts, that you are a sexiest white male (first sentence) and that freedom of speech means that anyone can say anything, true or not. As a current GPS parent, I feel that GPS is educating my daughter to be aware of the world we live in, like it or not! We have been able to have family conversations about what is being discussed at school and how she feels about the topics. I am thrilled that in three short years my daughter will graduate from GPS as a well informed confident young lady. Best of all, I am overjoyed that she will be able to peg people like you for who you really are.”
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“Thank goodness the pledge was eliminated at GPS. It is such a silly construct that in no way helps anyone become better American. Not to mention the phrase "under god" is a slap in the face of the many students who do not believe in the mythical being. I love the days at my school when it doesn't get recited. Most students only stand because they feel like they have to, almost no students actually recite it and I secretly love when students sit through it.
I can love my country, it's people and be a good human without pledging daily fealty to a piece of cloth. The fact that conservatives like yourself cling to that few sentences yet refuse to acknowledge the horrendous treatment of some of it's citizens throughout even recent history tells me everything I need to know about you. Like your daughter says, change is hard, old man. It's okay. You will be okay.”
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I am writing as a 2017 graduate of GPS. My mother was a graduate of the class of 1983, and my family has been in Chattanooga for generations. I found your most recent article on the “wokeness” of GPS to be disappointing. Several members of our class came together this morning to reflect on your disheartening words.
I am extremely proud of the education I received at GPS. Beyond the strong foundation that set me up to succeed as an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt, GPS also gifted me with the ability to critically take in the world around me, ask important questions, and decide not only what I believe in but why I believe it. The “queasy mix between faculty leadership and the school’s patrons” is what continues to allow the women at GPS to develop their ability to understand the world around us rather than being told how we should.
As a woman who “once danced the May Pole” and holds the traditions and memories at GPS dear to my heart, I also know that holding on to traditions for the sake of tradition while ignoring a greater call to change and growth is to live a naive life hiding in a bubble of privilege. It is always easy to not question a system that has served me well and has also served other white wealthy families in North Chattanooga well.
However, those very systems are hurting girls in and outside of our school system. There will always be older generations who resist the positive change that GPS is working towards. I don’t expect you to understand the importance of teaching critical race theory if this article is any indication of your understanding of the issues facing the school and the surrounding community. I’m sure there were troubled patrons who were on the wrong side of history when the civil rights movement made its way to Chattanooga’s North Shore.
While you and other patrons of the school might find themselves “not amused” by the use of critical race theory in the GPS curriculum, I would beg you to consider whether minority groups in and outside of GPS are even more “not amused” at this point in time.
To address your concern that 10th grade students are going to spend time learning how to create spaces for people of all backgrounds and experiences to be heard and then use those perspectives in a productive way, I am genuinely curious what you believe 10th grade students should be learning.
I can assure you those girls are still scoring as high as ever on their standardized tests. I can also assure you those girls will be better served later in life with an understanding of how to lead important conversations and engage with different viewpoints than with a higher ACT score.
I would also question your emphasis on religion in this article. GPS has made it clear that the school has no religious affiliation, regardless of how many students come from Christian families. As a young girl, I specifically recall instances in which this led me to ask important questions about my faith. I was raised as a Christian in a white Christian community, so I never had to think deeply about how my beliefs affected those around me until then.
However, those conversations at a young age started an important lifelong journey of working to understand other perspectives and beliefs while calling into question my own. GPS builds women who are passionate about their beliefs, and it is naive to assume that calling a woman to consider other perspectives is at all “disastrous.”
Ultimately, the administration is dealt the difficult task of incorporating important changes that will move the school forward, while preparing for community members such as yourself who choose to deal with serious social justice and gender identity issues like they are something to harden themselves towards and gossip about.
In that sense, I understand the lack of transparency. I pray that the hearts of those who find this progress “worrisome” will be softened so that they may see that the love of the girls is at the center of all of these conversations. The best way we can progress as a community and a school is to reconsider our place in history as well as our place in the community. I find it interesting that your final piece of advice is to abandon all but the school motto because as an alumna, I must have a far different view from you as to what is “best for girls.”
Have you, Mr. Exum, asked the girls what they consider to be best, or what "progress" looks like to them? Maybe we should take this opportunity to learn a bit from today’s guest speaker and “create spaces where students, and all community members, can be seen and heard while learning to be visible and use their voices in productive ways” so that we can continue this discussion on what we all believe to be “best for girls.”
royexum@aol.com