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For Christmas this year, Mason wants to learn about how he can become an independent human being. Maxwell wants to learn more about how to be a moral, well-mannered human being. Dylan wants to learn about leadership and being an influencer—not just about how to follow along behind all the other lemmings. And Brody wants to learn how his own ideas might become important to people’s lives, and how to become an entrepreneur someday.

Lofty ambitions, no doubt, and not from 6-year-olds full of wonder and beliefs that Santa can bring nearly anything you ask him to, but the wise, wishful thoughts of four 16, 17, and 18 year-olds at Camdenton High School in Camdenton, Missouri who started SPARK—Students Protecting All Rights for Kids. Your first thought might be, adults helped them a lot with this idea. But no. Brothers Mason and Brody Petska, Dylan O’Neal, and Maxwell Spurgeon seem to come by their leadership skills naturally, and despite the anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-morality-of-any-kind indoctrination of the Camdenton public school system, they are putting their talents to good use with the SPARK movement.

It started in the 2014-2015 school year. The two Petska brothers and friends Dylan and later Maxwell, were aghast at the nastiness of teachers and assistant principals who treated students unfairly and even unkindly in an atmosphere already akin to the same colors and attitudes that might be more common in a Missouri Department of Corrections facility than a middle school building. The four told us that one teacher in particular called the students “retarded slugs,” the tamest name-calling they cared to share with us. Makes one shudder to think what else these students were labeled. Who are the bullies again? And HOW are kids learning to bully each other exactly?

Finally having had enough, they wrote a letter to the principal and collected the signatures of 50 of their fellow students for that letter. Things slowly but surely changed, with said teacher and other school officials eventually beginning to be held accountable. Principal Paula Brown even changed the depressing gray walls into a more colorful and pleasant décor. It didn’t end there, unfortunately, as for each year that they advanced in high school, they found several more completely unacceptable situations, even as they continued to try to address situations one step at a time. Their complaints make one wonder where the “adults in the room” actually were: students punished for what they believe, indoctrinations at every turn, the lack of accountability of the administration, assistant principals, and teachers; the slanted assignments they were being given, and where the money the school system receives is actually going. They find it unconscionable the amount of data collected on them without permission from them OR their parents, how the internet works in their school to show them all the bad about their country and heritage but none of the good, and how, as one of them said, subtle inserts in study materials of their English classes constantly impressing students how horribly “white people suck!”

Still, for all the school’s worsening of Common Core garbage (now called Missouri Learning Standards– https://dese.mo.gov/ –yeah, we BET they want our feedback!) in their sophomore year, and which as of January 2018 has been ratcheted up even more, these “brilliant” Common Core/Missouri Learning Standards’ tactics have had an unexpected consequence. The constant bashing of conservative and traditional values at every turn in their lessons has led many students to start doing their own research. And so, while the current high school climate could be dubbed “MORE” Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), we still find reason to say, “Yes, Virginia, there really IS a Santa Claus!”

See companion article “ Sparks Fly”   by Abigail Adams