Portland Taught the Teachers First

Portland Public Schools began the 2026-27 school year by handing its microphone to a drag performer.

The video went up on the district's Facebook page last Friday. It was aimed at teachers, principals and staff, not children. The first face and voice belong to Poison Waters, whose legal name is Kevin Cook, identified on screen as an "advocate, educator and host."

I'm here to wish you all a successful 2026, 2027 school year... together we rise with excellence and purpose.

— Poison Waters, Portland Public Schools staff welcome video

Read that twice and notice what is missing. Nothing about reading. Nothing about arithmetic. Nothing about the children who cannot yet do either. "Excellence and purpose" is the language of a brand, not a school, and the district chose who would say it.

Some will tell you this is small. It was a staff greeting. No student was in the room. That defense misses how institutions actually work. A district does not have to teach a doctrine to a child directly if it can teach it to the twelve hundred adults who will be alone with that child for six hours a day. The formation goes downhill. It always has.

"The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master" (Luke 6:40). Portland understands this verse better than most churches do. That is precisely why the video was made for the teachers first.

Here is the thing I want parents to sit with. Nothing about Portland Public Schools looks different from the outside. The buses are the same yellow. The mission statement still says something about every child reaching his potential. The kindergarten teacher down the street is probably a lovely woman who has taught there nineteen years and would be embarrassed by the video. The sign, the schedule and the smell of the cafeteria all say what they said in 1985.

That is what I call a zombie institution. The body keeps walking. The soul that animated it left some years back, and no one issued a press release. Christian parents look at the familiar exterior and conclude the interior is familiar too. The district's own Facebook page is telling them otherwise, in public, for free, and almost nobody reads it.

Nobody sends a memo announcing that a school has stopped being about education. They just stop talking about it.

Corey DeAngelis of the Heritage Foundation called the video "beyond parody." He is right, but parody is not the danger. The danger is that this is sincere. There is no wink in it. A taxpayer-funded district genuinely believes that the right way to open a school year is with a cultural signal, and it believes the signal is the point. Education has become the vehicle. Formation is the cargo.

A school exists to hand a child the accumulated knowledge of his civilization and the tools to use it. Phonics. Long division. The Constitution. How to write a paragraph that says what he means. When a district has the attention of every adult in its employ on the first day of the year and spends that moment on identity messaging rather than on the eleven percent of eighth graders who cannot read at grade level, it has told you what it ranks first.

The education mountain is the one the other six run through. A man who controls what a child learns at seven does not need to argue with him at forty. This is the oldest strategy in the book, and it is not being run in secret. It is being run on a public Facebook page with the district logo in the corner.

So what do you do? Not a viral post. Not a shouting match in the parking lot. Something duller and far more effective.

1. Find the video, the memo, the training slide deck — your district's own materials, in its own words. Screenshot it with the date.
2. Learn the actual procurement question: who approved this, under what line item, and what was the cost to taxpayers.
3. Ask that question at a board meeting, on the record, in three sentences, and sit down.
4. Ask the second question at the next meeting. Then the next. Consistency is what boards cannot outlast.

Understand what you are doing when you ask. You are not persuading the board. You are creating a record, and you are showing the other parents in that room that someone is watching. Half of them assumed nobody was.

And be honest with yourself about the answer you get. Some districts still belong to the parents who fund them, and those are worth fighting for. Some have moved on and are simply hoping you do not notice for another decade. Reform one. Build past the other. The hardest work is telling the difference, and the way you tell is by asking a plain question in a public meeting and listening carefully to how badly they want you to stop.

Portland already answered. It put the answer on the internet.