The 2023 Idaho Teacher of the Year is moving to Illinois. After Karen Lauritzen was selected for the award by a Republican administration, the fourth-grade teacher was accused by conservative media outlets in the state of “promoting transgenderism” and being a “left-wing activist.”
It was the first time in her 20+ years of teaching that she’d been subject to such a broad array of insults and slander – which arose because she had expressed support for the LGBTQ+ community and Black Lives Matter on personal social media accounts.
Though the outlets offered no evidence linking her personal views to her classroom instruction, parents in her rural western Idaho community began emailing and confronting her with questions.
Some accused her of teaching fourth-graders inappropriate content, even though no discussion of sexuality was in her curriculum and was already prohibited by her school district. Her own global interests often inspired her teaching, but Lauritzen said she faced complaints from parents about a lesson on some worldwide cultures that eat insects and even objections to students learning about the United Nations.
“When it’s, ‘My kid can’t do this because it’s propaganda,’ and ‘My kid can’t do that because we don’t believe in the United Nations,’ it’s like, what? It’s not Santa Claus; what do you mean you don’t believe in it?” Lauritzen said. “Even if I have certain beliefs myself, that does not mean that I teach them to kids. It’s not my job to ‘indoctrinate’ or make kids little versions of myself. It’s to make kids into the best versions of themselves.”
