Ultimately, 1,195 people took this survey, a pretty good sample size. Of that total, 1,168 reported their children had encountered sexually explicit materials in school. That’s 98 percent of respondents reporting their kids encountered sexually explicit materials at school. Of course, survey participants were self-selecting, so that likely affected the results. Still, 1,168 is a lot of sexually explicit encounters in schools — and these are the encounters parents know about. It’s certain there are many more that parents don’t know about.

After showing my friend Bob the latest video from the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, I told him I had no idea what I was going to do when my daughter entered school. He turned to me and asked an obvious question. “How do you know this is happening at all the schools? Couldn’t these be just some rogue teachers?”

I tapped my pregnant belly as I stood there, thinking he was right. I had no idea if these videos were simply the most outrageous of all the teachers, or if this was pointing to a widespread problem across all school districts. As my daughter is due in December, I thought it would be helpful to know what exactly was going on in public schools, if nothing else to give myself peace of mind as I entered this new chapter of my life.

I have a bachelor’s of applied health science from Bowling Green State University, for which I took public health courses. One asked me to work in a group to design a survey related to a public health issue. So, I decided to use that knowledge to design an anonymous survey for this and use my Twitter account to encourage people to take it. I put down every topic that a parent could possibly object to, even ones I didn’t object to myself, and even ones that I found so abhorrent that I assumed they were never taught in schools.

Ultimately, 1,195 people took this survey, a pretty good sample size. Of that total, 1,168 reported their children had encountered sexually explicit materials in school. That’s 98 percent of respondents reporting their kids encountered sexually explicit materials at school.

Of course, survey participants were self-selecting, so that likely affected the results. Still, 1,168 is a lot of sexually explicit encounters in schools — and these are the encounters parents know about. It’s certain there are many more that parents don’t know about.

Not Just the Blue States at All

Before getting the results, I had a lot of assumptions, many of which the results disproved. For example, I assumed Virginia would be a big hitter due to the Loudoun County incident. I assumed New York would be a big problem.

I thought Democrat-run states would have a higher incident rate than Republican-run states because on the Libs of TikTok feed it seemed as though the blue states had much higher rates of teachers bragging about their accomplishments. That turned out to be wrong, too. Incident rates were high in red states including Arkansas, Ohio, and Texas.

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