Minds polluted? Film claims teachers are “grooming” students. Experts say it’s filled with falsehoods.
Just after 6 p.m. on a balmy Saturday this March, Stephanie Nantkes parked her Suburban outside the Civic Center in downtown Seward, opened the heavy glass doors and walked inside. She found a few dozen others gathered in the meeting room downstairs, heads bowed in prayer. She found Kirk Penner, running for re-election to the Nebraska State Board of Education. She found Jessie Bremer and Jacob Bierbaum, two local school board candidates. And she found a square-jawed man with silver hair standing near the flag, insisting the forefathers crafted America directly from the word of God.
“Holy crap,” she thought. “I’m in trouble.”
She found a table of fellow teachers. Some retired, like her. Some still at it: grading essays, revising lesson plans and organizing field trips. She greeted them with a nervous smile. “This isn’t gonna be easy,” she whispered. She hadn’t come with them, but now here they were, instinctively drawn together, waiting for a new film called “The Mind Polluters” to begin. A film that would eventually be publicly screened by two groups – Nebraska for Founders’ Values and the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition – roughly two dozen times across Nebraska, from Omaha to Gordon.
The lights were killed. The projector turned on.
“Let me ask you a question…,” Mark Archer, the film’s director and narrator, begins. He’s sitting upright on a wooden stool in jeans and a tight-fitting vest, hands folded across his lap. “What if I told you that your child was being not only sexually harassed, but shown pornography in an effort to groom them for sexual activity? What if they were being groomed for homosexual activity? What if they were being groomed for sex with pedophiles….”
He speaks slowly, softly, concerned.
“Now here’s the big question: What if I told you all these things were happening to your child in their school classroom?”
Nantkes watched as one speaker after another rifled accusations at “the government schooling systems,” at teachers like herself, she felt, who’d dedicated a lifetime to her students. While others ate popcorn and nodded along, her own table scribbled notes on the leaflets they were issued at the door. Numbers to double check. Claims to counter. Two of the retired teachers left halfway through, unable to stomach any more. Even months later, Nantkes, the mother of former ACLU of Nebraska director Danielle Conrad, struggled to articulate the depths of her bewilderment.
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“How insane is this?” she asked. “There isn’t one fact behind what they were saying. It was a horror film sold and wrapped in the fears of religion.”
She’d hadn’t spent 40 years teaching in Nebraska’s public schools, earned three masters degrees and served two terms on the Seward school board only to be called a sexual predator – to sit idly by while this movie portrayed her life’s pursuit as the work of the Antichrist.
“And that’s the proper definition…,” insists author Alex Newman near the end of the film. “So parents, you have an obligation as a Christian to remove those children from that school.”
She couldn’t muffle her outrage any longer. When the film ended and Penner rose to speak, Nantkes snapped.
“Boo!” she yelled. “Boo! Boo!”
She knew it was a tad “crazy,” but she kept at it until the hosts tried – and failed – to usher her from the building. She dared them to call the police. They backed down.
“They were telling people lies about what I’ve loved my entire life,” she said. “And I will go down fighting for it.”
Leaders of the Nebraskans for Founders’ Values and the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition rejected multiple interview requests for this story, as did current Nebraska Board of Education member Penner and current board candidates Elizabeth Tegtmeier, Marni Hodgen and Sherry Jones, all of whom have been endorsed by the PNCC and participated in at least one showing of the film.
“Any statements attributed to the PNCC or myself will be disavowed,” wrote Sue Greenwald, a retired pediatrician and member of the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition. “If you would like to talk about the film, I would suggest you talk to the producers.”
Mark and Amber Archer, the Indiana-based husband-wife filmmaking duo who produced the film, also declined to comment.
Doug Brady, a candidate for the Learning Community of Douglas and Sarpy Counties’ Coordinating Council, did agree to comment. Brady hosted an April viewing of “The Mind Polluters” in Bellevue.
“A real eye opener,” he said. A movie that “tells a lot about what’s actually going on in our school districts around here.”
