Oregon mother Allison Roberts grew up in North Portland in the 80s and 90s, clubbing on what’s now Harvey Milk Street, named after the gay-rights activists.
“We were on the frontier of all of it,” Roberts recalled. “We are, you know, the movers, shakers, and innovators. It’s Greece, it’s Portland, it’s San Francisco.”
But with kids of her own, seeing Portland become littered with more and more pride flags has given her pause.
“It just started looking unauthentic, not the authentic Portland I’m used to,” she told IW Features.
And especially when it came to her son’s school throwing those flags up, she added, “It looked agenda-driven.”
It started with a bench outside her 10-year-old son’s elementary school, repainted from a normal rainbow pride flag to a “progressive pride” flag, with extra stripes for Black Lives Matter and transgenderism. Then, about a month in, her son, who loves G.I. Joes and trucks, came home with a worksheet: a flower with blank petals labeled with words like “gender,” “religion,” “ethnicity,” and “race.” The word “gender” in particular bothered her, as it is “kind of a triggering word these days,” she said.
“All of these were questions that I feel are very provocative,” she told IW Features. “There’s not a world where anybody can tell me that you are not ripe for indoctrination and you’re not fraught with confusion at that age. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, you should be if your child is being taught how to think or what to think.”
Beyond that, she worries about the kids left off that flower, so to speak.
“Every kid wants to feel special,” she said. “And when you see medals going out to other people for immutable characteristics…in their honor, of course, a child wants to be honored as well. A human wants to. We all have egos and children have fragile ones. And so it is, for all of its inclusivity, I see it as extraordinarily exclusive.”
So, Roberts started asking questions—first to the the school’s principal about the “progressive pride” bench, and then to the Parent-Teachers Association about the identity flower assignment.
For months, she was told she’d first have to go through a committee before she’d be allowed to speak at a PTA meeting. But Roberts pushed back, arguing that unless the district could show her that other parents, or PTA presidents, had ever been made to do the same, she should be able to speak. No one could.
Then came the anonymous emails, she said, from parents who disagreed with her politics but wanted her to know that PTA leadership was discussing her behind closed doors, and had decided they didn’t want her speaking.
“I was barred,” she said.
This led her to join the PTA outright and pay her PTA dues.
After joining, Roberts wrote a letter to the association “that simply and, very in my opinion, neutrally spelled out what I had been experiencing from the beginning of the year — asking if there were other parents [who had experienced the same],” she said. “I was not trying to proselytize. I was merely trying to get my voice out there, because I had a suspicion that there might be other parents who felt the same, and that there was a group of people preventing us from speaking to one another. No shortage of them were also shamed or barred or afraid to speak up.”
She showed up to the next PTA meeting remotely, but her microphone was muted so she wasn’t able to speak. So she handed the letter out to parents on the sidewalk.
In the letter, Roberts argued education should return to academics instead of prioritizing politics. “Why are we doing progressive pride when this is an elementary school? We need one, two, threes and ABCs. Let’s just let the adults worry about the politics,” she wrote.
Roberts was also frustrated with the way the PTA itself had become politicized, despite ostensibly being designed to serve all parents.
“There’s also a white privilege statement that is read at the beginning of each PTA meeting, that states white people have inherent white privilege,” she said. “It’s a verbal flagellation of sorts. It perpetuates this idea that they state plainly that children of color will be oppressed in the school, and that we will do our best to try and correct this wrong.”
Roberts went out of her way to show that what she’d been saying hadn’t come out of nowhere, that her concerns about politicization were shared by people across a wide range of experiences. Roberts told IW Features, “I cited some writers and gave links — Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Douglas Murray, Kathleen Stock, all people of color or of homosexual persuasion. That was in there, as well as a website that my husband and I made for people to leave comments. And they did. Lots of people loved the very comments that we thought that they would.”
But there have been plenty of opponents as well. When she was handing out the letter, one parent in the pick-up line screamed at her, “White people are disgusting!”, leading to an altercation. In a piece for the Christian Post, Roberts admitted she responded to the parent by calling his comments “racist.” “
“[I] used language I regret, and walked away. I did not threaten him. I did not assault him. I was not arrested,” Roberts wrote.
And yet, police officers showed up to her home the next day giving her a trespass notice: she was not to be allowed on Portland Public Schools property for a year. When she appealed, she was denied on a 30-minute Zoom call held by a basketball coach and two janitors (one of whom was allegedly emptying trash cans as she spoke).
With nothing left to lose, she wrote a second letter, this one about the First Amendment and the chilling effect of punishing speech, warning other parents that this could affect them too.
The next letter she received came from the district itself: she was now permanently and indefinitely banned from every Portland Public Schools location, for both of her children.
This was a slap in the face for Roberts and her husband, who had built their house specifically so their kids could attend that school.
For a moment, Roberts considered leaving Portland altogether. But then she decided, “No, this is not fair. I should not be pushed out for this.”
She’s also staying, she said, for the parents who can’t: several told her privately that they, too, had once spoken up and paid for it, and now just wanted to stay off the school’s radar.
“I don’t think you can walk away from that when you know that this has been happening to people for years,” she told IW Features.
Roberts is now engaged in litigation against the school district. Her case, which was taken on by the Liberty Justice Center, is now headed to court, but reinstatement to the district isn’t really the point for her anymore.
“I hope it brings about a sea change,” she told IW Features. “What I really want is for people to feel emboldened to speak up.”
The loudest voices in fights like these, she argued, tend to be the ones pushing ideological changes without accountability, while the parents who oppose them are quiet by nature, leading their silence to get mistaken for consensus.
After all, she had been one of those parents, too, having spent months assuming common sense would eventually win out, until it definitively didn’t.
“The more I look at the situation,” Roberts said, “the more I realize how insidious and hidden this has been.”
She also warned that plenty of schools still lean on pandemic-era rules six years later to keep parents out of classrooms and hallways, which is why it took her so long to realize how bad things had gotten in the classroom.
“Teachers are not demigods,” she said. “They’re human beings that have their own agendas, their own thoughts. Some are good, some are not.”
Her advice to any parent who finds themselves where she started: don’t be quiet.
“Speak up, speak up, be loud, be heard, organized, and get procedural,” she said. “You can get your emotions out on TikTok or Facebook or whatever, but you need to get procedural.”
