Trenton, N.J. – Mayor Lonegan delivered the following testimony to the Senate Education Committee today in opposition to Senate Bill S3330, legislation which would mandate grief curriculum in New Jersey schools.

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I would like to speak in opposition to and express concerns regarding S3330.

This bill adds yet another curriculum mandate to an already overburdened set of mandated curricula and continues to drain time and money from the ability to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Recent reports, like the 2022 National Assessment of Education Process (NAEP) report card, demonstrate just how badly our students are performing in math.

But this is the obvious concern. What is more insidious is the cultural impact of the ongoing war against relationships between children and their parents.

S3330 purports to teach about grief. Let me tell you grief is learned at the most inconvenient moments. Like the day in my Junior year in High School when I came home to learn my father had died at work. Very suddenly and with absolutely no warning. A Boy Scout Leader, baseball coach, Korean war veteran and just about the greatest dad a kid could ask for.

This devastated my mom, my 14-year-old brother and me, turning our lives upside down. I did not need to be taught about grief; grief taught me.

In that tragic time, I had the support of my family, my coaches and the Boy Scout leaders my dad had worked with. I turned to my Catholic Church, being offered and taking the kind of grief counseling that has come from churches, synagogues and mosques for thousands, of years. You may not know this, but many priests and rabbis are trained in handling grief-stricken parishioners. But their training is different from that of a government worker–they rely on God.

The bond formed between me and my church has lasted until today, it will last until the day I die, and it was forged in that critical time. I turned to God, not a government councilor. That is how our civil society has functioned and should continue to function.

S3330 has the promise to further drive a wedge between parents and their children. To replace our places of worship, our integral social structure, with a government employee or contractor.

As S3330 will be merged into Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and as SEL scores continue to develop, this will be just another component of SEL.

If a student tells their SEL Grief Counselor that they prefer to seek help from their priest or pastor and not some government trained employee, will they get a bad mark on their SEL score? We all know that the social engineers driving this agenda are often hostile to traditional family structures and traditional faiths . Many would like to replace traditional religious teachings with the Woke cult.

It is also becoming clear that SEL ratings are used as a measure of Emotional Intelligence and, as such, are directly linked to ESG, Environmental Social Governance. In the future, SEL scores may follow students for the rest of their lives. A bad score on the way someone chose to handle grief could drive down that score. And a low SEL score might make it harder to find a job in the field of one’s choice – whether it be with a profession, a corporation, or even our own government. That would be tragic.

Most disturbing of all, there appears to be a remarkable similarity between China’s social credit score system and the emerging regime of SEL and ESG scoring. We must reject efforts to divide parents from children, score or track Americans in any way, and further erode the influence and importance of religion in our society.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

2 Corinthians 1:3-4:

I urge the Committee to reject this dangerous and flawed legislation.

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