JERSEY SHORE — A field trip for seventh and eighth graders to see a play at the Community Arts Center elicited a strong response from a citizen in the Jersey Shore Area School District.

The play, “Keep Marching,” details the 1963 march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous and often quoted “I Have a Dream” speech. It is considered a key moment in the Civil Rights movement. The play was presented by Mad Rivers Theater Works from Ohio.

Don Peters, of Cummings Township, told the school board that he feels that it is “vital that our children learn this part of our history, which helped bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, guaranteeing long overdue freedoms,” and that he was “not here to critique the play because I did see its focus was Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington.”

But, after researching the play and the group that presented it, Peters was not happy that the students attended.

“I had the privilege of assisting one of our board members in their campaign. We interacted with scores of regional residents. Our three concerns: lower taxes, the future of Salladasburg school and the Marxist indoctrination of their children,” Peters, who is also the chairman of the county’s Republican Committee, said.

“Moving forward I want to be clear — I respect and admire Dr. Ulmer for his expertise, candor and points of view and I believe our children are secure with him and in the hands of this board.

However, something took place last week that is of grave concern to me,” he said, referring to the field trip to watch the play.

Although he didn’t actually see the play, Peters researched it and the theater group and was able to read the teacher’s guide. A copy of the student study guide is located on the Mad Rivers’ website.

Through his research, Peters claimed that it “became clear that the Mad River group is focused on indoctrination; recruiting our students to become social justice activists and only for causes that the liberal left — and never conservative causes — like radical environmentalism, LGBT youth, transgender, BLM, anti-police movements, climate change and Marxism in general,” he said.

“Marxists target the impressionable minds of children. Their strategy is to convince them that their parents’ generation has left them a nation of outdated and broken ideas and a repressive heavy-handed government, both of which must be overthrown,” he said.

“Marxists summarize their strategy in their two favorite buzzwords — social justice,” he added.

Peters said he became even more alarmed when he read that the play is “a call to action of today’s young people. It is an anthem to share with your peer travelers on the road to social justice and we can all be social justice activists. I was horrified when they quoted activists who are ‘making a difference in the world,'” he said.

An example of some of the activists named by Mad River, such as Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate change activist, who Peters called a leftist and whose name “most recently was removed from the school books in Israel for her pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas support.”

He also cited environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Angela Davis, who he identified as an “American Marxist, communist and political activist, two-time Communist Party’s candidate for the United States Vice-President and member of Los Angeles Black Panthers; three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement known for violent defund the police emphasis, LGBTQ rights and the transgender movement.”

“The leftist list goes on. No Charlie Kirk; no Ben Shapiro; no Riley Gaines — no conservative whatsoever,” Peters said.

“I want to believe that those in our district who made the decision to entrust the lives of our students and our scant tax dollars to an organization who supports such rebellious and destructive ideas was simply an oversight and not a purposeful act,” he continued.

“Our residents…have not entrusted this district with our children to train to the leftist calls of action to become social activists. They want them to become educated — period. Teaching leftist social justice ideology is not the role of our schools. My request is that such an event never be repeated and the district now give equal time to a conservative speaker with a differing point of view who can address these students in our auditorium,” he said.