“Most parents were outraged.”
While there are compulsory education laws throughout the United States, I don’t know of any that FORCE parents to use public schools, at least not yet.
So the parents here all made a choice, they prioritized ‘keeping up with the Jones’ over the chance for their kids to have a more normal childhood. Parents get to make that choice these days, and it is a CHOICE, as the government education establishment simply WILL NOT allow them to have it both ways (i.e., allowing kids to grow up unmolested and not having to directly pay for them to be educated).
So, really, nothing to bitch about here - it was an expected ‘outcome’ (to borrow some ‘educator’ terminology).
Sadly, there is no choice about the citizen funding government schools. School taxes paid by businesses are passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Those who rent pay the taxes in their rent payments.
Government schooling never was, and is not now, religiously neutral. It can’t be. Such a state of philosophic neutrality cannot exist in the mind of any sentient human.
Therefore:......An axiom! Government schooling is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination.
Government schooling could be shut down tomorrow.
There are many states and counties in this nation where, If Christians and observant Jews removed their children and voted to defund the government schools, the system would immediately collapse.