Imagine you are a Democratic member of a school board and you learn that the survey you commissioned of parents, students, and teachers shows that they all overwhelmingly oppose the changes you want to make to the school district’s sex-ed
curriculum
.
What do you do? If you are on
Virginia’s
Fairfax County School Board, you just bury the survey you spent all that money commissioning.
The Fairfax County Parents Association revealed in early March that a survey of parents, teachers, and students conducted last fall by the
Fairfax
County School Board found that 85% of parents, 85% of teachers, and 62% of students opposed a recommendation by the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee to combine sex education for boys and girls in fourth through eighth grade.
Fairfax’s Democratic-controlled school board is pushing for a vote to approve the committee’s recommendations by the end of this month. They don’t care that no one wants this.
The committee’s report justifying its recommendations explained that “when students are separated by boys and girls, it affirms a rigid binary based on anatomy.” Apparently, this affirmation of biological reality is bad. The committee added, “Separation of students into boys and girls does not create an inclusive environment for instruction to occur.” Inclusion, in this rationale, excludes the opinion of the vast majority, which also happens to accord with reality rather than the Left’s preferred fantasy.
To help further this “inclusive environment,” the committee also recommended changing the sex-ed curriculum so the terms “boys” and “girls” are stricken from the classroom in favor of the terms “individuals assigned male at birth” and “individuals assigned female at birth.” Not only are these ridiculous euphemisms linguistically awkward, but they are also inaccurate. Students are not “assigned” sexes at birth, if at any other time — they are conceived with them, as the science of genetics demonstrated in the 20th century.
The committee’s report drew heavily from a paper titled “Principles of Gender-Inclusive Puberty and Health Education,” written by a California nonprofit organization called Gender Spectrum. The group describes itself as a national organization committed to promoting “gender-diverse children and teens.” It seeks to “transform lives, families, and society” by finding “creative ways to eliminate obstacles for cultivating both societal change and organizational growth.” These goals are desired by only a small and grating but aggressively loud minority of people.
An overwhelming majority of parents in Fairfax, hardly a conservative jurisdiction, oppose this group’s attempt to transform their families. But Democrats are intent on forcing these changes through anyway.
The Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee comprises members appointed by the Democrats who control the school board. Instead of acting as a mechanism for feedback from the committee, Democrats have stocked the committee with
transgender
ideologues, including the president of the Transgender Education Association.
This is not the first time Fairfax’s school board has used a supposed citizen advisory committee to justify a deeply unpopular or controversial policy.
“Often when [Fairfax County Public Schools] wants to do something, they appoint a committee with people with viewpoints to get the outcome they want, ask for community feedback, then ignore or manipulate the feedback,” Fairfax County Parents Association President Bonnie Myshrall told a local television station. “It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly, from whether parents wanted in-person school to the [school calendar] … and now FLE.”
Gov.
Glenn Youngkin
(R-VA) was elected in 2021 largely due to parent anger at the unpopular decisions made by public school officials. If parents want to stop extreme Californian ideologues from “transforming” their families, they should elect more Republicans to their school boards.
