Important School Board Meeting — June 27
The Fairfax County School Board will be meeting this Thursday, June 27, to consider important issues affecting family rights, sexualization of children, and the agenda of the tiny-but-powerful transgender lobby. In particular, it will be voting on sex-education recommendations made by the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee (FLECAC). These proposals include showing graphic videos to young children, combining boys and girls into unisex sex-ed classes in elementary and middle schools, and teaching kids, from the fourth grade on, that their biological sex may not be real.
If you are concerned about these issues, PLEASE sign up to speak at the meeting, either in person, or live via video, or by a prerecorded video. The sign-up form, as well as the rules governing community speakers, are here. The deadline to register is the close of business tomorrow, Tuesday. Also, PLEASE attend the meeting in person if you can on Thursday evening at 7 p.m. at the Luther Jackson Middle School in Merrifield (3020 Gallows Road, Falls Church, Va.). The “progressive” activists always participate in force at meetings like this. It is important for those who oppose their agenda to make the School Board aware of the majority’s concerns. (If you sign up to speak, be aware that a two-minute time limit is strictly enforced.)
It is no coincidence that Board action on FLECAC’s proposals is scheduled for a meeting in late June, after the schools have recessed for the summer and the attention of the public is on swim practices, vacations and other matters. The same thing happened last year.
I can’t speak at Thursday’s meeting because I did so on June 13 (speakers at a Board meeting can’t speak again at the next two meetings), but I can suggest a few points that are worthy of emphasis:
- FLECAC and its proposals are not representative of the community. FLECAC’s members are almost all progressive activists, as demonstrated by the fact that its recommendations are usually unanimous, even when they deal with highly controversial topics.
- The community does not want graphic videos to be shown to young boys and girls, or to have both sexes combined in the same sex-ed classes prior to high school, or to be confused about their sexual identity when they are generally too young to be thinking about these issues themselves.
- The community’s message on these issues has been strong and overwhelming. Last year, over 80 percent of the respondents to a School Board survey opposed unisex classes for sex-ed prior to high school, as well as a proposal to use “sex assigned at birth” lingo in classrooms. All categories of respondents agreed, including parents, students, FCPS employees, and other community members.
- The same opposition has been voiced this year. The Board conducted a community survey on FLECAC’s current proposals between May 10 and June 10. Precise data have not been released to the public (although FLECAC has been given the data), but it is clear from what has been disclosed that FLECAC is pushing an agenda that the community doesn’t think is appropriate. (FLECAC’s summary of the survey results, which can’t completely disguise what the data show, is here and here.)
- The recent survey asked participants to identify which of 41 FLECAC proposals they wanted to comment on, but the 41 proposals weren’t described. That’s why very few people provided comments on most of the individual proposals: They didn’t even know what the particularized recommendations were. So, the fact that there was no feedback to the Board on recommendations ## 5, 16, 24, etc. doesn’t mean the public has no objection to some of those proposals. Most respondents were only able to comment generally on the main themes.
- The school system shouldn’t put itself into the middle of sensitive topics where well-intentioned people hold strong, widely divergent views. Parents and other caregivers should be respected, not supplanted by the school system. FCPS doesn’t have all the answers concerning the upbringing of our youth. The school system should teach that everyone is entitled to respect, and that bullying won’t be tolerated, but it shouldn’t adopt an official position on such things as whether sex is an artificial concept “assigned at birth,” etc.
Again, please participate in Thursday’s School Board meeting if you can.
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Thanks for keeping up the fight, Mark.
The way that the survey was designed was to prevent any substantive evaluation of proposed changes. I revisited multiple times however it was obvious the district was checking a box that a survey was conducted, instead of truly soliciting feedback.
You are right. The structure of the survey was terrible.
Can we add bulldozing as a woke term. The Board and Superintendent think that if they force us (as families and our children), it will be in our best interests. When over 80% of people who responded to the recent survey don’t want what is proposed, why are they still being pushed on the System. I object to teaching this material in 4th grade, and certainly to the mixed class concept. All we have is a rough outline; what exactly are the lesson plans? That we won’t know until our children are subjected to them. It’s not enough be be elected to the School Board or be the chosen paid Superintendent, who often says she wants community input. We have it, and more attention should be paid to what residents of the County think.
Valerie: Well said.
I have signed up to speak on Thursday night.
Valerie, where can I find evidence for the 80% opposition you cite?
Jeff
Jeff: I don’t have a link handy to the survey results from last year, but it’s definitely correct that 84% of the respondents opposed unisex sex-ed classes in elementary and middle schools. Strong opposition came from every category of respondents: parents, FCPS employees, students and other community members.
I gave the speech below last night at the meeting (sans the final paragraph, which I didn’t have time for before the airhorn went off, silencing me).
They Board passed the recommendations largely as they found them, with a few weak edits. By my observations, the spirit of the board is, in general, anti-democratic, as revealed in one member’s (Lady?) being sure to offer the correction that the “community review comments” were not a “survey” (much less, God forbid, a referendum): a clear indication that bringing in community influence is seen as a problem to be resisted by certain board members.
Even if it HAD been a survey, she noted, she had no way of knowing if all the thousands of responses were really individuals or on individual registering an opinion 2,539 times or was giving input from CA. How disingenuous to create a system that can’t control for these two problems and then complain about them. Dr. Anderson was quick to see this and noted that if they wanted to rely on the data, then they need to do a better job collecting it without these taints (she is perhaps wishfully thinking that the collectors actually care about such data from the people).
But the board member would not be deterred–even if all 2,539 comments were legitimate, she said, this number was a mere fraction of the 187,000 students in Fx Co. Never mind the fact that the views of non-respondents are normally taken not to matter since they don’t care enough to respond either way. Never mind that ALL FOUR people who spoke last night to the FLECAC report OPPOSED key elements in it. Power trumps democracy here. The woman who spoke after me accusing them of the tyranny of the minority was right on target. Can you imagine a vote being discarded but it represented only a small fraction of all voters? Those who don’t show up are discounted by default–and rightly so.
The two more reasonable members of the Board, it seemed to me, were Dr. Anderson and Mr. Moon, who questioned things and was grateful for the input of people (even if they went ahead and did what they wanted anyone, of course). Many of the others I could not get a read on.
I’d like to suggest three things:
1. We need to join with other groups like this across Virginia and get the Governor involved. I think it was the fiasco in Loudoun County that pushed him to victory.
2. We also need to get a speaker like Abigail Schrier here to speak on the transgender craze. I’ve already contacted her speaking coordinator and will begin to look for a venue.
3. I plan to submit a proposal to the Board that the more controversial issue be put on the next ballot as part of a referendum, which is so important to DEMOCRACY.
Thoughts?
Jeff
Good evening. My name is Jeff Leach. I’m an attorney, educator, and taxpayer.
I’m here tonight to address the venue and content of sex education, particularly the proposals of FLECAC.
First: a lot of good stuff on biology, relationships, boundaries. Good job.
A few critiques:
First, the primary focus of education at a school (which is not a family, a church, or a political party) must be on mastery of basic academic knowledge and skills.
Second, if we truly support diversity and inclusion, then it needs be more apparent in this process—several of the recommendations on controversial topics show an unusual degree of uniformity of opinion.
Third, fourth-graders do not need to be talking about sex in school. They have their whole lives to be sexual beings; children should be allowed to enjoy a certain degree of innocence in childhood on a number of fronts.
Fourth, I echo opposition to coed classes at any level, especially in the lower grades. I’ve observed extreme discomfort and a chilling effect on discussion in such scenarios even among older students. Privacy and a feeling of safety are good things.
Fifth, parents must be able to opt out.
Sixth, I echo opposition to normalizing and even encouraging the recent, anti-scientific idea that proposes that the sex (and now even the species) to which children belong is not biologically hard-wired into 99% of us but is instead a matter of arbitrary choice. This is causing all kinds of mental and physical harm to minors, as clearly presented in Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigal Schrier.
Finally, given the importance of democracy in resolving matters, which of you would support turning the most controversial questions over to a popular vote by the citizens of Fairfax County?