School Board’s Contempt for Parents on Full Display
A perceptive journalist, Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, just eliminated a project I had planned for today. I intended to write an article about last week’s meeting of the Fairfax County School Board at which the Board once again dismissed the results of a community survey because the results were not to its liking. The Board also decided, in effect, that it’s okay to adopt a sex-education curriculum that the public overwhelmingly opposes because parents can opt their children out of the classes if they are offended by them.
I intended to make two points: First, why undergo the time and expense of conducting surveys if you intend to characterize them as unscientific when you don’t like the results? Second, shouldn’t the School Board have an obligation to adopt an appropriate curriculum in the first place, rather than just saying, “Why do you care? You have a right to opt out, after all.”
But then I woke up this morning and saw an op-ed by Ms. Lundquist-Arora in the Washington Examiner, making these points more eloquently than I could do. So, instead of writing my own piece, I highly commend her op-ed to you.
Washington Examiner
July 2, 2024
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora
Fairfax County Public Schools Leadership Displays Disdain for Parents — Again
Last Thursday, as the first presidential debate was making national headlines, Fairfax County School Board members held a meeting during which they voted on controversial changes to family life education curriculum. The takeaway for the few of us able to attend or watch it virtually was that the district’s leadership hates parents — or, at the very least, is severely inconvenienced by us.
Darcy Healy, one of the speakers during public comment, delivered an impassioned statement that represents how many parents in Fairfax County are feeling. She said, “We are parents, and we want you to listen to us, but we feel that that’s just not happening. … The survey that was done in May and June [shows] 80% are against this co-ed situation. Let’s continue to debate this. Don’t do it over the summer. And don’t do the vote on the evening of the presidential debate. This is an important topic. Show us that you want it to be important.”
Healy is right. In surveys both this year and last year, parents and community members made it clear that they did not support co-ed sex education or gender ideology instruction in their children’s elementary classrooms. Several community members made this exact point during the last two school board meetings’ public comment periods on June 13 and June 27.
Instead of being inclusive and accepting community feedback, the Fairfax County School Board was hostile — most notably among them, the board’s vice chairwoman, Melanie Meren.
First, Meren spoke indignantly about the curriculum’s opt-out option. She said, “And, you know, what I want to convey is that we need to make decisions of curriculum for the benefit of, you know, as many children as possible. And this is why parents and families have the option to opt out if they don’t feel the content is appropriate for their children when it comes to family life education.”
But why include unwanted, political nonsense such as gender ideology in a public school district’s sex education curriculum and then place the burden of opting out on the parents? Here’s why: because district leadership knows that many parents are preoccupied with our many other obligations and will forget to complete the extra administrative task of opting out our children from curriculum lessons.
District leaders should not be experimenting with our children, but since they seem to insist on doing so, this curriculum should require parents to opt in rather than opt out.
Meren then delivered an angry rant about the illegitimacy of the community’s feedback mechanisms. She said, “I also do want to underscore that the comments that have been referred to as a survey, um, it actually was not a survey. There was a call for public comments. … There was also not a methodology to ensure that comments were unique contributors. So, of the 2,500 comments, it’s unknown how many were contributed more than once.”
The takeaway is that if the district’s leaders don’t like community feedback, they blame the comment forum. Last year, for example, Karl Frisch, the school board chairman, similarly dismissed the survey as feedback from “Reddit warriors.”
In contrast, Ilryong Moon, a school board member who does not appear to be completely disgusted and inconvenienced by the district’s parents, seemed to realize the absurdity of his colleagues’ comments right away. The at-large member responded that if there was a problem with the feedback mechanism for community input, it was the board’s responsibility to fix the process. Moon further said he valued community input and thanked the 2,539 survey respondents for their time.
Unfortunately, in spite of the negative feedback on the proposal, school board members, including Moon, voted to include gender ideology instruction in the seventh grade family life education curriculum. And they did not vote against gender ideology indoctrination for elementary school children. They instead postponed that decision — perhaps in the hopes that they can pass it when fewer parents are paying attention.
Or even worse, they will include such measures surreptitiously and without a vote. Acting on her “majority doesn’t always dictate” philosophy, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid has already used a back-door, anti-democratic, administrative method to introduce co-ed instruction for sex education in the district’s new pilot program in 14 elementary schools that she likely intends to expand.
And so, to Healy I say, I feel your pain, and we will continue to debate this. But sadly, it seems that Reid, Frisch, Meren, and their tyrannical leftist activist minority have already decided what is best for our children. They seem to believe that we, the parents, are roadblocks obstructing their path, to be circumvented or run over.
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Mark- it was you who inspired me to go to the meeting and speak my truth. Thank you for continuing to educate the community.
Just a bit freaked out that they used my name in the article! It’s going to bite me in the ass one day.
Darcy: Your comments at the meeting were right on point, and very well delivered. Thanks for taking the time to do it. Courageous testimony like yours should motivate others to follow suit.
Mark
D,
Don’t fear being bit in the rear – that’s the benefit of being in the ~10th/11th largest school district in the nation. The FCPS attorneys are too busy defending the district against lawsuits to worry about community comment like this. And, we need more citizens like you to speak out, so thank you for being brave!
For the record, you didn’t speak “your truth” (a morally relativistic phrase Reid and other progressives like to use to confirm their personal political bias) – you spoke The Truth.
Mark, your passionate and continued work on this very important topic has provided insights to many of us on the truly outrageous actions of the FCSB that would simply not be readily available elsewhere, if at all.
I know how much time and effort you have spent in monitoring the school board and I’m sure I speak for many when I say well done and thank you.
Chris: Thanks for your comment and support.
Mark
Mark – your coverage of this topic also inspired me to travel to the meeting in support of those speaking out against this policy. I would like to point out that not a single parent present participated in support of this policy! Every speaker was against it.
That’s true … Four speakers, all very well spoken. I was actually surprised, because the activists on the left are usually much better organized, filling up many speaker slots at meetings where ideological issues are on the table.
I didn’t like the way my school and Gatehouse were going and retired. Have not liked any FCPS policy I have read about since. But as long as Fairfax voters continue to vote these people in, this is what Fairfax students are going to get.
Richard: You are right. The problem is that most people assume that the school board is non-ideological and focusing on education. Most voters don’t carefully examine what candidates really stand for in down-ballot races like school board positions. This opens the door for ideological activists to take over.
I gave the speech below at the meeting (sans the final paragraph, which I didn’t have time for before the airhorn went off, silencing me). Thanks to all the others who spoke.
The 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 one member’s 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 Fairfax County. 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 in the meeting 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 because 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?