The Miami-Dade School Board voted to reject a sex-education textbook for middle- and high school students. The district will have no textbook for this subject for several months—until a new one is located or until the current one is stripped of all offending content.
In a narrowly divided vote, the Miami-Dade School Board Wednesday reversed its decision to adopt a new sex education textbook for the 2022-23 school year — a move that leaves the district with no sexual education curriculum for at least four to eight months.
The 5-4 vote followed an emotionally charged public comment period that included community members being escorted out of the building and a multi-hour board discussion that strongly paralleled the discussion it previously had in April, when members initially adopted the material in a 5-3 vote….
The book, “Comprehensive Health Skills,” which comes with a version for middle school and one for high school classes and offers research-based health education with topics such as nutrition, physical activity and sexually transmitted diseases, would have addressed the district’s units of study for Human Reproduction and Disease Education for grades six through 12.
But the materials soon came under fire from some parents and community members who argued the lessons were not age appropriate and violated the state’s parental rights law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in March and which critics have dubbed the ‘Don’t say gay’ bill. They also argued the district’s process lacked transparency.
The pushback included the filing of 278 petitions objecting to the materials and resulted in Miami-Dade Superintendent José Dotres selecting a hearing officer to conduct a public hearing to review the concerns and the materials in question…
That hearing, which was conducted on June 8, resulted in the hearing officer recommending the board “deny the petitions and proceed with the adoption process,” according to the district.
This is not the first time school textbooks have been questioned. Earlier this year, the Florida Department of Education announced it was rejecting 54 math textbooks in the state’s public schools, claiming the books contained “prohibited topics,’’ including critical race theory.
“I’m deeply disappointed by today’s decision. I hoped that Miami’s School Board would step up to protect youth in times of crisis,” said Kat Duesterhaus, a board member of Florida NOW and Miami Coalition to Advance Racial Equity. Not only does providing comprehensive sexual education help prevent sexually transmitted diseases, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted teen pregnancy, it’s also important to “building bodily autonomy,” which is important for teens to prevent and identify instances of sexual assault, Duesterhaus said. “We need to equip youth with the ability to navigate their own bodies and consensual situations,” Duesterhaus added. “We’re leaving them ill equipped to have agency of their sexuality and bodies.”
For those who opposed the adoption, the content under question was either inappropriate or “not scientifically factual,” such as vaccinations being the only proven method from viral disease, a notion they would challenge, Alex Serrano, the county director for County Citizens Defending Freedom, told reporters before the meeting Wednesday. Serrano has no children in the district and sends his children to Centner Academy, the Miami private school that last year said teachers and students who got vaccinated for COVID-19 could not interact with students and would risk losing their job.
“We are not against sexual education or human reproduction and sexual education books,” Serrano said. “We are for statutory compliance and age appropriateness in the content … and compliance with parental rights law.” Discussions regarding gender ideology “do not belong” in the books. “That is ideology,” he said. Others who spoke against the adoption also cited their contempt with the books’ discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation as reasons to oppose the materials. But in the board’s decision in April, members agreed to remove the chapter called “Understanding Sexuality” from both middle and high school textbooks, which would have discussed those topics.
More than 40 people — parents, students and community members — signed up to speak on Wednesday. Of those, 38 asked the board to adopt the recommendation given by the hearing officer, according to Vice Chair Steve Gallon III’s count. Just four urged against doing so. “That’s 90% of the speakers that spoke today. You do the math,” he said on the dais. “That data for me provides a greater opportunity to debunk and denounce this narrative that there’s this broad opposition to the board’s adoption of these materials.”
Most people in favor of the textbooks cited the urgent need to provide this information to students. Some pointed to research that found students who receive quality sexual health education choose abstinence longer and have fewer rates of unplanned pregnancies. Others said the materials provide a safe environment for students to learn factual, scientific information and give them the understanding to prevent instances of sexual violence.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/article263649763.html#storylink=cpy
The school board will meet again to reconsider the issue because the district is now out of compliance with state requirements.
The Miami-Dade County School Board is meeting on Thursday to “assess the potential impact” of its decision to reject the adoption of a comprehensive health and sex-education textbook for middle and high school students. The 5-4 vote effectively removed sexual education curriculum for middle and high school students for at least four to eight months and left the school district out of compliance with curriculum requirements and standards set by the Florida Department of Education….
“The issue at hand, as reflected in the item, is compliance with the Florida Department of Education,” Chairwoman Perla Tabares Hantman said in a statement. The requirements are different for each grade level and everything must be “grade-appropriate.”
Still, she added, “above everything, we must respect parental rights. Parents play an essential role in the education of their children. Parental rights are the bedrock of our school district. Rest assured that this School Board is committed to respecting the rights of parents to make decisions regarding the education of their children.”
The special meeting — scheduled for Thursday at noon — is expected to draw many more parents and community members than last week, said Gina Vinueza, a district parent and one of the organizers behind a petition, Save Sex-Ed in Miami-Dade.
Last week, more than 40 parents, community members and organization representatives flocked to the meeting to speak on the curriculum adoption. Of those who spoke, 38 urged the board to adopt the recommendation given by the hearing officer, according to Vice Chair Steve Gallon III’s count; just four spoke against doing so.
Here is the puzzle: which parent voices count? The board listened to parents opposed to the textbook. The board did not listen to the parents who support the textbook.
Why does the board decide to side with some parents while ignoring others?
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article263887237.html#storylink=cpy
Parents play an essential role in the education of their children. Parental rights are the bedrock of our school district. Rest assured that this School Board is committed to respecting the rights of parents to make decisions regarding the education of their children.”
Every parent should have the right to teach their child math in the way they see fit. For example, that 2+ 2 = 5 and that a square is round and that a circle has 4 sides.
And of course, that pi equals exactly 3.
Makes calculating the circumference of a square much easier.
Pie are round, damnit
My pies are both round and rectangular.
Pi is Sir Cumference over Di Ameter. This is why women must be subservient to Knights with peculiar names.
McDonalds pies are rectangular.
Stand up for parent rites!
Textbooks that teach that the Earth is round violate the rights of flat-Earther parents!
Schools with female students, teachers, and administrators violate the rights of Taliban parents!
Which parents decide?
No unconscionable act by the right wing should surprise us.
Lisa Duggan wrote, “The least powerful are represented as sexually excessive or perverse, needing regulatory control. The most powerful espouse these controls as key to social order while maintaining their own unaccountable social access to subordinates.”
Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin are mentioned in accords about right wing politics. Thiel’s Senate candidates are JD Vance and Blake Masters. The Conversation posted “An antidemocratic philosophy, ‘neoreaction’ is creeping into GOP politics”, 7-27-2022. After reading the article and the Wikipedia entry for Yarvin, we understand what the right wing is. Yarvin is quoted as saying, Anyone who claimed St. Mandela (Nelson) was more innocent than Breviek (murdered 77 people at a Norwegian summer camp) might have a mother you’d like to f___. The Wikipedia Yarvin entry includes mention of Trump’s Michael Anton (lead reviewer of the Bronze Age Pervert).
Yarvin’s fiancee is BDSM blog teacher and writer Clarisse Thorn, a pseudonym for Lydia Laurenson. Lydia’s New Modality website provides on her profile page a link, “(very secret)” that gives details. She wrote as Thorn in may national publications.
Parents have always had choice. If they don’t agree with the curriculum that the majority of the community sees fit, then they are free to homeschool or send their children to private schools- at their own expense! The teenage birth rate is bound to go up. I hope the Republican legislators are prepared to raise taxes to support the babies.
Abstinence only is a failed approach to sex education for teens. It is both naive and harmful, especially in combination with abortion restrictions. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/545289168/abstinence-education-is-ineffective-and-unethical-report-argues
Incredibly stupid and dangerous
There is an interesting article by Finian O’Toole in the most recent NYRB about how banning abortion in Ireland hasn’t done a thing to reduce them. Just barbaric roadblocks for women who don’t need them.
Abstinence from thinking is also a failed strategy for Republicans but that has not stopped them from using it.
For GOP men, abortion prohibition isn’t about reducing abortions. It’s a plan that they think will reduce what they view as women’s promiscuity. NPR reported 5-27-2022 that in countries with or without restrictive abortion laws, the number of abortions are about the same (research from WHO and Guttmacher Institute).
I think the MAGA fascists behind this might accept a book with this story in it to replace sex education.
The symbol of the stork delivering babies with no mention of sex.
What happens when there is poor sex education? Well, teenaged pregnancy, kids dying from suicide because they made ignorant mistakes that they couldn’t live with or because they weren’t allowed to be who they are, kids dying from or suffering other severe consequences from STDs they didn’t know how to prevent. Unfortunately, it isn’t the moron Christian Taliban parents in these backward states who will suffer these consequences directly. It’s their kids and the kids of their neighbors.
An acquaintance of mine who teaches 5th grade told me that because of parent pressure, the unit that the district used to require on human reproduction was replaced with one on expressing yourself using emojis.
One cannot make up stuff this idiotic.
Greg I disagree: 😀😂😍😄🙁😃😎
Are there pornemoji’s?
“You know quite well the answer to this, Mr. Poet,” he said in his inside teacher voice.
This is why the good Lord moved Apple to create the eggplant, taco, oyster, cherries, and peach emojis, of course.
There’s a lesson in that
When the censor’s at play
invention’s mother
will have her way.
Double so in schools. This is one of the many, many truths that the rightwing extremists don’t grok (their internal grokking device is defective). Nothing short of storm trooper/brown shirt-level repression will do anything but have precisely the opposite of the intended effect.
🙄🙄🙄
Posted on YouTube – Honest Government Ad U.S. Supreme Court
Juice Media (Australia) produced the video and posted it two days ago. It succinctly shows us how screwed we are if we thought we had a democracy.
Hmmm… conspiracy if you ask me!
Ok… your 16 years old and whatever a typical 16 year old… relationships and body image are competing with your hormones that kicked in…
HOWEVER..
You can’t talk to your parents because they are leading the protests (see “Footloose”)
Your teacher can’t teach sex education.
You Can’t talk to counselor or
You can’t take a survey about your feelings, bullying, and climate in school.
You Can’t talk to an adult about sexuality.
Your counselor can’t ask “How are you?
Your school can’t use the word “condom” “protection” or “safe sex”
AND
If you get pregnant …
The “centers” that provided information (any information about pregnancy are all closed
THE GOVERNMENT decides what you (young woman) can’t do with your body.
So the GOP wants the women “barefoot and pregnant” while the men go out with their AK-47s to kill Bambi and put food on the table.
Maybe the time has come for school boards who are being forced to ban textbooks and course curricula to establish a policy that books and/or curricula will be banned if the majority of the parents of students actually registered in the district’s schools have voted to support that ban. Any parents not voting will be counted as yes votes. This allowing a very small vocal minority take control the curriculum in our schools (in my case some of whom are not residents of our school district and do not even have students in the grades they claim are receiving inappropriate instruction and using inappropriate materials).
Maybe the almost assuredly Republican members of the school board that rejected the sex Ed text can get Republican Florida Congressman Gaetz to write a sex ed text that is more to their liking and morality.. After all, he knows all about sex with teenagers.
Should material from consenting adults be left out of the tome? If not, there’s a buff, male, yoga guru who allegedly knew the married Marjorie Taylor Greene. Jerry Falwell and his wife should be slated in for a chapter and the former Hillsdale President embroiled in a scandal while he was President of the school shouldn’t have his authority on the subject omitted. Greitens could do a chapter and the S.C. Gov. who found love on or off the Appalachian trail would have a compelling viewpoint.
Linda
I’m sure you probably noticed, but Notre Dame University just had Supreme Just us Alito
represent their school in Rome, where he sucked up to the pedophile protector* and liar Pope by joking about the European leaders who criticized the Supremes decision to overturn Roe
Could the Board of Trustees and President of Notre Dame be any more obvious?
The Notre Dame President is the same guy who was penalizing students for not wearing a mask while he himself was socializing with colleagues without one.
Pedo protector Pope
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/28/pope-francis-knew-cardinal-mccarrick-sexual-abuse-catholic-churchcolumn/1109251002/
Poet-
Also occurring- diabolical plots by right wing Catholics to get Francis out. They focus on the pedophile story and Francis as a means to get Francis’ resignation/retirement and to advance fascism. IMO, men like Matt Schlapp want someone who is like Francis relative to women as second class citizens and who wants to spread Catholic K-12 and college. But, they want a pope who also (1) hates the poor (2) has greater zeal for world domination and, (3) want privilege for Catholics (as cited by Harvard’s Adrian Vermuele). It’s item 3 that threatens those in minority religions.
Hmmm…where is all this heading? Teachers in Florida and some other states are now prohibited from even mentioning in the classroom anything that conflicts with the religious belief of any student.
Let’s look at the topic of the origin of humans and other creatures: The Catholic Church — which by itself comprises more than half of all Christians — the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the United Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church, and other traditional churches which together comprise the overwhelming majority of Christians all accept that the human body and other creatures developed through the process of evolution over millions of years. Some of these churches officially call on their members to actively resist any teaching of “creationism” in the public’s schools.
On the other hand, vociferous fundamentalist evangelical churches typically hold to the literal creation of humans and other creatures as described in the Book of Genesis.
So, teachers in Florida can’t say anything at all about the origin of humans and other creatures in science classes or anywhere else the topic arises because no matter what they say they will offend some student’s religious beliefs.
That’s the end of science teaching in Florida.
The dumbing down of Florida children.
The number of American’s belonging to a church is a state of steady decline and evangelical fundamentalism is a main cause of that; evangelical churches need to heed the warning of Saint Augustine:
“It is a disgraceful and a dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talking nonsense about scientific topics. Many non-Christians are well-versed in scientific knowledge, so they can detect the ignorance in such a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The danger to Christianity is obvious: The failure to conform to demonstrated scientific knowledge opens the Christian, and Christianity as a whole, to ridicule. If non-Christians find a Christian mistaken on a scientific subject that they know well and hear such a Christian maintaining his foolish opinions, how are they going to believe our teachings in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven?”