Virginia Regulatory Town Hall
Agency
Department of Education
 
Board
State Board of Education
 
Guidance Document Change: The guidance document "Model Policies Concerning Instructional Materials with Sexually Explicit Content" was developed in conjunction with stakeholders in order to comply with SB656 (2022).
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7/16/22  3:44 pm
Commenter: Alun Palmer

Goes too far
 

I do not agree with this proposed guidance document. It says it is not censorship, but effectively passes over to parents the right to censor material used in the classroom. It says children of the parents who file objections will be given alternative material, but that effectively singles their children out. How can they be studying different material to the rest of their class without feeling ostracised? More likely, the teacher will withdraw the material so that no-one feels singled out, and then the parent will have acheived censorship for the whole class, which I suspect is the real objective here. Within that objective, I further expect that many want to censor the gay and transgendered out of existence. Our eldest child is transgendered, and previously identified as gay. We don't want the facts kept away from children, and some will use this to achieve that, given what it envisages. Our kids went to school in Maryland and we went to school in England. I got sex education in school at 11, which managed to go into detail on contraception without explaining intercourse! That itself must have been difficult to devise, apart from being laughable to study! School systems may devise such ridiculous plans by committee, but these guidelines would, in practice, let one parent decide what would be hidden from his or her child's whole class, as no teacher in their right mind will use separate censored and uncensored material within the same class.

CommentID: 122617