My name is Tucker Winter and I live in Charlottesville, VA. I am a veteran high school literature teacher with 26 years in the classroom, the last 15 of which have been in Virginia. I believe that classrooms should be a place where students are free to ask questions, explore new ideas, and learn about diverse viewpoints. The entire job of educators is to teach, nurture and protect our students by creating educationally relevant and meaningful assignments within our content area to ensure that the Commonwealth has an educated labor and voting force. This bill will create a scenario where that is impossible to do. Worse than that, the vague language present in the bill leaves the concept of "sexually explicit content" open to interpretation.
The fear-mongers out there would have us all believe that children in early elementary school are being faced with wacko teachers who just love to include sexually explicit material in their classrooms. To these people I ask: what ACTUAL classroom content are they seeing that they object to? All content taught in public schools undergoes a rigorous selection process by locally elected school boards and curriculum specialists who are well-versed in child development and how students learn. These are experts. No one is allowed to simply start teaching something that is not approved in advance. It's not a free-for-all! All curricular materials are created following strict educational standards and guidelines, and all texts are vetted by experts in curriculum design before a school district approves and purchases them for use in any classroom.
As far as I can tell, in the earliest grades (PK-2) these bigots object to the inclusion of some stories containing families that have same sex parents, yet they do NOT objecting to stories with non-same sex parents. Given the vast number of students already in our classrooms whose families do contain married (or not married) parents of the same gender, it makes no sense not to allow these families, and especially these children, to see themselves and their families represented in the literature shared in the classroom. In fact, if these stories were altered so that the parents were a man and a woman, none of these people would be objecting to them and this bill would not exist. That proves that the problem is not the story itself, but stems from the weird and inappropriate fascination some people seem to have with the idea that every LGBTQ+ relationship is somehow only about sex and possibly about pedophilia. That is homophobia, plain and simple, and should have no place in any classroom or school where ALL students and their families should be respected and fully accepted.
As students get older, the benefits of having open, honest and clear sexual education including discussion of all aspects of sexuality and gender expression become clear. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), studies have REPEATEDLY demonstrated that comprehensive sexuality education programs reduce the rates of sexual activity, sexual risk behaviors (eg, number of partners and unprotected intercourse), sexually transmitted infections, and adolescent pregnancy. Here is a link to their recommendations: https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2016/11/comprehensive-sexuality-education
Isn't this what we want in Virginia? Why on earth would be do anything other than work to achieve these goals?