Virginia Regulatory Town Hall
Agency
Department of Education
 
Board
State Board of Education
 
Guidance Document Change: Every day, throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, educators and school leaders work to ensure that all students have an opportunity to receive a high-quality education. As a part of that work, educators strive to meet the individual needs of all students entrusted to their care, and teachers work to create educational environments where all students thrive. The Virginia Department of Education (the “Department”) recognizes that each child is a unique individual with distinctive abilities and characteristics that should be valued and respected. All students have the right to attend school in an environment free from discrimination, harassment, or bullying. The Department supports efforts to protect and encourage respect for all students. Thus, we have a collective responsibility to address topics such as the treatment of transgender students with necessary compassion and respect for all students. The Department also fully acknowledges the rights of parents to exercise their fundamental rights granted by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children. The Code of Virginia reaffirms the rights of parents to determine how their children will be raised and educated. Empowering parents is not only a fundamental right, but it is essential to improving outcomes for all children in Virginia. The Department is mindful of constitutional protections that prohibit governmental entities from requiring individuals to adhere to or adopt a particular ideological belief. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees religious freedom and prohibits the government from compelling speech that is contrary to an individual’s personal or religious beliefs. The Department embarked on a thorough review of the Model Policies Guidance adopted on March 4, 2021 (the “2021 Model Policies”). The 2021 Model Policies promoted a specific viewpoint aimed at achieving cultural and social transformation in schools. The 2021 Model Policies also disregarded the rights of parents and ignored other legal and constitutional principles that significantly impact how schools educate students, including transgender students. With the publication of these 2022 Model Policies (the “2022 Model Policies”), the Department hereby withdraws the 2021 Model Policies, which shall have no further force and effect. The Department issues the 2022 Model Policies to provide clear, accurate, and useful guidance to Virginia school boards that align with statutory provisions governing the Model Policies. See Code of Virginia, § 22.1-23.3 (the “Act”). Significantly, the 2022 Model Policies also consider over 9,000 comments submitted to the Department during the public comment period for the 2021 Model Policies.
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10/26/22  10:31 pm
Commenter: Robert R

Support 2022 policy
 

After carefully reading the 2022 Guidance document for the department of Education I realize that the policy is both factual fair and impartial. Parents are responsible for raising their children, not the Department of Education. Our school systems should not be adopting policies that enable or encourage discrimination of anyone regardless of race, sex or sexuality. When our minor children turn 18, they gain several adult choices and responsibilities, up to and including sexuality. When our school system imposes an ideology, regardless of origin, that imposition is the very fascist oppression of freedom we as a society have striven to avoid. The Department of Education has gone beyond the defense of trans gender individuals to the point of forcing the ideology upon the entire system up to and including keeping information from the parents. While forcing this ideology, the school system as well as liberal mentors have taught our children to demean themselves by referring to themselves as pronouns or letters in the alphabet. After being taught to demean themselves, they then wonder and complain about mental health. Our educators and liberal influencers seem to have forgotten why we capitalize our names and the names of places, to symbolize their individuality and importance, basic grammar. The very individualities that not only create our melting pot and diversity but should be celebrated. Our school system should also cease and desist the teaching or propagation of racism through the outdated 1940's communist NAZI Critical Race Theory. In this regard our school system has taken the most diverse sector of our population, who have only ever known equality through diversity, and once again established racism as well as many forms of segregation into these United States of America. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and our educators are taking it away from our children. No parent I know has taught any of our children to hate or see color or diversity in a negative way, neither does any child see negativity until they are taught to. Today racism and segregation, under the guise of equality are taught in our classrooms instead of reading, writing and arithmetic. 

"The white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us. The white liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the black man." Malcom X

CommentID: 202526