Strongly OPPOSE!

Parents ALREADY have the right to opt their child out of reading an all-class read. Parents already have the right to see what books their children are reading in the classroom. This bill does NOT create this right.

This bill is worse than uselss. It poses as a bill to do something that is already done. Parents are notified of controversial topics and can opt out. This bill just adds more work for the teachers and give more power to the complainers out there who can "find" sexual content even in kid's shows. All this does is give a platform to those who wish to impose their backward point of view on all the other children.

If you look at the states with the most strict laws against anything controversial, they are also the states with the highest teen pregnancies. Sorry, but I trust educators to educate. We need scientifically accurate sexual education for our students. We need to let kids know to accept others as they are. Innocence, in this context, is not a virtue. It is just another word for naive. If you want to keep your child ignorant, sure, opt out. There are already policies that cover that. But don't force an already overworked workforce to try to figure out how every word might offend someone out there and send out warnings, as if the material is some kind of dangerous substance.

All this bill would do is trigger “sexually explicit” warnings for most books taught in high school including classics such as The Scarlet Letter, The Color Purple, almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, The Canterbury Tales, Their Eyes Were Watching God, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Jane Eyre, Beloved, and so many more.

Put the onus back on the parents to read the cirriculum instead of requiring an educator to figure out what each parent could possibly define as “sexually explicit.” Parents are quite capable of investigating and reading the books being taught in the classroom and making decisions on their own, without an educator prompting them. If it is important enough to the parent to censor what their child reads, they have this right just as they always have without this nonsense bill. Senator Dunnavant must think parents are idiots who can't do anything for themselves.