Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | October 20, 2023
(Washington Examiner) — At 7 p.m. on Oct. 12, hidden away in the cafeteria at Gatehouse, the headquarters of Fairfax County Public Schools, the appointed members of the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee held their latest monthly meeting. Public perception of these meetings is that they are intentionally non-transparent.
Unlike other public meetings and work sessions, these meetings are neither recorded nor livestreamed. Though technically open to the public, they are not easy to access. Parents and members of the community arrive at Gatehouse without knowledge of where, in the large complex, the meeting will be held. Security personnel have to lead them to the meeting location. If members of the public arrive late and security personnel are not at the front desk, then they are not admitted.
The secrecy and hurdles to attending these meetings are suspect, leading parents to wonder what the public school district’s administrators and board members are trying to hide.
What we do know is that the 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members have appointed gender ideology activists to the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee, which advises them on the district’s sex education curricula. This stacking-the-deck method is standard operating procedure in Fairfax County’s public schools. Despite their incessant claims about the importance of inclusion, school board members only appoint advisory committee members who are ideologically homogenous so that they can draw the conclusions on which they have already decided.
The 2022-2023 Family Life Education committee of activists unanimously voted on several recommendations that were not well received by the public. These recommendations included gender-combined instruction for sex education beginning in 5th grade, gender identity instruction beginning in 4th grade, and changing the words “male/female” to “assigned male/female at birth.”
After the committee presented its recommendations, the district conducted a community survey. Months later, we learned that activists tried to bury the results because respondents were overwhelmingly against these absurd proposed changes to the sex education curricula. In particular, 84% of respondents indicated that they do not support gender-combined family life education instruction in grades 4-8.