Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | May 23, 2024
(Washington Examiner) — Last week, Fairfax County’s school board members sent an email to the district’s residents soliciting feedback in a survey on the proposed changes to the family life education curriculum.
The school board’s appointed Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee members’ recommendations for this year include gender identity instruction in elementary school and an age-inappropriate puberty video for all fourth graders that shares graphic information about the development of both sexes.
Parents were left scratching their heads and wondering why they received another survey about this committee’s recommendations. Respondents to last year’s survey about the advisory committee’s previous proposed changes to the sex education curriculum demonstrated overwhelming community disapproval. But last year’s vile recommendations were passed unanimously in the committee anyway, demonstrating its complete lack of ideological diversity and its disregard for parental input. There were and are conservative applicants for the committee — they are just ignored.
And last year’s recommendations arguably were even more explicitly absurd than this year’s recommendations. They included combining sexes for family life education starting in fourth grade, beginning gender identity instruction in elementary school, and replacing all the words “male/female” with “assigned male/female at birth.”
Parents and community members said, “No way.” In fact, 84% of respondents to the school board’s survey objected to the recommendation that boys and girls should be taught sex education together.
At a work session after these survey results were made public, the district’s superintendent, Michelle Reid, said, “Honestly, the majority doesn’t always dictate, right?”
The truth is that neither the advisory committee nor Fairfax County’s school board members reportedly intended for those survey results to be made public. But along came the Fairfax County Parents Association, the school board’s undesired accountability buddy, to the parents’ rescue. On March 4, 2023, the Fairfax County Parents Association publicized the survey results in a tweet, and likely delayed the school board’s plans to force gender identity down our young children’s throats — for a year, at least.
And here we are again, a year later. Last year’s survey results went against what the school board, its advisory committee, and the district’s administration intended, so they never voted on the recommendations. They seemed simply to hope that time would erase parents’ memories and divert their attention.