School Board Approves new Human Growth and Development Curriculum
Previous article here:
I.
Unfortunately, I was not at the August 22 Wauwatosa School Board meeting in person, but I did watch the recording. If the meeting on August 8 was a dress rehearsal, August 22 was Opening Night. All the same characters were there but they were playing their roles with a lot more pizzazz.
Maybe there was an angry dad on August 8, but he spoke at the microphone and wasn’t that angry. On August 22 though, the angry dad character was shouting things from the back of the room and interrupting everyone.
On August 8 there was only one precocious and brave student that spoke, but on August 22 there were seven, and they were extra brave and everyone was extra proud of them and clapped extra hard.
On August 8, the guy from the external curriculum committee who was really opposed to the new course kind of surprised everyone when he got up during the part of the presentation where other members of the committee were talking about how great the new curriculum was and how much good discussion they had, and he said, “No, the new curriculum is terrible and you ignored me whenever I tried to discuss how terrible I thought it was.” This time though, he tried to do the same thing and the Board President just told him to wait until it was time for public comment. And then when the time for public comment came, another board member suggested the children speak first, and they kind of stole the show so when he finally got his chance to speak, it really didn’t have the same impact.
But while the performance may have been better, the amount of good faith seemed to have diminished, people seemed less conflicted and less likely to support some parts of the curriculum while expressing worry about others, and while there were still good comments and most people were respectful, it seemed like the vast majority had made up their minds.
This could be because people have had an extra two weeks to think about things, but it could also be because the issue has received a lot of attention from outside the community—there was a story on Fox News—and a larger audience will include more people with strong opinions while also causing people who lean one way or the other but are more ambivalent to avoid airing their misgivings lest it somehow give ammunition to the other side.
II. Scarlet Johnson at the Board Meeting Pre-Game
Speaking of outside attention, the picture in this tweet seemed to capture the pre-Board Meeting festivities pretty well. Although it’s important to recognize that those who make picket signs and show up to protests are probably more extreme in their views than the average person that attends a school board meeting (Although, I would love to see signs that said, “Pretty satisfied but have a few reservations,” or hear a group of attendees chanting, “Hey! Ho! There’s still some more I’d like to know!”), it does at least represent the ends of the spectrum:
One can get a greater sense of the festivities in the videos posted by local news organizations: Spectrum1 News, TMJ4 Milwaukee, WISN12 ABC, WDJT Milwaukee, and FOX6
At the center of the picture are representatives of a group called Moms For Liberty (Mission: “[D]edicated to the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”) led by Ozaukee-chapter President Scarlet Johnson, a person who I’d never heard of before, but who was the subject of a New York Times profile in October of last year.
According to the story, she transformed from a “a stay-at-home mother, devoted to chauffeuring her children to school and supervising their homework,” to an activist “orchestrating a recall of her local school board” in the Mequon-Thiensville School District after a video on race and privilege posted by the school “jarred [her] to [her] core.”
Since then, she’s become interested in new curriculum material from nearby school districts as well, including Wauwatosa:
I couldn't actually find the scenarios she posted screenshots of in the 6-8th grade curriculum. However, I did find them in the High School curriculum. Maybe the fact that the lesson is given to high school students instead of sixth graders makes a difference to some people and maybe it does not, but it did make me a little more skeptical of her claims.
Also, in a further tweet, she says:
This lesson plan includes a note for teachers that explains how straight boys might have a bigoted response to being asked to engage in same sex role playing.
“Should this happen in your class, it’s important to stop what you are doing, notice the interaction, and ask for the class members to reflect on what’s happening and why...”
But I could not find this text either in the lesson she referenced or in the high school lesson where I found the scenarios, so I’m not sure what she’s referring to.
A number of people did seem pretty upset that she had invaded the School Board meeting, and not just because of her loose citation standards. One tweet I read said she and other Moms For Liberty were escorted out of the Fisher Administration Building during the meeting, but I also saw tweets from her with video from inside the conference room where the meeting was being held, so I’m not sure.
One public commenter was particularly offended by her presence:
I'm just frankly very disgusted that a mob of conservative pearl clutchers led in part by Scarlett Johnson, a failed candidate of the Mequon—and you heard me right. Not Wauwatosa. Mequon—School District has decided that she suddenly cares so much about the children of Wauwatosa.
This is not my first schoolboard meeting, okay? Why is someone who is not a stakeholder in our district able to manipulate and invalidate the results of a survey to reflect her own disgusting rhetoric, bigotry, and misinformation?
[Whoops and hollers from the audience. Clapping in background]
Do not fall for the lies of someone who only cares [about trying] to be elected in the future.
III. Outsiders Keep Screwing Things Up
Other attendees were also upset at the interference of non-residents. The survey sent to parents to gauge the level of support for various aspects of the curriculum was circulated outside the community in a bid, some suspected, to reduce perceived support.
For instance, on August 8th, a large percentage of the survey’s approximately 180 responses Strongly Supported (orange) the new curriculum:
After the survey was circulated beyond the initial list of 13,000 caregivers and parents, the results looked like this:
The School District then cross-referenced email addresses from survey respondents against the email list the district maintains for communicating with caregivers and parents and removed survey responses that did not match. After the culling, results looked pretty similar to those presented on August 8. They did not say how many responses they threw out, but the final sample size was 530:
I’ve only included the survey results for Senior Kindergarten, but the percentages were roughly the same for all grades. Overall, about 65-70% of respondents strongly supported the curriculum, about 25% strongly opposed it, and the rest were somewhere in the middle.
It seemed reasonable to me that the School District would remove responses from email addresses they did not originally send the survey to; however, a couple members of the public did make the point that all property owners pay taxes to the school and should be heard whether they are on the School District’s email address or not. Representatives from the School District didn’t really respond to this point.
Meeting attendees grew even more perturbed when non-residents began speaking during the public comment period:
One was a medical doctor from Milwaukee who had relatives and grandchildren in Wauwatosa. He mentioned some statistics that suggested the benefits for kids with gender identity disorder from socially transitioning weren’t as positive as others claimed.
Then there was a family physician who had treated many members of the LGBTQ community and said she was invited to speak. She also spoke in opposition to the new curriculum and described some of the negative effects of gender reassignment surgery.
The School Board President then asked if we could get some actual residents to speak. There were a few, but then another doctor—this time a member of the Milwaukee Guild of the Catholic Medical Association—started speaking. People began to complain loudly, Dr. Jessup-Anger quieted the rabble, and the good doctor continued. He emphasized that while everyone should be treated with dignity and respect as a human being, there isn’t a strong consensus on the appropriate treatment for transgender children and that practices in Western Europe are at odds with what the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests.
After this, either the non-residents were scared away or they were careful not to announce their outsider status, because I didn’t hear any more non-community members speak.
While I’m sympathetic to the fact that these people probably kept some members of the community from expressing their opinion on an issue that directly affected them, they were at least kind of subdued, not inflammatory, and offered a useful perspective.
Overall, however, comments opposing the new curriculum were the minority. Unlike the last meeting where 15 of the 23 people who provided public comment were opposed to the new curriculum, only 9 of the 24 public comments on August 22 were opposed to the new curriculum. Sixteen supported it, including 7 students.
IV. Presentation of The Science™
As part of the presentation by school administrators to the board, Caitlin Berry, a nurse and member of the external committee, provided more information on the research behind the proposed curriculum. This included information from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP):
that rates of teen pregnancy in the U.S. are higher than every developed country,
that 50% of STIs are from adolescents,
that rates of STI are increasing among teens and condom use is decreasing, and
that 20% of new HIV infections come from people 13-24, and
that adolescents who don't receive formal comprehensive sex education are half as likely to practice safe sex and that they are more likely to get STIs.
However, those who do get comprehensive sex education become sexually active at an older age and are more likely to be safe.
She also discussed the American Psychological Association’s 2020 recommendation (I think she may be referring to this?) to teach sex and gender topics at a younger age, because:
children are capable of understanding and expressing gender at very young ages,
children who self-describe as LGBTQ or gender diverse are more likely than peers to have depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance abuse, and bullying,
that LGBTQ and Gender diverse students are not innately more prone to these problems but that they are a result of an unsupportive and discriminatory environment, and
that education on these topics does not harm children that are not LGBTQ or gender-diverse.
She kept going, but you get the point.
I think the impression a neutral observer might get is that there are a lot of concerning statistics about teenagers and their health and that most experts who have looked into this problem agree on the ways those concerns could be mitigated.
And while the doctors and health professionals that opposed the new curriculum claimed the evidence was weaker or less positive than it had been made-out to be, it was usually in reference to topics such as the rates of desistance among children with gender identity disorder, the potentially-harmful effects of giving teenagers and children puberty blockers, or the persistence of mental health problems following gender-reassignment surgery.
While I think people at the school board meeting were too quick to label these claims “fringe science” or “misinformation,” I also think it’s important to point out that the proposed curriculum doesn’t really have much to do with puberty blockers or encouraging kids to have permanent, life-altering surgeries. I think they’re worried that lessons on gender identity for third graders could lead to these sorts of things, but I wish they had made this connection more explicit in their criticisms.
Additionally during the presentation of the new curriculum, the School District's Chief Academic Officer, Dr. Marble, provided answers to some of the frequently asked questions from the community including:
Why are we updating the curriculum now? (Answer: We're supposed to review the curriculum every 3 years, and it's been 10.)
Why are we teaching kids this stuff at such an early age (Answer: We've actually already been doing this for 10 years, and also it keeps kids safe.)
How much instructional time are we spending on this stuff? (Answer: from 0.2% to 1% of total teaching time)
Why does all the material say things like, “Person with a vulva” instead of “woman”? (Answer: It's inclusive and preserves dignity, etc., etc.)
What's going to keep teachers from going off-script and injecting their personal opinions into things? (Answer: We'll tell them not to deviate from the script. And they'll sign a piece of paper that says, “I won't deviate from the script.”)
V. Discussion
Following the presentation, board members mostly asked procedural questions like, “How will you get teachers trained quickly enough to roll this out for the new school year that starts in a week?” and “What's the plan if there needs to be more revisions based on parent and student feedback once it's being taught?”
One Board Member, Sharon Muehlfeld, made a motion to delay the vote for a month to give more time for parents to review the curriculum and submit feedback since there had been some changes to the lessons in the past two weeks.
Dr. Jessup-Anger said we probably wouldn’t hear anything new, but okay.
Board Member Mike Meier made a friendly amendment to her motion to have the School District report back in one month on the feasibility of creating a second, alternate curriculum that those opposed to the current revisions could opt-in to and what the timeline for its creation might be.
Dr. Jessup-Anger said something kind of circumlocutious and confusing about how maybe Mr. Meier really wanted three new curriculums. Mr. Meier said he had no idea what Dr. Jessup-Anger was trying to say, and then he restated his amendment.
Mike Meier’s amendment to look at the feasibility of an alternative curriculum failed to pass by a vote of 2-5.
Sharon Muehlfeld’s motion to delay a vote for one month failed to pass by a vote of 2-5.
The revised curriculum was approved by a vote of 6-1.