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.
In the lead-up to this year’s vote, activist board members likely hope to yield favorable survey results this time around on the proposed changes. To that end, I would bet they will activate the LGBT community inside and outside of Fairfax County to respond to the survey before the deadline on June 10.
The ideological inclinations of this year’s survey’s authors and its intended audience are clear. In addition to other demographic information, the survey poses a question about the respondent’s gender identity. The choices are agender, cisgender, genderqueer, man, nonbinary/gender diverse, transgender, woman, and, in case the extra-special respondents do not identify with any of these, “other” is an option as well.
A concerned Fairfax County resident sent an email to school board Chairman Karl Frisch asking him if the school board would vote on last year’s recommendations in addition to this year’s recommendations and, if so, when they intended to vote. He did not respond before the publication of this article.
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For a school board and administration that speaks so much about inclusion, they certainly do have a nefarious way of excluding parental input that thwarts their leftist agenda in our children’s schools.
In the end, it probably doesn’t even matter what the new survey results show. The school board will inevitably vote in favor of forcing gender ideology into the elementary school curriculum regardless of what parents think is appropriate. And that, in a nutshell, is what the Left means by “inclusion.”
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
