LCS moves forward with sex ed curriculum after editing out contested optional material

After weeks of delay and edits, the Leon County School Board finally came to a consensus on its human growth and development curriculum at a school board meeting Tuesday night.

Originally slated to be approved and implemented earlier this spring, the sexual education curriculum went through changes after Moms for Liberty members criticized the optional content for middle schoolers, saying it was age-inappropriate, "dehumanizing," and promoted promiscuity among girls.

Those optional provisions have now been removed, and some of the wording that Moms for Liberty objected to has been changed.

Background:Leon schools defer approval of sex ed course after Moms for Liberty complain about content

"It was a surgical approach. I promise you it was not all dumped in the trash. We went through it very carefully and thoughtfully," said Superintendent Rocky Hanna. "While a number of our students have very supportive and engaging parents, a large number of our students unfortunately do not, and they desperately need this information."

Local leaders who advocate for women and girls' issues showed up in force at the meeting and asked the board to approve the human growth and development curriculum as is, with no more edits.

Kathleen Brennan, president of the board of directors for the Oasis Center for Women and Girls; Cicely Brantley, chair of the Tallahassee/Leon County Council on the Status of Women and Girls; and Kelly Otte, founder and executive director of Oasis Center for Women and Girls, were just few of the women who spoke in favor of the curriculum.

"For girls, a lack of information about their bodies can lead to damaging misconceptions and discrimination and can cause girls to miss out on normal childhood experiences and activities," Brennan said.

Otte, who was a finalist for the executive director position for the Children's Services Council of Leon County and has worked in women and girls' advocacy for 37 years in Tallahassee, stressed the importance of including LGBTQ information in the human growth and development curriculum.

"They deserve to have a curriculum that helps them be safe and navigate the same waters that straight kids are navigating," Otte said at the lectern.

The original curriculum's gender-neutral pronouns were brought up by a Moms for Liberty member at an early March board meeting and described as "dehumanizing" and "confusing language to avoid the weaponized sensitivity of trans activists."

Inika Williams, member of the council on the status of women and girls, pushed back against the anti-trans rhetoric.

"Putting our children first should never be about giving in to the loudest in the room or giving into forms of political grandstanding. It is about making the best decision that serves all students across the district, from my neighborhood on the north side to the south side," she said. "In the future, consider that there are over 64,000 parents in this district, and altering and piecemealing instructional material to satisfy five parents is not in the best interest of our community."Leon County has a higher than average rate for chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis compared to the rest of the state, said assistant superintendent Alan Cox.

In 2019, Leon had the highest rate of newly diagnosed cases of chlamydia, with 1,153.4 cases for every 100,000 residents, according to a study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin.

Cox, who is also the husband of board member Laurie Cox, presented the county data on sexually transmitted diseases for residents 15 to 19 years old.

As Cox scrolled through line graphs comparing Leon County with the rest of the state, he said the number of teens at risk of STDs labeled the district a "priority" by the Florida Department of Education in 2015.

"You can see what we've had to face," Cox said.

"Priority" status meant the district could receive DOE funding and support for sexual education. The district currently teaches a DOE-approved "abstinence plus" curriculum, a designation the district voted for over 30 years ago when the HIV epidemic sparked a national movement for more sexual education.

According to DOE, the "abstinence plus" category "emphasizes the benefits of abstinence, includes information about non-coital sexual behavior, contraception and disease prevention methods."

This is the first year the human growth and development curriculum has been contested in Leon County, according to a district administrator.

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The school board held a workshop on the curriculum in February and met individually with district administrators, some for several hours, according to district administrators, to address concerns. At an agenda meeting on Feb. 27, the board had decided to change the titles of some lesson plans they deemed too "aggressive," and alter other components of the sexual education instruction, but had settled on approving the curriculum.

The board initially had a consensus to agree on the curriculum, but after public comments from Moms for Liberty members, both board members Cox and Alva Smith said they would not approve the curriculum.

According to state statute, districts are required to teach students every year about sexually transmitted diseases, the signs, symptoms and the risk factors for those diseases while also promoting abstinence as "the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage."

It's also up to the districts to determine what falls into compliance with state standards.

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There is currently a bill in the Florida Senate, sponsored by Sen. Clay Yarbrough, R-Jacksonville, that would shift the responsibility for the curriculum for human growth and development to the state. SB 1320 would require DOE to approve all materials used to teach reproductive health or disease. It would also prohibit classroom instruction on gender identity in middle school and declare state binary gender — male and female — as unchangeable.

At Tuesday's meeting, Sharyn Kerwin, who heads the Leon County chapter of Moms for Liberty, thanked the board for listening to her group's concerns about the middle school curriculum. She said the group also had concerns about the high school content, but because of the time crunch they would reserve their edits until the following school year.

"Hopefully, there can be continued discussion moving forward," she said.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Leon County OKs sex ed content after Moms for Liberty concerns