Looking Back, Looking Forward

It's good every once in a while to stop and look at where we are in the ongoing saga of the revision of the sex-ed curriculum in the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools. There's always something to hold our immediate attention, and sometimes we forget what we've accomplished and how far along we have actually come.

A little history. Through most of 2004, beginning the previous year, a citizens advisory committee reviewed and evaluated curricula for 8th and 10th grade health classes dealing with sexuality. As the process went on, some conservative members of the group attempted to introduce a number of anti-gay and anti-safe-sex topics and resources, and they were outvoted by the mainstream members most of the time. Several committee members sent a letter to the school board in the spring of 2004, complaining, listing materials that had been rejected, arguing that they were unfairly treated, that the committee was biased, etc.

In November, 2004, two things happened. The presidential elections on the 2nd resulted in the return of George W. Bush to office, and a school board vote on the 9th unanimously adopted the new sex-ed curricula.

A certain segment of our county's population felt that the Bush election (though the vote went against him two-to-one here in Montgomery county) was a mandate that called for immediate takeover of the school board. A web site sprang up, RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com, and people posted the most unbelievably vile comments on the message board. At one point a leader of that group had to apologize to the school board for personal threats that had been made there. The group closed off their message board from the public, after it had become a favorite source of humorous material for various sites on the Internet, yay-hooism at its most ... refined.

That group held an organizational meeting on December 4th, 2004. Some of us more progressive parents had heard about it through a school listserve, and attended the meeting. We didn't know one another, but just attended individually. As the meeting went on, and people stood up to complain about the "sodomites" and "deviants," we ended up catching one another's eye, and within a week of that meeting we had our own first meeting of Teach the Facts. One of our group was a web developer, and I had some experience with blogs, so we started this web site. Others in the group were organizers, energizers, go-doers, think-it-throughers.

Our goal was straightforward. We supported the curriculum that the other group wanted to eliminate. The curriculum itself was very moderate. It was going to talk about sexual orientation for the first time, and it was going to have a video that showed how to use a condom. The sexual orientation discussion was informative and, it seemed to us, uncontroversial. Some people are gay, some are bi, some are straight. No sordid details, nothing that made it sound cool or especially attractive, stuff just existed, and here's what it's called.

It turned out to be a pretty simple task we had, mainly we just created a public presence for the tolerant and inclusive point of view. A lot of people checked out our web site, and joined our Yahoo group, and we kept the blog moving, something new every day or so. In this county, most people agreed with us on this. The rightwing web sites tried to call us "gay advocates," but, well, most of us aren't gay, not that it matters. And we don't really promote any gay stuff, we just think gay people deserve the respect and rights that the rest of us have, and that they should be depicted accurately in the public school curriculum. If anything, we are an "education advocacy" group.

As the year wore on, the anti-MCPS group, calling themselves the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum or CRC, tried all kinds of things, letter-writing campaigns, talk radio, they connected with the big rightwing organizations. But no matter what they did, it backfired on them. When they sent letters they ended up being reprimanded by the county PTA for misusing the school's student directory. When they held a "town hall" meeting, their speakers were so over the top that the group had to issue a statement that they didn't really agree with them. They were caught several times lying in public comments to the school board, and in various other situations, not that that discouraged them any.

To make a long story short, in May 2005 the CRC and PFOX, an organization that claims to support "ex-gays," that is, people who say they have stopped being gay, filed a lawsuit, and won a temporary restraining order. In negotiations, the school district agreed to start over in developing a new curriculum with a new citizens committee, guaranteed the two groups seats on the new committee, and paid $36,000 to the suers' lawyers.

As love and respect for the Bush administration increased across the country, the CRC continued to, uh, just a minute, that didn't happen. As the administration showed itself to be incompetent at war and nation-building, homeland security, and everything in between, support for the CRC's approach coincidentally began to dissipate. Where they had a couple hundred people at their March meeting, in November they got around twenty, including several from our group. You could still find the occasional anti-gay politician somewhere to claim support for them, but really, their followers mostly lost interest. The Family Blah-Blah groups liked them, and continued to publish their press releases as fact on their web sites, and that was about it.

This winter the school district assembled a new citizens advisory committee, including members from the two anti-MCPS groups, and a team of experts, including a group of area pediatricians, has now proposed a high-level "framework," a very general outline of an entire new curriculum, from pre-K to high school, and the committee has been evaluating it. I represent TeachTheFacts.org on the citizens committee, in case you didn't know that. Just last night the committee approved the new framework, with some amendments, after a grueling meeting.

Next, the framework will be formally presented to the school board, and the district will work on the next stage of the curriculum, called the "blueprint." This is slow-motion bureaucracy at its finest.

Of course I've left out many of the exciting adventures that have befallen us on the way, but this is where we are now. If you want to know about The Talk Show That Wasn't, or the story of The Purloined URL, or any of the others, look back in the blog archives. There's a bunch there. At present, the CRC is complaining about some nit-picky rules, and I imagine they'll continue to do that. Who wants to bet they won't sue again?

There are a couple of interesting things at the moment. The pediatricians who are working with the school district noted the names of a couple of textbook sections they liked. The CRC complained to the school district because they couldn't find one of the books. Well, it's not part of the curriculum at this point, anyway, but they wanted to see it. So the members of the citizens advisory committee received copies of the sections in question, and ... oh my. It turns out that the people who are developing this curriculum are much more progressive than the group that produced the last one, the one that got thrown out.

This is turning into a classic case of "be careful what you wish for." The CRC and PFOX worked themselves into a dither over the previous proposed curriculum, which was very mild and innocuous, and they wanted to start over. But, you know -- there was no reason to think that a new curriculum would be more conservative than the last one.

In yesterday's citizens committee meeting the CRC/PFOX members had proposed nearly forty changes to the framework. I hope I'm not overly condensing this when I say that the group mostly rejected anything that made it sound like you had to be married to have sex, and anything that put gay people in a negative light, and accepted recommendations that contained sound medical advice or promoted families and marriage without restricting the definitions of those concepts. Eleven of the CRC/PFOX changes were accepted, so they can't really cry that the group was against them or anything. Lots of the votes were close.

Though the new curriculum is making progress, we expect the few remaining members of CRC to throw up roadblocks at every turn. Watch for out-of-town lawyers to show up at the last second. Watch for the school district to be prepared this time.

The moral here is that you can't let up. A small minority of people tried to hijack the process here in Montgomery County, as they have successfully done in some other places. And the thing is, they'll work day and night, they'll organize and network with the big Family Blah-Blah organizations, they'll say anything and do anything to get their way ... and you can't let them. For more than a year now, Teach the Facts has been putting out the word, speaking in public, talking with the press (you saw us in the Wall Street Journal last week, right?), and generally supporting common sense and fairness in our schools. And we're not getting tired of this, not at all.