Presto -- State Changes Site, Health Person Not Needed

The CRC has been howling that the citizens advisory committee can't evaluate the HIV section of the curriculum because there's nobody from the county health department on the committee. We've talked about this a few times here. The state law says "The local school system shall use an existing committee or appoint a committee comprised of educators, representatives of the community including parents/guardians of students enrolled in a public school program, and the local health department... etc." MCPS lawyers determined that that word "or" in the middle meant that the citizens committee did not need a public health person.

The CRC noted another state web page, however, that explained COMAR: "As stated in the regulation, local school systems can use the existing system wide citizen advisory committee for both the family life and human sexuality and HIV/AIDS prevention education provided that this committee has a representative from the local health department."

I had confirmed this, and linked to it HERE. If you search Google for the phrase in quotes "committee for both the family life" you'll get a couple of hits for this blog and a link to the Maryland state web site that contains the phrase.

But guess what: that phrase doesn't exist there any more.

Unfortunately, the Google cache for that site doesn't exist any more either, so we can't really compare to see if it's changed. It's funny, Google still points to it, and you can read this wording on Google, but it's not in the cache, and when you go to the site there's nothing there about needing a health person on the committee.

Here's what I think happened:

MCPS sent a letter to the state school board, asking for clarification. Their letter noted the COMAR wording and the discrepancy with the explanatory web site.

It appears that the state, upon seeing the discrepancy, resolved it by changing the wording on the web site.

The wording of the COMAR is clear -- if you use an existing committee, it doesn't need to have a public health person on it.