PFOX Flyers: MCPS Central Office Blames Principals

There has been a lot of interest these days in the PFOX flyers that Montgomery County Public Schools have been sending home with students. The flyers themselves are just what you'd expect from PFOX, suggesting that nobody would really want to be gay and if you think you are you should contact PFOX so they can help you become straight, instead. We understand how PFOX feels and why. It is a reprehensible point of view, dangerous to young people, based on fantasy and wishful thinking and contradicted by science, but ... that's PFOX for you.

The problem is that our public school district is passing PFOX's flyers out to our county's children. School officials have always maintained that they are not allowed, because of a court order, to exercise any discretion in determining what materials are distributed. If a nonprofit submits something, then the schools have to give it to our kids, they say.

The Post did some digging and found out something interesting. Their question was, who decides?

I asked Montgomery County schools officials to explain who is responsible for vetting the fliers that non-profit groups are allowed to send home with students four times a year.

The issue arose when my colleague Michael Birnbaum reported about fliers that were passed out to some Montgomery County high school students from an organization that insists that therapy can turn gays into heterosexuals.

The fliers, from the group Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, were distributed at Churchill High School and other schools last week under a district regulation that allows non-profit groups to distribute information that is not deemed to be hate speech.

Some entities can distribute information whenever they want: The school system itself; federal, state, or local governmental entities; nationally affiliated PTAs operating within MCPS and MCCPTA; and parent-teacher organizations at special education schools and alternative centers that operate in lieu of nationally affiliated PTAs.

According to school spokesperson Dana Tofig, it is up to a school principal to raise any concerns about material that a non-profit is distributing.

If a principal does have concerns, the material is sent to the Office of School Performance for review and legal counsel may be consulted, Tofig said. A final decision “is made by executive staff if the material is appropriate for distribution.”

Tofig said that a 2006 lawsuit forced the school district to adopt this policy and it leaves “very little room for interpretation.”

Apparently principals at schools where the anti-gay flier was distributed either didn’t see it or weren’t concerned enough to speak up. Up to Montgomery County principals to challenge fliers

It is not clear if that last sentence is the writer's opinion or if it came from the MCPS spokesperson. Either way, you have to wonder, are principals unaware of the material that they are giving children, or do they think this is okay? Because most people do not think it's okay.

The Post points you to THIS SITE for the MCPS flyer policy. That page links to a decision tree for determining whether a flyer should be sent home with students. One route to acceptance is for non-PTA or school groups where the flyer has the required disclaimer, the materials do not violate law or MCPS policy, and the group is a registered nonprofit organization. It does not say, "Principal exercises judgment" or "Principal approves material" at any place on the flow chart.

The article continues:

I understand that the school system is required to pass out the information because of the lawsuit, and that the regulations surrounding this are supposed to be “viewpoint-neutral.” Only hate speech is off-limits.

The problem is that hate speech isn’t always easy to define. To many people, this flier clearly qualified. What if a non-profit group wanted to send out material on how to become a transgender? Or a group of atheists wanted to invite kids to a seminar critical of organized religion? What if the material is not spewing hate but is, nevertheless, patently wrong?

The information on the PFOX flyers is patently wrong. It directly contradicts the schools' health curriculum and the consensus among scientists and medical and mental health practitioners and researchers about the nature of sexual orientation. A lot of people worked hard to develop a curriculum that was accurate and also reflected the values of our community, and the school district undermines that by giving students literature that tells them just the opposite of the classroom lessons.

Somebody needs to look at these flyers and what they represent, the real message to and about gay people. It is cleverly veiled -- "you can change" is an especially insidious message that tells gay teens there is something wrong with them and tells straight teens that their gay peers have chosen to be the way they are. Last week a member of PFOX's Board of Directors said on Hardball that homosexual behavior should be criminalized, they call themselves Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, but they don't even use the "and Gays" in their acronym, which would make it PFOX-GAG. They are no friends of gay people. Parents, some of them, but not friends.

At some point a real live human being needs to take responsibility for the information being given to our children at public school. Somebody needs to look at it and put their foot down, they need to say, I don't care what your bureaucratic policy says, parents trust me to be responsible for their children and there is no way I am giving them this material.

Somebody needs to decide, and so far the word has been that the school district's lawyers were the ones. They have always said, PFOX is a nonprofit, we have agreed to allow all nonprofits to send home flyers, therefore MCPS staff have to spend their time handing out dangerously incorrect literature to students.

Now Dana Tofig, the MCPS Director of Public Information, is saying that it's really been up to school principals all along. I'll bet there's more than one harried principal looking at that Post article in amazement. This appears to be the MCPS administration denying responsibility for distributing hate literature to our children, now they're saying they didn't order anybody to do it, the principals decided. I'd like to hear what a principal has to say about that!

This reporter has one thing wrong.

Now that this policy has become news, I’m betting that a lot of organizations that didn’t know about it will avail themselves of the opportunity to distribute information to kids and their families.

Naw, it's a big pain to distribute flyers. It is expensive to print them up, you have to go around to every school on a certain date, you have to bundle them a certain way, it takes hours of work. We did it once, thinking that it would be sensible to counter PFOX's poison with an alternative view. But in reality, this is not a matter of "opposing viewpoints." It's not, like the lady said at the Parents Coalition listserve, that PFOX "disagrees with homosexuality." That would be like disagreeing with blue eyes, or disagreeing with being tall. The problem is that PFOX's point of view is nonsense. It is old-fashioned bigotry, there are people who are gay by nature and PFOX promotes prejudice against them. It's not just a different point of view, it's wrong, and our school district should not be passing this material out to students.

Now the central office is circling its wagons, saying that the schools are really responsible for the decision to distribute these flyers. That's a good sign, at least they realize they are under attack.