Many parents and residents are reluctant to speak up in opposition to the current policies and are concerned about the potential repercussions if they do so. Their concerns should be elsewhere.
No clarification from the Board or Dean Rose on their stance on whether high school interscholastic sports team participation should be determined by a student’s gender identity or biological gender.
Transparency in Education, with Dr. Kate Goonan and Tom Neumark, provided some insight on WFMD this past weekend on gender identity and how it is handled in Frederick County Schools.
Policy 443 does not require a parent to be notified when their child expresses confusion about their gender, chooses an alternative gender, or identifies as transgender. We believe it should be required.
The efficiency and organization of BOE public meetings seem to be deteriorating, and increasingly, the FCPS BOE is making it harder for parents to provide input via public comments. This appears to be more due to a lack of a cohesively organized meeting than by design, but the result is discontent and frustration amongst the public.
As parents and community members begin to learn more about FCPS and BOE positions on gender identity, a groundswell of support is emerging against existing policies that restrict what parents are told about their child and the policy of allowing participation in interscholastic sports teams by a student’s self-identified gender, rather than a student’s biological sex.
Our forum on Wednesday, April 5th, “Understanding Gender Dysphoria and School Policy Forum,” was well attended. Jim Lehmann hosted the forum and led off with the point that the current policy is six years old, outdated, and does not consider the impacts the current policy has on the roughly 99.5 % of the students who do not identify as transgender or gender non-conforming.
Many of those that oppose the policy proposal we submitted to the FCPS Board of Education are criticizing Genspect, who we approached after our proposal was developed. This is an obvious attempt to discredit the organization and paint them as a fringe group.
How is it possible for a school system to state that the physical and emotional safety of the students is a top priority and then put female students at risk of both physical injury and emotional harm by allowing biological male students to perform on girls’ sports teams?
Notwithstanding the importance of the arts, the number one priority of any school system should be academic proficiency. Everything flows from that goal; problem-solving skills, critical thinking, the values of the merit system, the benefits of hard work, the negative consequences of not meeting deadlines, the importance of following rules, and self-discipline.