Apr 29, 2005  |  By: YUSEF NAJAFI  | COMMENTS     

Montgomery County Public Schools officials have removed two sentences from a newly implemented pilot sex education curriculum that the county’s school board voted on late last year because of their gay content.

Russell Henke, the county’s health curriculum coordinator, confirmed that he removed a sentence in the eighth-grade educational curriculum that read: “Sex play with friends of the same gender is not uncommon during early adolescence,” after receiving complaints from parents who labeled the wording of the text as pro-gay. Another sentence that indicated students would discuss sexual identity during the curriculum was also removed.

Henke said the changes, which were voted on in November and recently announced during parent meetings, are “minor” and not anti-gay.

“If you take a look at what we have done, overall, you would see that we have made minor changes to what we had before,” he said. “The majority [of the document], including definitions, hasn’t been changed at all.”

The changes signify small victories for conservative parents like Michelle Turner, who is also the president of the Citizens for Responsible Curriculum, a group formed in opposition to the new sex education teachings. While Turner and other members of the group did not respond to requests seeking comment by the Blade’s deadline, Turner spoke to the Washington Times earlier this week.

“We think [the school system] has realized that their wording was misleading and that it needed to be corrected,” she told the Times. “We are hoping that they will continue to realize that there are pieces of the revised health curriculum that will cause some real health issues for students.”

The county’s board of education first received criticism from Turner’s group and other conservatives in November 2004, when the board voted 6-0 in favor of the new health curriculum that addresses homosexuality and includes a video demonstration on how to use condoms.

The new curriculum came about after recommendations from the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Family Life & Human Development to recognize “the concept of sexual orientation as an essential human quality.”

While students in classes that implement the new curriculum must receive written permission from their parents to participate in the sex education program, opponents said they still feel uneasy about the changes.

More changes likely
Nancy Navarro, who serves on Montgomery County’s school board as a member of the Board of Education’s Strategic Planning Committee, Research & Evaluation Committee and Communications & Public Engagement Committee, said edits to the pilot curriculum are to be expected.

“Given the fact that the curriculum is still in a pilot format, there could be some edits that could come through,” she said. “The process of editing [the curriculum] is not completed being that it is being tested.”

The curriculum is currently being tested at three Maryland middle schools: Martin Luther King Middle School, in Germantown; Tilden Middle School, in Rockville; and White Oak Middle School, in Silver Spring. The board will evaluate the curriculum in June.

Navarro added that the board was recently given a brief update on the status of the pilot curriculum that will be voted on in the summer. She said so far, reviews have been good.

“We’ve received a large number of positive feedback from the community and parents of the schools who have been selected to test the new curriculum,” she said. “In terms of content, we have had overwhelmingly positive responses as well,” she added.

But members of the Citizens for Responsible Curriculum claim the new curriculum violates the value systems of some families.

“Teaching respect for persons with same-sex attraction is appropriate and right,” reads the group’s Web site, “but the new curriculum goes beyond the ethic of tolerance by demanding affirmation of a homosexual orientation and behavior, and in fact violates the value systems of many families. Therefore, [we] recommend that it be rejected in favor of the current eighth grade and current high school curriculum.”

“One of the things the new curriculum is proposing to do is to encourage children as early as 13 to self-identify their sexual preference in school,” Steve Fisher, a spokesperson for the group, told the Cybercast News Service last month. “The new curriculum is essentially saying that same-sex experimentation and play among adolescence is normal and should not be discouraged.”

Yusef Najafi can be reached at ynajafi@washblade.com.