There were two motivations for the coercive LGBT curriculum. One was inclusion, the other administrative burden. MCPS’s claim about administrative burden was reported in several news outlets, and unfortunately I can’t find a source document from MCPS itself. Fortunately, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor mentioned it in her dissent.
…requiring schools to provide advance notice and the opportunity to opt out of every book, presentation, or field trip where students might encounter materials that conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools.
For some reason, nobody on our Board of Education or County Council ever brought up the administrative burden. It was always about “inclusion” and “diversity.” Watch Kristin Mink’s memorable exhortation during that fateful BoE session.
Not a mention of administrative burden.
All of the statements I read from our County Council members decry what they perceive as a loss of inclusion: none of them mentioned the additional administrative and financial burdens the school system now faces.
Justice Sotomayor’s remark about an “impossible administrative burden” is the perfect example of Big Justice in confederation with Big Education. Ms. Sotomayor apparently believes that if a school district cannot accommodate a bureaucratic chore, then the students take the rear seat in favor the bureaucracy. There are two things wrong with this position. First, MCPS often reminds us that it is Maryland’s largest school district. It has more layers of bureaucracy than any other public school system in the state. If it can accommodate those bureaucrats and their salaries and their pensions and their manifold perquisites, then surely it must be able to handle a few thousand opt-out requests every semester. Second, if MCPS really cannot accommodate the opt-out requests, then MCPS needs to adjust, not the students. Adjustments include opt-in, charter schools, and school vouchers. None of these are very hard to implement. Schooling is about the students, not about the bureaucracy that runs it. (Although that standard was abandoned as far back as the 1960s in favor of teachers’ unions.)
Forced LGBT studies was never about administrative burden, and it was never about the LGBT students. As we’ve concluded many times, the entire sham was about ever more control, coercion, and the progressive orthodoxy.
