Indoctrination in Your State & District

HCPSS Pride receives $30k for "Social and Emotional Learning Support"

Howard County Public Schools, Maryland

Submitted: 2022-06-03

Story:

"While Pride month is wonderful, we want to make sure the advocacy continues throughout the year"

HCPSS Pride was awarded $30k in June 2022 for district-wide support for "Social Emotional Learning" including Rainbow Representatives and SAGA/GSA sponsors

"What is a GSA? A Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA), Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) or Sexuality and Gender Acceptance (SAGA) is a student-run club, typically in a high school or middle school, which provides a safe place for students to meet, support each other, talk about issues related to sexual orientation, and work to end homophobia and transphobia."

Are these the clubs that meet during school hours with no parental notification or permission required? Very possibly. Teachers actively recruit students to these clubs and support students in lying to their parents--using one name and set of pronouns at school and a different set at home. Teachers or students may change the name of the club to hide its content.

Rainbow Representatives are school-based adults who students are told to talk to privately about gender identity and sexual orientation. These representatives promise to be affirming and supportive and to keep all conversations secret, including hiding student information from parents. Regardless of the character of the representatives, normalizing secret conversations with adults about sex starting in kindergarten is a dangerous precedent which sets kids up as targets for predators.

Social Emotional Learning is a required part of school--students do not have the choice to opt out, parents are not given a chance to preview course materials. During one social emotional learning lesson, the students were told statistics about the percent of LGBTQ+ students in the school and in a very pressured way asked if they think that is the real number or if there are more. Note also that it is against federal law for schools to ask students to identify their gender or sexual orientation, so where did the school get the information?

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