At the Tuesday, Dec. 17, school board meeting, Murrieta Valley Unified leaders were surprised with an “award” for their sex education program.
Members of the Murrieta-Temecula Republican Assembly presented the board with a Goldbrick Award — an actual brick, painted gold — for what the group calls the school board’s “shirking of duties and responsibilities” by failing to respond to complaints about district curriculum.
Though none of its members have students in Murrieta Valley schools, Assembly President Bob Kowell said Friday, Dec. 20, that he “knows,” from second- and third-hand reports, that the district is teaching inappropriately advanced material to young students.
“We have people in the community who are being taught sex ed that would be appropriate for college, not for kindergarten,” Kowell said. “Second hand, I’ve heard about teachers teaching to kindergartners that they have five or six homosexuals in their class. How do they (teachers) know this, unless they’ve been promoting this?”
Board member Kris Thomasian referred an inquiry to district spokeswoman Monica Gutierrez. District administrators said they aren’t hearing complaints from families and few have opted their students out of the lessons.
Kowell, and Murrieta pastor Tim Thompson, would like to take a page from the sanctuary cities movement that saw California cities not cooperate with federal immigration officials and see the school district not go along with 2015’s Assembly Bill 329, the California Healthy Youth Act. The law requires districts to teach sexual health education and HIV prevention education at least once in middle school and once in high school.
“We have the lawyers to fight this thing,” Kowell said.
But the Murrieta Valley Unified School District board didn’t bite when presented with the idea Nov. 14.
“They did not even bring it to a vote last time,” Kowell said. “Nobody brought it to a first, nobody brought it to a second. They’re just cowards.”
School officials said the district complies with the law, teaching the material to secondary students. The district’s website spells out what that means:
- Information about HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including transmission, FDA-approved methods to prevent HIV and STIs, and treatment.
- Information that abstinence is the only certain way to prevent unintended pregnancy, HIV and other STIs, and information about value of delaying sexual activity.
- Discussion about social views of HIV and AIDS.
- Information on getting resources for sexual and reproductive health care.
- Information about pregnancy, including FDA-approved prevention methods, pregnancy outcomes, prenatal care and the newborn safe surrender law.
- Information about sexual orientation and gender, including the harm of negative stereotypes.
- Information about healthy relationships and avoiding unhealthy behaviors and situations.
Assembly members met with district officials in summer to discuss the material.
Gutierrez, the district spokeswoman, said that during the hour-and-a-half meeting, “there was only one of them that really looked through the binder.”
The district isn’t hearing complaints from Murrieta Valley families, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Mary Walters said.
“It’s not an issue for our parents,” Walters said. “It’s come up for the last year from members of one congregation.”
During the 2018-19 school year, more than 4,000 eighth- and ninth- grade students were taught the unit, Walters said. Only 17 students opted out of the program. Families have two chances each year to do so, according to Walters.
The district also takes appointments from parents who want to review the eighth- and ninth-grade sexual health education and HIV prevention education programs in person.
The issue is larger than AB 329, according to Thompson, who operates the OurWatchNow.com website to organize around these issues.
“When they take gender ideology into other subjects, like story time with the kids, or language arts, history, assemblies, when they put it outside of the context of sex ed, then parents don’t have the right for parents to opt out,” Thompson said Friday.
In 2011, California passed the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act, which requires that social studies classes include the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Thompson also wants parents to have the ability to not vaccinate their public school students, which the state has increasingly cracked down on in recent years, and said that a state law that allows students to receive off-site medical treatment means that they can get abortions without parental consent.
“We’re asking them to not enforce state laws like that, because we as parents would like to be brought into the loop,” Thompson said. “I get it, it’s law. They have to teach it. But that’s why we want the district to be a sanctuary district.”
Where the gold brick is now, Walters isn’t sure.
“Our board secretary took it, and to be honest, I don’t know what happened to it after that,” she said.
There will be more bricks for more government agencies in the future, according to the group, which plans to make the Goldbrick Award an annual tradition.
In the meantime, its members remain frustrated by the district’s insistence that it’s not teaching anything inappropriate to children and the board’s unwillingness to flout state law.
“There’s something wrong here. People are being told something, and they believe it,” Kowell said.
Editor’s note: Murrieta Valley Unified School Distirct’s 8th- and 9th-grade sex education curricula is below.
