School board members were both intellectually feeble and nefarious this week during a supposed “work session” they conducted on Tuesday afternoon.
Work sessions are typically used for staff to raise and discuss the background on sometimes complex issues, so that the board will be more prepared to discuss the issues when they are on the agenda of the official, monthly meetings of the school board.
To some extent, we’ve long regarded these sessions, particularly among school board members, as “practice sessions,” aimed at shoring up their background before actually having to make a decision or discuss the matter publicly.
Instead, this week, school board members took advantage of being out of the public’s eye to ratify a new policy that bureaucrats from the federal Department of Education are trying to ram down the throats of all school systems nationally.
The feds want to re-write the historic interpretation of anti-discrimination policy, which for 60 years has been understood to mean boys and girls, men and women, were to be treated fairly and equally.
But now the liberal educrats within the Department of Education are trying to expand the anti-discrimination to include “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”
“Every student deserves educational opportunity free from discrimination,” the preface to the new regulations say, a sentiment that has been federal law for six decades.
It’s the subsequent attempt to revise the definition of what constitutes “discrimination” where the bureaucrats truly ran amok.
While these concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity might be the bread and butter for Democratic Party socialists and the bureaucrats who align with them, these radical revisions are hardly widely-shared among most people.
In fact, these revisions are under challenge in multiple federal courts.
The first sign of a sneaky approach in ABSS was the very idea that this topic would be broached during a “work session.”
There had been no previous discussion – not a sentence, not a word – that the board might be asked to consider such a radical revision.
No public hearing was announced or held.
The public wasn’t even notified such an item might be considered until the agenda was published a few days beforehand – while most residents were preoccupied with tropical storm Debby.
The school board considered and took action when they were out of the limelight of public view. Few, if any, residents typically attend work sessions, and when no public comments are allowed anyhow.
And rather than have an initial discussion, with final ratification at a subsequent, more formal meeting – the normal route that these policy changes take – the school board hurriedly approved them at the urging of its attorney, Adam Mitchell.
Oh, you might be in danger if you don’t ratify these right away, Mitchell intoned by phone.
You might lose federal funding if someone sued and you haven’t adopted this policy.
That’s precisely the kind of threat Washington’s bureaucrats had in mind from the outset.
And like the good lemmings they are, the ABSS herd agreed, 6-1 – minus the support of Ryan Bowden.
Because the federal government would require compliance with the new regulations (a new 700 pages worth) as a condition of federal funding, the changes could force schools and school systems to follow policies that might conflict with their own policies, or, state law – or dare we point out, common sense.
North Carolina has a Parents’ Bill of Rights, for instance, that stipulates that parents are entitled know if their child requests to change his or her name or preferred pronoun at school. (That would apparently conflict with the new “anti-discrimination” pablum from the federal bureaucrats.)
Board members apparently don’t care about state law, only about federal regulations – even ones already under constitutional challenge – and, of course, federal funding.
We commend Bowden for showing at least a modicum of some backbone or restraint – sadly and woefully lacking altogether in his fellow six board members – and at least wanting to dig a little deeper and ask some questions.
Nope. No skepticism allowed. No questioning the directives from Washington. We’ve got to get this adopted right away, the rest of the board concluded.
Instead, the board rushed through approval – and even bent its own rules to avoid a second vote (in an open, televised board meeting).
Frankly, ABSS board members acted even worse than the lemmings who will rush over a cliff following each other because “everyone’s doing it.”
Is it any wonder that the county’s school system continues to be in such a mess.
Worse yet, the underlying effect of some of these radical Washington-mandated changes – for instance, compelled speech for any school employee who might try to refer to a student by his or her actual pronoun rather than a “preferred” one – should terrify anyone with even a minimal knowledge of history.
These changes adopted by ABSS with no public debate whatsoever leave us wondering, again, where is the leadership on the board, or any ounce of common-sense reasoning.
