Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

School Board’s decision perplexes some on sex ed advisory panel

CCSD Board Debate on Sex Ed

L.E. Baskow

Sara Lemma with the Sex Education Advisory Committee is also one of many parents speaking out during a debate on sex ed with the CCSD Board of Trustees at the Las Vegas Academy on Tuesday, September 29, 2015.

Almost everybody got something they wanted in last week’s Clark County School Board meeting on sex education.

Supporters of updating the district’s sex ed curriculum got trustees to consider including information about gay students and gender identity in the district’s middle and high school curriculum. Opponents got them to eliminate a proposal to expand elementary sex ed.

But members of the state-mandated committee overseeing the district’s sex ed curriculum just got confused.

In an unexpected move, the School Board of Trustees voted to give itself the ability to review the proposed changes to sex ed standards before the district’s own Sex Ed Advisory Committee, whose nine members should technically be the first to do so.

The decision perplexed some SEAC members.

“I don’t understand what our role is,” said the Rev. Kathryn Obenour immediately after the vote. Obenour, a pastor, is an SEAC member who occupies the spot on the committee reserved for religious leaders.

The SEAC’s existence is rooted in state law, which requires each school district to offer sex ed and appoint a board to review what’s being taught and make recommendations about any changes.

“Our only job is to review the curriculum submitted by someone else, and now we aren’t even allowed to do that?” said Sara Lemma, one of the five parents who sit on the board and a staunch advocate of updating the county’s sex ed policies and curriculum.

Typically, sex ed classroom materials are first submitted by district staff to the SEAC, which reviews the materials in depth and advises the school board how it should proceed. With the board’s decision last week, district staff will have to submit the proposal for adding topics like homosexuality and gender identity first to the school board. The school board members will review it and pass it on to the SEAC, which will review it again and then pass it back to the board for a final decision.

“If by definition we’re an advisory committee and the board is going to make a decision and send it to us ... What are we going to be advising on?” Obenour said.

Erin Cranor, who voted to consider changes for middle and high school sex ed but not for elementary, said it was an extra step to make sure community members knew what was going on.

“There’s not at all a community consensus about whether those topics should even be (taught),” she said. “We’re making sure the community has clarity before we make the decision.”

The process technically only applies to the controversial changes currently being discussed, but it’s still a fairly serious tweaking of the SEAC’s mission.

And that mission has been strained lately as a group of mostly rural parents have stepped up to oppose the kind of medically accurate, comprehensive sex ed adopted in other states. Those same parents have set their sights on the SEAC itself.

At the meeting last week, a number of parents organized by a group called Power2Parent decried SEAC as an unelected board that doesn’t represent the interests of parents. SEAC already is mandated by law to have five parents on the board, which is four more than any other group represented, including medical professionals, teachers and students. That didn’t stop the parents from demanding that they be able to elect the members.

“The SEAC already represents the community,” Lemma said. “While I understand the desire for parental input, it’s not required by law.”

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