Well, there's this:
Pride symbols and “safe space” stickers once decorated many classrooms and doors in Pennridge High School. Now, they’re gone.
“It’s like being queer was erased from Pennridge,” said Silas Nathan, a transgender and pansexual junior at the school in Upper Bucks County, in a recent interview.
At the start of the school year, the district adopted a new policy that prohibits staff from engaging in “advocacy activities” on school grounds. It bans teachers from displaying materials and “advocating” to students about “religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, social, political and geo-political matters” when not “applicable to the curriculum.”
“Everything feels way less safe,” Nathan said. “They’re trying to hide us in a way… they don’t want any LGBTQ representation anywhere.”
Yea, read the whole thing.
And then there's this:
A new Pennridge School District policy limiting student access to books and educational resources related to gender identity has ignited a battle over civil rights and safety in the Bucks County community.
The conflict came into public view this week when District leaders removed at least one book about LGBTQ identities, “Heather Has Two Mommies,” from all district elementary school libraries and sent an email notifying school officials that all books about gender identity should be removed from the shelves.
A few paragraphs later there's this:
Dr. Cheri Derr, director of pupil services for Pennridge, also sent new guidelines for school guidance counselors, social workers, and nurses on Dec. 15.
The new instructions discuss policies relating to LGBTQ issues, student pregnancies, and mental health, including directions for elementary school faculty to not “discuss or use terms related to LGBTQ.”
And then finally there's this. After noting that the book bans were tied to recent updates in school board policy, WHYY points out:
Recent updates to the policy were reviewed by a conservative Christian law firm, Independence Law Center, as first reported by the Bucks County Courier Times. The Independence Law Center is the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which is a statewide branch of the national organization Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group designated as an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And a few paragraphs later there's this:
Rich Ting, an attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania said that, based on the policy, Superintendent Abe Lucabaugh “has unilateral power to just remove a book,” and the regulations were designed to allow the board majority “to control whatever content they want to get out.”
Followed a few paragraphs later by this:
The ACLU’s Ting said the list of challenged books “just confirms that the purpose of the policy was to target LGBTQ content.”
So there may well be some very good reasons why Bucks County needs a "safe space" for it's LGBTQ+ youth.
Ya think?
