Maryland lawmakers are deciding whether to codify inclusive health curriculum guidelines into law through a new bill.
The state department of education established the health education framework in June 2021, to ensure that all students receive formal school instruction on key topics including gender identity and sexual orientation.
But in June 2022, Carroll County’s school board voted to remove sexuality and gender content from the district health curriculum. This year’s proposed bill, which passed the House of Delegates at the end of February, aims to give state leaders more power to enforce that required content.
“This is just an effort to codify and make sure people do what's been going on for years,” said Mark Eckstein, the Maryland Advocacy Chair for PFLAG, a national organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ education and support.
But he says the bill has sparked “tons and tons of noise,” especially from parents who don’t want their children learning about LGBTQ+ topics in school.
“It's the framework that people have the problem with, it's the content,” Eckstein said. “When you talk about gender identity in first grade, it starts going all over social media…Gender identity in first grade is ‘We can all wear pink,’ it's not definitions of transgender surgeries. So there's just tons of misinformation.”
Advocates for the bill say inclusive health education keeps youth from falling victim to misinformation online. William O’Donnell, a senior student in Talbot County and the vice chair of the Maryland Youth Advisory Board, testified on his experience at a Feb. 7 bill hearing.
“As a gay student from rural Maryland, is my life too political to be talked about? Am I not fit to be taught about healthy relationships in the same way that my heterosexual classmates are?” he said. “Nothing that I have been taught in my health classes from kindergarten to now as a senior in high school has resonated with my experience.”
O’Donnell said he only felt safe to explore health-related information about his identity online, which made him “increasingly fearful that nobody would accept me for who I actually was,” he said.
Wendy Novak, mother of a transgender teenage student in Carroll County, told WYPR that her son has faced years of harassment and threats from peers — and teachers who are hesitant to know if they can intervene.
“My child missed I think 30 days of school last year out of concerns for safety. It's been awful,” Novak said. “[Passing the bill] will give our teachers a little bit of freedom to be supportive and at least acknowledge that these kids exist, because I don't think they can right now.”
But some parents say their local school boards should have the final say.
“Just like I feel I'm an expert on my children, I feel my local [board of education] is more in touch with their local community students’ needs and desires than the state [board of education] and/or legislator,” said Melissa Idleman, mother of three children in Anne Arundel County, at the February bill hearing.
Eckstein, who has been a main advocate for the bill, said local school districts still have control of their curriculum design.
“There is no curriculum from the state, it's just guidelines,” he said. “A place like Montgomery County will lean into inclusion, and a place like Carroll County can lean out. No one has a problem with that.”
Parents still have the option to opt their child out of the family life and human sexuality unit, which is where most of the queer content will likely be, Eckstein said. But some districts might include examples of queer relationships or references to queer-focused statistics in other units — and parents can’t opt their children out of that.
“This just speaks to the ongoing problem with curriculum fights all around the world,” he said. “It's impossible, you can’t opt-out of LGBTQ in public education, because it comes up every day, everywhere.”
Lisah Tontala, treasurer for Carroll County’s local PFLAG chapter, said the opt-out is a compromise for the sake of progress.
“In an ideal world, they pass without any opt-outs whatsoever,” she said. “But although I want everything, I'm willing to take a little less at a time, like what we've gotten now, simply because if you try to grab the whole thing at once, it's gonna have a harder time passing.”
The bill is currently in the hands of the senate education committee, with no co-sponsor on the senate side.
