Montgomery County schools have fought parents who oppose the ‘inclusive’ curricula, only to now agree that some books are in fact unsuitable for young kids.
When parents in Montgomery County, Md., banded together in 2022 to protest the classroom use of LGBTQ storybooks that discussed gender and sexuality, they had a simple request: Allow families the chance to opt out of lessons that include those books. Parents didn’t ask for books to be banned, nor did they demand that teachers in the district stop using them altogether. Parents simply wanted to be able to opt their children out of lessons that discussed mature topics, an option the state of Maryland already requires districts to provide for sex ed.
Montgomery County Public Schools refused. The district’s LGBTQ curriculum, which falls under its English language arts curricula, teaches students in pre-K through eighth grade about topics such as pride parades, gender transition, and pronoun preference. MCPS lawyers said last year that allowing students to opt out of these lessons would curb the district’s effort to create “representative” classrooms. Gender and sexuality instruction is “critical for educating children in a diverse society,” the lawyers said, and the lessons don’t “work” unless all children are required to participate.
Pride Puppy!, a children’s book about “the vibrant community” that celebrates Pride parades, and My Rainbow, a book in which a mother creates a rainbow wig for her young, autistic, transgender daughter, were two controversial books taught in MCPS’s curriculum. In a change that was reported just last week, the district decided in February to stop teaching them. Although MCPS lawyers have defended the books in court before, the district pulled them from classrooms after an evaluation of the books deemed the works unsuitable for the classroom, the Washington Post reported:
The Washington Post learned the books were pulled from classroom use after asking local school board candidates if they think parents should be able to opt out of storybooks that could introduce discussions about gender identity and sexuality. [A candidate] mentioned in her response that the school system has a process for reviewing its books that resulted in “Pride Puppy” no longer being used in classrooms. . . . “My Rainbow” was also disapproved for classroom use.
Schools spokeswoman Liliana López also confirmed the books are not being used for instruction but the district did not provide a copy of its evaluation of the books.
Administrators objected to some of the books’ vocabulary — what vocabulary, exactly, is unknown, but school officials said of My Rainbow that it “could require teachers to explicitly teach vocabulary terms outside the context of the lesson.” Parents have said for years now that MCPS’s catalog of 20 “inclusive” books contain age-inappropriate vocabulary, such as “intersex” and “non-binary.” One book even says that doctors only “guess” when determining a newborn’s sex.
Children will one day become aware of these topics. Parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere just think it best if they’re the ones to introduce their children to such sensitive, complicated, mature topics. MCPS has spent almost $1 million in legal fees against parents who oppose the “inclusive” curricula — only to now agree that some of the books are, in fact, unsuitable materials for pre-K through eighth-grade classroom discussion.