SNOW HILL – Local officials voiced vehement objections to a state bill that would establish a comprehensive health education framework for schools.
The Worcester County Commissioners this week voted 6-0 to send a letter of opposition to local delegates as well as state and federal officials regarding HB 119. Commissioners said the bill, which calls for a comprehensive health education curriculum, would hoist issues like gender identification and human sexuality onto students too early.
“This is abhorrent to all of us who live in Worcester County I believe,” Commissioner Chip Bertino said. “It is yet another step forward in the state trying to take away the rights of parents.”
According to the Maryland General Assembly website, HB 119, sponsored by Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary of Howard County, would require the Maryland State Department of Education, in collaboration with the Maryland Department of Health, to develop a comprehensive health education framework and require county school boards to create age appropriate curriculum consistent with that framework.
Commissioner Jim Bunting told the commissioners this week that he’d reviewed the Maryland Comprehensive Health Framework Plan that was proposed by HB 119 and had major concerns with it. He said that while support of things like mental health and nutrition was vital, he felt children’s needs in those areas were already being addressed.
“We’re doing the best we can with that,” he said.
According to Bunting, the majority of the bill addresses far more than that. he said the framework included talk of gender identification as early as Pre-kindergarten. He said he found other parts of the framework, including the fact that it calls for seventh graders to be able to identify “solo, vaginal, anal and oral sex,” to be disgusting.
“Education should not be involved in this type of smut,” he said. “I just think this is wrong. . If I was a young person and I had children that were pre-k through seven eighth grade I would work three jobs just to pull them out of the county school system if this becomes a mandate for county schools.”
Commissioner Ted Elder praised Bunting for bringing the issue up.
“I just can’t express how horrible it is to expose our children to this kind of, as Commissioner Bunting said, smut,” Elder said. “When we went to school, you didn’t hear anything like that unless you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.”
Commissioner Caryn Abbott said reading through the bill, people might think parents could opt out of this type of instruction.
“They make it sound like parents can opt out,” she said. “But they can only opt out of certain sections of it.”
She said the language should be changed so that parents could “opt in” if they wanted their children instructed regarding what was proposed.
Bertino echoed his fellow commissioners’ concern.
“It is, I believe, victimizing the innocence of our children,” he said.
He said parents should have the opportunity to parent as they saw fit.
“I suspect as more of these types of things move forward that there is going to be a growing concern among the taxpayers of this county as to whether or not their tax dollars should be used to fund an education system that allows those sorts of things in the classrooms with our kids,” Bertino said.
