PA: Bucks County Classroom Chill

I've predicted this kind of thing for states that are leaning hard into book bans and teacher gag laws, but here's a perfectly good example of how this sort of thing works right here in Pennsylvania.

The process is simple. 

Step One: You put some threats in place, from fines against the school district to possible lawsuits to just the fact that you have increased the likelihood that some agitated parent will feel empowered to call and complain. 

Step Two: Watch all your most conflict-averse school administrators implement far more repression and silencing within their district than you ever dreamed of.

If you've taught for at least a decade, you know the kind of administrator I mean. Raise your hand if you've ever had some version of this conversation.

Administrator: You have got to stop doing X in your classroom. Parents are all upset and I'm getting all kinds of phone calls.

Teacher: How many phone calls?

Administrator: Well, one. But she sounded really angry.

Teacher: So, how many parents?

Administrator: Look, just stop doing X. That's our new policy.

Sometimes, there isn't even this much discussion. The administrator supervising the junior high at my old district simply pulled two novels from the curriculum without so much as talking to the department chair. 

In Pennsylvania, Pennridge School District (Bucks County) has sent out a memo from the assistant superintendent for elementary education stating, in part,

The district is requesting that library books with content regarding gender identity be removed from the current elementary student circulation.

The books will be reviewed for, among other things, "sensitive topics involving foul language, intense violence, gender identity, and graphic sexual content." If the book is slapped with a scarlet C, then it goes in a special library gulag from which students can only get the books with parental permission. If you are a young person with questions, you can't be allowed to look for answers on your own (well, unless, of course, you have encountered the internet).

One of the first books to be pulled under this policy is Heather Has Two Mommies, which includes no violence, graphic sex, or foul language.

That parental control runs through several district policies. No using a preferred name or pronoun without parental permission. And if a student doesn't tell her parents that she's pregnant, then the school will (no clear word on whether the male who helped create the pregnancy will be likewise turned in to his folks). 

I have sympathy with parents who want to be in the loop of their children's lives, but coverage of these policies turns up an example of a story that every single teacher could have predicted, involving student James Peuplie:

In 8th grade, Peuplie asked his teacher to use his proper name and pronouns. The school then asked his mother and father to come in to discuss his gender identity. His father had not previously known Peuplie was transgender.

“A couple of nights later my dad ended up kicking me out,” said Peuplie. “So we had a really big falling out with a really big argument.”

Peuplie and his father then had an argument where the police were involved. He ended up being taken to the hospital and diagnosed with situational depression.

Every teacher knows a story like this one about an LGBTQ student whose home turned out to be an unsafe place for them to be. This is exactly the spot where parental rights and student rights collide, and it is a mistake to declare that parental rights must always take precedence. Parental rights folks often say that the child does not belong to the school, which is absolutely true, because the child does not belong to anybody--including their parents.

Pennridge has its own little Liberty group that has been busy pursuing goals of abolishing critical race theory, promoting patriotism, and standing up for parental rights. They made enough noise to get the district to fold up its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative, as well as getting some Black authors pulled from the curriculum. That became a winning campaign brag to fuel a GOP sweep of the last board election (theme "Parents over Politicians")

The district is 30 miles north of Philadelphia, with an 85% white student body. In 2018, 225 high school students participated in the national student walkout in response to the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School murders; the students were given detention. The school board vice-president, a Trump supporter, called them "Marxist truant[s]." That same member, Joan Cullen, was in DC on January 6.

Bucks County is also home to Woke Bucks County, now expanded to Woke PA, whose website (complete with eagle head and stars and stripe shield) declares their work "to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, and state policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom--" Their website offers yet another chance to turn in anonymous tips about awful things that somebody is doing. You can turn those anonymous tips in here. Right here. Any tips at all. 

So the district is getting plenty of noisy pressure from one set of parents, and now other parents are also speaking up against the district's anti-LGBTQ message, and the region is politically hot. But that kind of political heat in a community translates into a deep, frosty chill in classrooms where everything remotely approaching an uncomfortable topic is ignored, erased, and silenced--even if that happens to involve the lives of actual students.