Photo Credit: Reardon Sullivan
It isn’t going away. The grassroots energy. The passion for basic civil liberties and religious freedom, for pluralism. The grassroots movement for basic parental notification and yes, an “opt out” option on select MCPS curriculum. None of this organizing is going away, like the local MoCo politicians or the Montgomery Board of Education want it to.
And MCPS, if it had engendered more community trust during 2020-21 with the decisions made about school closures, mandatory masking, vaccines, COVID ‘relief’ funding and more — probably could have fostered more community trust in what it has been proposing. But, alas, here we are.
Photo Credit: Reardon Sullivan
And simply issuing statements like this again will not help find a constructive solution that works for everyone in MoCo. Such a statement seems to fly in the face of an “inclusive” public school operating model:
“Students and families may not choose to opt out of engaging with any instructional materials, other than the ‘Family Life and Human Sexuality Unit of Instruction,’ which is specifically permitted by Maryland law. As such, teachers will not send home letters to inform families when inclusive books are read in the future,” said Montgomery County Public Schools in a statement.
Back in 2019, then-activist Kristin Mink tweeted the following about various organizations people should support to help immigrants and new Americans, and to fight back against what she deemed Islamophobia (screen shots below).
In 2023, just this past week, CAIR issued the following press release:
(WASHINGTON, DC – 6/26/2023) – On Tuesday, June 27, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) plans to join community partners at a news conference in Rockville, Md., to call on Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) to restore its opt-out option and parental notification policies for recently-introduced reading material and classroom discussions that some parents fear would force their children to violate their sincerely-held religious beliefs.
Something has indeed awakened in the MoCo body politic, and across the spectrum of non-profit orgs and institutions – and neither smears, intolerant rhetoric, nor rain will stop it.
More to come.
