A school board in Virginia is ignoring a majority of parents who do not want to allow boys and girls to take sex education together. We spoke with one man who is running for Fairfax County Public School Board to give power back to the parents.
“This shows the school board does not care about the parents,” Tony Sabio, who is running for a position on the Fairfax County Public School board this year, said. “They feel a disservice, they don’t feel their voices are heard.”
In a work session, the Fairfax county school board was presented with a poll showing 84% of parents are against children being taught “Family Life Education” together. It showed, out of the 2,656 respondents, parents overwhelmingly want classes separated by gender.
Currently, the students are separated by gender, but the proposal will combine the students’ instruction starting in fourth grade.
Parents wrote overwhelmingly in the open-ended comments part of the survey that they were against teaching gender ideology in schools.
However, the Fairfax County School Superintendent, Michelle Reid, responded to the data by saying, “Honestly, the majority doesn’t always dictate, right?”
“You know, what if students learned more than my generation did about other genders?” another school board member, Melanie Meren, said. “I think this is a step towards further accepting everyone and understanding people’s biology. I mean, it’s just straight-up biology.”
“You can’t discount 84%,” Tony Sabio, was not buying it. “For the school board, and also the superintendent, to say the majority does not dictate. It’s not the country we want to live in. It’s not the country Fairfax County residents want to live in.”
Another school board member, Karl Frisch, who outwardly identifies as gay, dismissed the data.
“So if I’m a Reddit lawyer in Wyoming, and I have two cell phones, a laptop and iPad, and maybe web access over my television, I could submit answers to this survey,” Frisch said. “As many times as I have access to a device, we have no guarantee that the people reside in Fairfax County.”
Sabio is looking to unseat Frisch in the Providence district and offered a solution to his opponent questioning the reliability of the data from their own survey.
“What we do is go to each district and break it down,” Sabio said. “We go to the schools, we go to the parents, we go to the PTA meetings, we bring everyone in. We take the surveys to them. We say, ‘Would you please take the survey.’ If there is a question about the data being skewed. There’s easy ways to fix that.”
“They could do that, but they refused,” Sabio said. “Because they’re afraid to see what actually comes back. Which is going to be the same result. 84% of the parents are going to say, ‘Tell them we do not want this.’”
During the meeting, one school board member, Abrar Omeish, called out the others for not following the data showing when the survey is broken down by teachers, the number actually rises to an overwhelming 88% who do not want to combine genders in Family Life Education for 4th through 8th graders.
“Why are we doing this if that’s the data we have?” Omeish questioned the board. She recited the data again, saying teachers, parents, and students are opposed. “So, can someone help me understand, what is the push? Where’s it coming from?”
The survey included responses from 48 students. The majority of students surveyed from elementary, middle, and high school were against combining. They expressed concerns about being awkward, embarrassed, and feeling uncomfortable in a mixed-gender class.
Despite pushback from a majority of students, Frisch ended his statements saying the genders need to be combined, in order to accommodate the transgender students in the county.
“I think it’s important to remember that those students exist, that they are real.” Frisch said. “That trans boys are boys, and trans girls are girls, and they deserve the same services from FCPS as anybody else.”
Sabio, who is also a veteran, feels these responses from the school board are directly attacking the values of parents, not just in Fairfax County but across the country.
“They don’t want to face the fact that they have their agenda and it does not go with human traditions, family traditions, and faith traditions,” Sabio said.
The board decided to vote on the changes at a later date. Part of the final recommendations also included adding teaching “gender identity” in elementary school — which would be to kids as young as four — despite overwhelming parental opposition.
