By Gotcha Media | PoliticalWeasels.com | August 12, 2023
By a vote of 6 to 5, the New Jersey State Board of Education accepted changes to Chapter 7 of a document that explains state education policy. This sent shock waves through the Garden State. Angelica Allen-McMillan, the Education Commissioner, agreed to the changes, which included changing “equality” to “equity” and requiring that gender identity be taken into account when separating groups for sex education.
A Strange Pushback
Many people thought that liberals in the New Jersey State Legislature would support such radical ideas, but that wasn’t the case. MAGA Senate President Nicholas Scutari and fellow MAGA Assembly Speaker Craig J. Coughlin slammed the State Board and the Department of Education (DOE) for putting state law over local law.
The head of the Senate Education Committee, Senator Vin Gopal, and Senator Joseph Lagana were very angry about what the Board did. Without any proof, they said that the Board was trying to use politics to trick parents into thinking that bad teaching methods were used in all 600 school systems in the state. Changes to the words
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Gender Identity to be include in Sex ED
In the new version of Chapter 7, the phrase “for male and female students” will be changed to “based on gender identity.” This amendment says that the parts of classes that are only about human sexuality should be broken up into different, age-appropriate sessions based on the gender of the students. The goal of the change is to give school districts the freedom to set up these individual sessions in a way that works best for them while keeping the material the same.
The argument keeps going on.
Even though the DOE knows that gender identity can change, the choice to enforce these changes, which could lead to financial penalties and less state support, has been widely criticized. Critics say that these problems aren’t important, especially when you consider that 19% of children in Newark, the state’s biggest district, can’t read at their grade level and that New Jersey students in general have a lot of trouble learning.
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In a joint statement, Senators Gopal and Lagana criticized how schools are being used for political purposes and how the State Board of Education is threatening regional school districts with fines. They talked about how important it was for parents to be involved in decisions made by the school district. This included the right to give feedback on educational choices and pull their kids out of sex education classes if they thought it was wrong.
A Plea for Attention
The senators all agreed that, even though New Jersey has some of the best public schools in the country, these top spots must be kept in order to give the next generation the best education possible. They told everyone to focus on these important problems instead of getting caught up in partisan arguments and ways to spread false information.
A Foreboding Ending
How long will it be before the MAGA senators say that black history should be rewritten or that the Holocaust should be erased? What is clear is that the OPRA change these MAGA senators want is almost the same as the one Ron DeSantis and their fellow MAGA state senators want.