001next item please special reports athletic athletics mr abe mashur isaac okay good evening trustees dr wahl uh jeff deljudis elect director of fortson high school jeff conway authority director at dearborn high and mr chuck silver athletic director ethel ford and scott hummel he's the middle school athletic director and oversees a lot of athletic athletic stuff when it comes to middle school and high school okay so basically you just want to kind of talk well let me just start here i guess we just want to talk a little bit about our sports programs middle school and high school first of all we have uh all of our middle schools all seven of our middle schools we have uh sports for boys and girls we have actually i think one more for girls because we have competitive
002cheer and sideline cheer we just started boys and girls soccer last spring boys and girls soccer was absolutely terrific for our kids we had great participation at all the schools and of all the sports i would say that's the one sport that we had the most competitive balance in in middle school soccer we also just so everyone knows started three soccer clinics throughout the throughout the city and we're going to expand on it this year for our elementary students as well uh that's a partnership with uh pal and you've been anyone else or just pal just pat okay so that's some of the things we're doing in middle school uh one of the things that we tried to do pre-pandemic was middle school wrestling we tried to have a tournament obviously the pandemic cut that
003we had everything set up but that was in 2020 so we obviously uh cancelled that something we're going to look to do again this year hopefully now that you know covered numbers and so on are a little bit more and balanced although we've had a little spike lately but anyhow we're going to try to do something with middle school wrestling they're just here for support i guess they don't want they don't want to speak at all middle school combined you see the numbers that we have we have pretty good participation really in all of our sports some schools some sports are a little bit lighter as far as total number of uh of people participating but overall like i said soccer was was great uh boys and girls basketball uh for for both uh jv
004and varsity seventh eighth grade well actually sixth seventh is the jv and then the varsity would be eighth grade we get great participation some of our football numbers are down but that's also true not only in middle schools but in most high schools not only throughout the state but throughout the country the football numbers with all the uh the concussion uh you know issues and so on those numbers have been declining and you know continue to decline overall really that's why here in the state of michigan a lot of people don't know but we started even flag football league seven on seven leagues and so on as sponsored by some of our high schools i don't want to read to you all the numbers but you see we have a pretty good percentage nationwide it's
00538 percent of high school students participate in high school sports i think we're either at or above that and pretty much all three high schools based on our enrollment so um and then if you compare our numbers to livonia which is a three uh three high school city plymouth canton which is through high school city were either or more than them and since in a lot of the sports and then the other thing too is sometimes the numbers not sometimes but the numbers you see here they don't include and the the national federation of high schools they they compute it differently so if jeff for example participates because he's such a such a phenomenal athlete and football basketball and baseball they would count them as three these numbers here just count the students as one
006so sometimes our like our three sport or two sport kids are are only counted one time here um the other really one of the other reasons again that uh the high school numbers are down in sports overall throughout the country is because a lot of more specialization in sports a lot of uh athletes parents of athletes are thinking that having them participate in one sport as opposed to you know specializing their sport as opposed to two and three sports is becoming more and more common unfortunately and that's i see unfortunately because it's my opinion that they should participate in all of them but um all right so here are the middle school sports offerings that we have uh we try and do the championship games at high schools uh so uh depending on what the
007availability is that the the high school facilities on those championship days is what we do and we just try to go from edsel to dearborn to forts and and just kind of spread it out for the different sports just to try to kind of you know keep the kids put them more on a big stage and those games are usually very well attended by our middle school uh middle school students and supporters so that's been going very well for us so there's a lot to do uh for us and there's a lot we do to promote our sports programs i'm not gonna read you every bullet point but one of the most common things that we do is that open houses we'll have you know the high school coaches and it's not anything that's required
008of them but the athletic directors will put out an email say hey your open house is coming soon if you want to reserve a little area in your building to kind of come and promote your programs uh you know to the new students especially but to everybody that's you know that's one thing that they can do the other thing is high school coaches will go to the middle schools and kind of talk about their program when they're doing the orientation there for the eighth graders who are going to be incoming 9th graders that's something else these guys are a lot more savvy social media than i ever will be but they're great on social media they're constantly putting updates out there highlighting some of our athletes they get scholarships and so on highlighting our sports
009teams that are doing well and even you know putting information out there for some of our sports teams that are struggling but they get a big win they do a great job in promoting it and so on um but look at the end of the day every coach is responsible to promote their program that's you know i mean they have to take initiative and they have to kind of sell their program to the community and the better that coaches do that generally speaking the more participation they get so that's uh that you know that's a big part of it there's got to be culpability when it comes to coaches as well um again this is just a few of the other things that we did i already spoke about the soccer that we did with
010pal this past year and then the championship games for the middle schools and so on at the at the high school facilities um the other thing that we've been doing a much better part of a job of rather our coaches have been doing a much better job of this clinics and camps for for their schools for their programs so i know coach b dunatzil ford runs a free clinic for his basketball program we run a clinic at dearborn high for for our for our basketball program our football program fordson runs a very low cost clinic i know that for their basketball programs as well and they're starting to do more more for for the uh the the uh like some of the clinics all of them are are for both boys and girls but we're
011trying to get that out to some of the other sports as well they haven't been doing that uh when you look at athletic departments there's a lot of things that that go into you know having a very successful athletic department and when you look at again the national federation of high schools and so some of the things that they talk about and this is a lot of this information is from their website and from these guys going to uh different conferences and so on um when they talk about having great high school sports the first thing they talk about is upgrading facilities i don't want to get too much into that i think everyone here knows how i feel about our facilities and what we need to do but another very important piece is winning
012people want to be part of winning programs if you look at the college level for example when alabama was the national championship in football or you know well pretty much football because they don't do anything else but when they win a national championship in football the amount of enrollment or applications for enrollment in alabama skyrockets when michigan had a great football season last year the amount of people who applied to the university of michigan goes up exponentially so that's that's just the reality people want to be part of winning programs if you just look at our pro sports i remember everybody uh mason was a huge redwings fan i haven't seen her wear a running shirt in about 10 years so you know if you win people are going to come and support you and
013so on so another reason i bring that up is i used to pick on mason all the time totally she don't know the first thing about hockey but she has more red wings attire than steve eiserman but anyways um you know getting non-athletes to attend games is a big part of it but that's a struggle that's another thing like gate money gate receipts are down not only again in in our city and state but throughout the country and that's again because this uh this era of kids have so much going on there's so much for them to do um you know unfortunately they're on their phones a lot so they're entertained in other ways and and so that that having uh you know attendance at football games with 2 000 people or whatever on a
014consistent basis those that doesn't happen much anymore you'll get it at big games but overall you don't you know you don't see it from from week to week celebrating our athletes that's something we really i think have done a much better job of the last maybe i would say again take cover away last two or three years um but that's something we're going to continue to try and do better um you know some of the different things that the schools are doing if you walk in the fortune gym today and you haven't been there for five years you'll see a huge difference with the branding and the different things the things that fortune has done there dearborn high not only had it inside but this year has put their branding outside and so on to
015try to enhance the look of it and that type of thing uh mr silver has already started doing some things at edsel ford i know bob actually started bob picano former athletic director has started some things there in the hallways and so on with the branding and that type of thing and then like i said just celebrating our athletes a little bit more that's something that we're looking to do different things with as well supporting coaches all four of these gentlemen do a great job of supporting all our coaches they're always have all of our coaches always have the opportunity to go to any clinics that are out there pretty much we pay for the clinics we pay for you know some of the if it requires a hotel stay we pay for that we
016do whatever we can to try and do and do that obviously we don't want a missing instruction so usually the clinics that we'd like them to go to are in the summer time sometimes they're in the fall like i know the b cam basketball clinic is coming up here in early october but that's at oakland university and it's on a weekend it's friday saturday so or saturday sunday saturday sunday so again you know we don't want to pull people out of classrooms but at the same time we want to offer them the opportunity to get better so we're we're constantly you know sending them different things and that uh so that they can you know understand what's out there and and try to work on improving at their craft um just a few other ways
017that we you know we try to promote athletics uh our student athletes are fantastic at participating in community service projects uh you know like the backpack drive that we just uh had i know the amity foundation had a backpack drive a lot of our student athletes were there helping getting materials and backpacks and so on um zaman has got an event coming that our some of our teams will participate in the the walk walk run thing that they do every year at ford field um are they they're constantly going out during marches reading month reading to the elementary kids and the montreal kids love it you know they see these guys come in and you know they're larger than life some of them you know there's obviously there's a lot of growth between them and
018and you know i know we had uh rana who uh played basketball fortson and is playing the division two basketball and having a great career she came back and spoke to students at miller and fortune where she went to school uh dearborn high has people coming in doing the same thing as well so any way we can we try to again promote you know promote the sports with uh with our young young ones just some pictures here from uh from the pal program that we ran last year and like i said uh we you know we got a late start with it last year but we're gonna look to expand and so on from from on it this year uh and then if you have any questions they will have to answer them because i
019did everything else here so anybody have any questions i have a couple um so the first thing is that you had mentioned that the middle schooler sometimes will have their games at the high school to expose them to that are we doing the same thing for high school students in terms of the collegiate stadiums and arenas because i saw just re recently the fortson was it fortune was at michigan stadium yeah we just played in michigan but outside of the football are we doing other sports at other places i i know like last year dearborn and etzel played at the toledo mud had the stadium um we're looking at doing something for softball this year too okay um so yeah we're trying to do some of those things um wrestling at ferris state i didn't
020know about that no um we're looking at at expanding doing some different things a lot of times the athletic facilities at the college if it's coincides at the same season it's kind of hard to do that softball season it's hard to get in at u of m um but we're looking at some different venues do you ever get a chance then for vice versa for those college athletes to come here to speak to the students i know you had mentioned the one um female basketball player that was that came back my experience with it has been mainly like our our former athletes coming back to you know etzel graduates dearborn graduates fortson graduates coming back to school to their their school okay have we had anybody else from outside of that yeah uh in the
021klaa conference they have a leadership summit every three times a year uh once in the fall and winter in the spring and often they'll bring in college athletes to speak to all our whole league we'll each get to send six eight ten kids and the whole league gets together we're having one when is it tony mandrich from michigan state came in last year to talk about drugs and alcohol abuse and um with this one's uh the 26th we're having another speaker come in it's a good thing because it gets all the kids from all the schools together in our league so it promotes not only that competitive part of it but the fact that we're all in this together in a certain way so um and then the other thing is um is there any
022collaboration between um the dearborn wreck thing specifically like the fog the softball uh wreck that they have and the high schools and the middle schools is there any collaboration there or is it just are you talking about like little league right so so like at dublin i think like uh dearborn baseball is our baseball field right here's our softball field um you know we we are probably at a point now where we share some common coaches that are able to work back and forth and stuff like that we have other recreation programs as well like the tennis program use our tennis courts in the summertime we have drd use our pool so we see a lot of recreation programs coming in and out of our buildings for various reasons uh you know some have um
023you know more of a long-standing relationship and others will just maybe run out our gym for uh for a clinic or something like that so a little bit of both okay and then the last thing um you know i think this is getting more and more national attention um but what steps are we doing to make sure that title ix that we're getting equal [Music] play opportunities for our for our girls and all of these sports yeah good question so uh let me touch on a little bit on the question you asked before with regards to collaboration one of the things that we talked about when we were asked you know to do a presentation a little bit about sports and so on was having maybe like you know the dearborn baseball teams come to
024a baseball game or whatever and invite them to baseball game and just kind of say oh here we have you know the 12 year old team cincinnati reds or whatever their team name is and so on just to do some of that a little bit more with regards to title ix again we actually have more girls sports than we do boy sports uh the funding for both sports is the same at the amount of funding that we get you know for for each sport you know with certain things like football football and ice hockey both boys sports of course but they're both very expensive sports so you know like helmets uh the cost of helmets and reconditioning and so on so yes we do allocate a little bit more money when it comes to football
025football it's kind of like its own entity and so is hockey again because of the equipment although hockey a lot of the players paid for uh some of their equipment right now or no yeah yeah i thought so so um anyhow uh with regards to title nine there's there are no opera like when uh boys basketball goes to traverse city at dearborn high girls basketball also goes to traverse city for durban high for that trip um chuck talked about our baseball team going playing a game at the mudhens we're also looking for our softball team to do that but so much of this again i will tell you and i'm not throwing coaches out there in a bad way i promise you but because our coaches work very very hard but if they you know
026say hey there's this really cool event like this year actually uh jeff we did the cross-country thing those boys and girls they went to toledo and ran under the lights right wasn't it toledo or yeah st john's which is next to toledo so st john's ohio this guy's getting very specific on me like geography class here so you're a math teacher by the way um so anyway so you have so so we you know we we do anything when it comes to you know when it comes to all those things and you know we try we just as much as we promote the boy sports we promote the girls sports it's not like we're you know doing anything different there whatever the needs are like they'll call me and they'll say hey listen i don't
027really have a whole lot of money for this but i we really need whatever it may be and uh fortunately the good doctor wall here gives me enough money here for for a little latitude to kind of support some of those things so we make sure that everything is taken care of i promise you there trustee berry oh i was gonna say a lot of like abe was talking about a lot of it's coach driven to like we we try to accommodate whatever coaches want to do if we need to do some fundraising or try to figure out creative ways to to finance something um we very rarely say no to anything a lot of times we'll run it by abe he's been very supportive we'll talk to tom wall about it's very supportive but
028we try to make it work so and not to put coaches on the spot but a lot of it is coach initiated now you know whether it's the toledo mudhens game or whatever else but we try to support in any way we can just let me touch on that real quick so this this uh past fall like or summer actually like uh volleyball fall sports start really in you know in the summer time if you will so volleyball wanted to do a team building camp so you know they would take the girls or you know and go like on a little trip or whatever and so on kind of do their team building thing it was approved and you know boys football didn't ask to do that so obviously it wasn't approved so it's like
029you know like we're saying it's coach driven if coaches come to us and say hey we want to do this to try to do whatever you know we're all in we never tell you know the girls no you can't go or whatever if the trip makes sense we're all in for it trustee barry going back to toshiwat's question about the partnership between public schools and administration it's been an amazing partnership we have many many parent-run organizations programs if it's basketball football soccer swimming many many sports to get we get to you know we get to use the facilities of their own public schools and you know all three athletic directors are very welcoming there so i can speak on behalf of the dearborn youth football i already reached out to athletic director mr conway and
030we're going to set up a date at a home game where our football players are out there on the field welcoming the you know the deal on high team and i'm going to be reaching out to uh mr silver for maybe have the cheerleaders out there at the same time so it's been a great one fortune's always been very welcoming so that that works out great but the point i wanted to make and when i plan to see it here i tried doing it at henry ford college a few years ago we just you know we just put in a plug for another university and a few years ago there was a community college that was advertising in our in our district for camps uh have we ever or did we ever talk about maybe
031doing camps at any fort college and we're not talking about just basketball you know basketball or football other sports that we want to give more attention to like for example cheerleading gymnastics volleyball wrestling and it could be a city-wide event has that ever been discussed with henry ford college i know when i brought it up i know the answer you know you don't have to buy i know the answer i'm just planting that seed that why not we have these facilities instead of you know forcing doing their thing here and i know it broke all of our hearts when the gymnastics program went away and that's a ford what are we gonna do to try to you know get these sports going again especially sports like uh you know gymnastics and wrestling i know we
032tried doing something at uh at the middle school bad timing with covet but i remember one of my boys it was just that one day wrestling tournament at fortson high school all of a sudden he had a beautiful career at fortson as a restless so these are the things that we need to be doing so maybe uh mr mosher if you can reach out to somebody at henry ford college and maybe have that discussion yeah so just to piggyback a little bit off what uh trustee berry said with regards to some of the sports so if you look at the nfh nfhs and the sports that are declining in number like i said football is one that was uh declining rapidly although there was all kinds of studies about baseball and the age of baseball
033and softball spectators going up baseball softball numbers actually have been increasing very slightly at the in most high schools again throughout the country hockey is is very much down and again some of the reasons for it uh for first and foremost as let's speak about hockey is the the fact of the expense at young ages so a lot of kids are not getting into hockey at a young age or being able to uh continues to stay in hockey um and you know as they as they get older so their passion i guess for the sport or their their interest in the sport kind of dies down a little bit and that's something that we we uh obviously experienced here this year because we had a hockey team but the numbers just kept continually decreased uh
034year after year after year and then the other thing that you know you have to take into account as well is the change in demographics so uh certain demographics enjoy playing certain sports a little bit more you know and we're seeing it here in our own city with soccer soccer didn't used to be as big as it is now but it's continually getting bigger and bigger and bigger and that's you know so we just as a district need to adapt and try to do what we can to support the families that we have yeah thank you to all athletic directors you guys do an amazing job especially with uh you know the sizes of our high schools and just for the record you're going to be here all night we're trying to stall we're trying
035to avoid the next action i don't see i i had one trustee ambrosio had his hand up so just a moment and i'll get to you trusty muslim well you've answered my question because it was about unified hockey and so i'm okay with your explanation thanks jesse moses i know we had a some kind of a paid study by a parent on improving the football teams it was suggested maybe we can look at even other teams has that gone further are we looking at those feedback of improving all teams in all high schools well i think we're constantly trying to improve our teams i mean the way we go about hiring coaches and recruiting coaches i think is the way we we do that um you know unfortunately the little league is kind of dwindled
036like abe was talking about and we're not we're just not seeing as much interest you wouldn't know it by my numbers at football obviously we have 150 160 kids still out for football um but i think that's a that's an ongoing battle that we're fighting and any athletic director worth his song is going to be doing that stuff on a daily basis so i'm not sure about the study you're talking about or anything like that but i think we're constantly trying to review what we do and how to do it better just like teachers and everybody else so right you know i think that's that's a given any id that you talk to is going to say hey how can we get this better so i think we're still doing it you might have to
037answer that i think um edsel forge probably had the least success in the last few years obviously um and i think one of the things we're trying to do is make sure the kids have a positive good experience and what what we have in our schools we get a lot of kids who come out late okay we have over 90 kids in our football program right now which is the most that we've had in a while um which is a positive thing but a lot of those kids haven't played before and now they're just getting their first experience so i think one of the things in what's my job is to make sure our coaches are providing a positive experience that those kids will come back and get excited get to the weight room do
038the off-season stuff and that they come back year after year so next year or over a hundred um and will slowly become more and more competitive in our conference i mean that's the the goals um and obviously um for me personally i coached football at etso ford for 15 years so it's something that's near and dear to my heart and i want to see it be successful and obviously like at fortson you've had you know 60 years of really good football um so i mean we're we're kind of in a different different spots right now but we all have our challenges um and we're just looking to number one first and foremost just make sure the kids have a good experience let me just say about that too i don't want to single out any
039particular school but we have one of our schools in particular that has been having their coaches go watch coaches and other programs in other cities even so you know it might be difficult for a fortune coach to go watch an that's all practices you know to try to pick up from there and they might feel a little uneasy if you will about it but you know there's obviously a lot of good coaches throughout the state in various sports so we're having our coaches go in watch their teams practice and then sit down with the head coaches and assistant coaches just to get some ideas and build their knowledge base trustee wall i think i mean i'm sorry [Laughter] mr wall i think he had a question thank you for that dr wahl but i don't
040have that honorific title for doctor i have other initials but not doctor but now you're trusting but i want to thank you you guys are great advocates for the program every time i've come across the issue you guys are very very welcoming creative so i want to thank you for all your hard work and your years of experience you guys work a lot of extra hours in the evening and and you guys enjoy it so present about your families but i think you do sorry i requested this presentation a couple of months ago after we had gotten the note about the closing of the ice hockey program and we've also seen numbers dwindle in some of the other high school sports no different than when we heard the music programs talking about dwindling numbers because
041of middle school and i know that there's only so many middle school sports that we can do here in a district but that's where i think there's a lot of other community groups that we can be reaching out to to promote it one thing i heard from several of you was it's on the coaches to promote it and i don't disagree however we see turnover with the coaches and my assumption is the athletic directors or the school administration it's on their shoulders as well this isn't just about coaches we know that a good coach or a good advisor can build or or kill a program really quickly so we can't have it just be on one person's shoulder so i would encourage all of the groups ads and everyone else do what you can to
042support all these all these students thanks thank you one thing that i just want to add and i love the point that trustee berry made was about the partnership with hfc because it's obviously a good partnership and we're always looking at ways of of enhancing that so i don't know if you're familiar with rochelle taylor but she is the athletic director are you yes yes i used to call you henry ford for 25 years oh well see i'm i'm out of duluth then i'm not the biggest sports fan here the basketball coach there but uh just reach out and see where we can we can make uh connections there that would be beneficial to all of our students in both the district and the college absolutely anyone else thank you so much appreciate it thank
043you [Applause] nick stayed in please citizen participation citizens wishing to address the board on agenda and non-agenda items for action who are signed in by 7 10 pm by submitting a blue card to the board secretary may speak at this time the board may not be in a position to respond to non-agenda items non-agenda items therefore speakers should not anticipate an immediate response to their comments or questions for the benefit of all concerned do not mention the names of students or school district employees please keep your comments as brief as possible the board president reserves the right to limit times the first person who would like to speak is miss emily giordano she would like to come to speak to the board about inappropriate material in the schools okay i am going to limit us
044to three minutes per comment just because we do have quite a few comments and we're already running long so i appreciate your time okay i will make it quick my name is emily giordano i'm a mother we have six children um three have gone through the dearborn public schools three are currently in the dearborn public schools um regarding the post that you all were referencing and the videos that we've all seen not just here but in other school districts i've been involved in board meetings at the walled lake public school system i'm involved with the livonia parent group all through the communities all through not only our state but through our country the stuff that is happening within the schools is disturbing and if you aren't all appalled then you are part of the problem
045what i heard earlier it sounded a lot like passing the buck like oh well this wasn't us it was because they had access through this online system if that's the case then my concern would be if this happened as of 2020 for two years students have had access to information books that are 100 percent inappropriate not age appropriate even if they're curated for k-12 if you've seen the amount of literature coming through that is approved for k-12 i don't want any of my daughters reading that not until they're grown adults as educators as administrators as people on the board it is your duty to protect our children i did not grow up in dearborn i moved here i moved here i've always felt very safe here being that the culture is very traditional and it
046aligns with my catholic upbringing the position that my husband and i are in now if we find that there is merit to what is happening we're pulling our kids we're not going to stay in the public school sector so that's what i have to say i am concerned i understand if there is no response but that is what i came to say i appreciate you listening to me i once again apologize i'm not a public speaker i'm just a mom trying to find out what's really happening and looking out for my daughters so thanks thank you next samuel gomez will like to come to speak from dearborn would like to come to speak to the board about removing explicit book from schools libraries about being okay to be gay moving along miss rob miss robert
047i was with her but it was pretty much the same thing what i needed to say okay thank you next miss robin macklin would like to come to speak from dearborn would like to come to speak to the school board about school book selections representing her three children hi um so first of all i just wanted i didn't come to speak about this specifically but um just with respect to title ix and um sports um i think that title ix is subtle and it goes beyond just having the same number of women's and men's sports and if you did a word cloud for uh because i think trustee thorpe asked last time for uh um information about sports other than just football and basketball but if you did a word cloud of that last presentation
048it was all football i heard football like a lot of times so i i also think female representation in our administration is important um so i just encourage all of you to maybe take a a good hard look and make sure that we're we really are providing equal opportunity in terms of like experience not just the not not just the budget that we allocate but the number of coaches that we have the experience of those coaches you know and and it's not just on those coaches um to make sure that the the experience and the opportunity is the same so i'll say that first um my second thing that i wanted to talk about well really the the primary thing um is that the ideal purpose of public schools is to educate children how to
049critically think and engage with society and democracy that means that our schools are required to educate children from different backgrounds and belief systems to have a greater say over curriculum we have private schools and we have homeschooling options i think that some of the language that i've been seeing on social media and that you're probably going to hear tonight is very inflammatory misdirected and it's very strategic also it's it's very strategic and inflammatory um those books weren't physically in the library they were part of a consortium um that's that's one thing that i don't think was very clear um in a lot of the things i've seen on social media and i also just want to say that i am opposed to any parent committees and parent involvement in choosing the appropriateness of books in
050our school libraries i didn't elect anyone on this parent review committee i elected my school board representatives who in turn hire the superintendent who in turn hire educators who have been have gone to college who have learned um the appropriate way to to choose books and i just think a parent committee is punching responsibility as well so thank you thank you next miss mary lane from dearborn would like to speak to the board about libraries censorship and access congratulations on having 300 000 titles that's really amazing uh thank you also trustee petrikov for a really great quote from the u.s supreme court i totally agree with that and of course it's not only important if i agree that's a law of the land so i want to say that freedom to read is one of
051our most important american rights it comes implicitly from freedom of the press what good is a free press if no one reads no one writes or no one publishes it's our birthright as americans and free libraries are another birthright that we have it comes from it's widely credited to benjamin franklin besides our freedom to read we know that censorship is very dangerous the number of people authors who have been censored is really ridiculous the countries that censor books are totalitarian authoritarian communist regimes they censor heavily history is replete with examples of bad censorship usually it's done to protect people or for supposedly for the public good but the best public good is wide access for example mark twain shakespeare the merriam-webster webster dictionary uh grimm's fairy tales tales of the arabian nights even harry potter
052people have censored or tried to censor these no one has a right to censor for someone else except the parent for their child as public officials it's your duty to try to maintain as wide access to information as possible i applaud dearborn schools for making public books books available widely and i urge you to get that right back to our students as soon as possible i thank the dearborn city library and wayne risa also for making books available the coders for the library the city wayne risa american library association or overdrive should be able to limit for parents what access but any particular student can have two books i would urge you to rely on them to do that and implement a system where the parents who don't want their kids to read something they
053screen because you cannot screen all the number of books that come through any system the parents can censor the books they can also refuse access to their students for the libraries i wouldn't recommend that because that will not create a good citizen i urge you thank you i urge you to stay with your process because it's a good process it's done well over the years i ask you to return access to the library you have a great website great things are happening in dearborn schools thank you for returning biking and walking to school and so many other good things you do thanks thank you next miss stephanie butler would like to speak about books and she's taking crystal time so hold on before you begin do i have a blue card from crystal uh you
054should have a blue card for crystal i don't know well we weren't informed we needed to fill out one separately i also said i don't have one for stephanie okay thank you dear community members and school board my name is stephanie and i'm a mother of four children and a daughter of the dearborn community i asked to be listened to as i expressed the concerns of many parents in this diverse community i believe that pornography and rape culture have no place in our schools and to my disbelief after a year my mic's cut off i'm gonna fix the mic i don't think it's cut off we might be having some technical difficulties can you see speaking it again hello okay it's working i believe that pornography and rape culture have no place in our schools
055and to my disbelief after a year of looking into what is being made available in our school libraries i came across a book titled this is gay and another one called uh the how to guide for sex this book is a wasteland of tips on how to join adults on hookup sites and thus get raped it also has tips on how to engage in same-sex sexual acts and rather than being a book classic it belongs in trash cans and not in our beloved library staring our kids in the face upon further review i found another gem an explicit book with depictions of drinking semen from bottles and contemplation of suicide while our kids are increasingly confused about their very existence and suicide and adolescence is on the rise schools should be protecting our children not
056grooming them for a life of trauma hypersexuality and moral decay this is not an attack on people's personal choices and lifestyle but a call to action for parents to say enough of this imposed fear of speaking out especially when our children's lives are at stake i am not a crusader against books that depict diverse life ethnicities or ideas but i sure as hell am against smut being presented to our kids as appropriate reading material i believe we must meet the following objectives identify who is ordering and allowing those books into the library in our school district remove all sexually explicit detailed i don't even call these books these are manuals okay these aren't lgbt teen romance novels these are how to guides telling our kids to go on adult sex apps any one of you
057would you want your kids to go on that would you want your kids to your grandkids on on grindr honestly i mean this is a no-brainer we are not talking about regular books here as this district is trying to portray and to blatantly sit up here and lie to this community and say that these books were not found physically is a bold-faced lie to which i have multiple evidence i'll pass the mic that's a forward right here i mean go ahead we'll get into that peace be upon you all my name is kessie monsiger i'm a product of this uh school system k through eight i went to lori elementary middle school and then went to fortson high school graduated my way on to a track and field scholarship to rochester university a private christian
058college graduated two degrees psychology and biology and um i do admit i have not been coming to these meetings but i guess this was a wake-up call for me to come here and just let you know that as individuals we have to understand that people have different views different ideologies different mentalities they ascribe to but i do i do want to say that allowing our children to reach these books before they hit the age of puberty before they before they can understand what life is as stephanie said is an injustice to our students and um i am not telling you know anyone here that we have to be close-minded and only believe in our religious beliefs or our moral beliefs and we cannot go outside that box but there is a clear distinct line as
059to what uh even individuals myself at the age of 24 can and cannot read and if our students are not able to make those decisions and if the parents of our students who are giving money to keep these to keep these schools open and skip these programs running do not have a say then what kind of school system are we in lastly i must point out if people authors who do not believe in their religions they are talking about in these books if they have um if they are allowed to write about this kind of stuff and if they are allowed to talk about religion why are we not allowed to include religious books in our libraries why arena allow to let our children know that as much as school is important religion is a
060guiding factor in their life i say these words with peace and i hope you guys take my words into our accounts thank you good evening um my name is rola mackey and i just moved to dearborn a month ago um and this is actually my first school board meeting because i have a two and a half year old at home and i would like my two and a half year old to eventually grow up and be a product of the dearborn school system just as i was um but there were a few things that stood out to me today uh during this discussion and one of the things that was said today was we are here to prepare children for the future and it's incidentally today i saw on facebook a post that was way
061county school state assessment results for the math 21 22 school year dearborn schools is at 32.98 percent in advance in proficiency and other cities northville 72 percent can't in plymouth canada and 56 so i just wonder what are we gonna have to do what are we gonna work towards to prepare our kids for the future with such test scores here so um i also saw this post on facebook and it alerted me to you know to speak out against it and i don't know how this is an educational book when it i i'm so embarrassed to even say this because there's people there's there's a kid here so i i i'm just really i'm really distraught my heart is shaking just looking at these i can't imagine a minor looking at these somebody within you
062know a brain that's not fully developed and i you know hopefully i have a fully developed brain after seeing this but i just um i just want to know how this book made it into the library and how we can prevent books like this in the future from making it out there too thank you for your comments [Music] [Applause]