May 7, 2021 Board of Education Meeting

001okay it's friday may 7. 2021 and it is 908 a.m live web streaming will be available through the state board of education website www.education.ne.gov state board good morning and welcome to the state board of education meeting as commissioners stated a little bit ago for many of you this is your first state board of education meeting and i just want to add that i'm so proud to have it hosted here because this is my district and it is the commissioner's district because i'm his board representative so we're really excited to be here and thank you we appreciate this board members please engage your microphones before speaking and turn off when you are done speaking and please turn off or mute your cell phones if you haven't already and i ask that of the audience as well

002so there are no distractions agenda item one call to order the state board meeting will now come to order patricia tim contacted me in advance to let me know she would be absent from today's meeting agenda item 1.1 andrea please call the roll patty google's present jacqueline morrison present debra neary here patsy cojones here lisa fricke here maureen nichols here robin stevens here patricia tim commissioner bloomstedt present seven president one absentee please rise of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all microphone marine thank you agenda item 1.3 information regarding the open meeting act is posted as you enter the room from the main hallway doors the open meetings act is also posted on the state board of education's

003website www.education.ne.gov state board agenda item 1.4 provide 19 meeting protocol ryan four i think i'll cover that for ryan um just uh be as cautious as you can and respectful of other folks and and the distances that that they have um and thanks thanks for again for being here agenda item 2 public comment period we will now have our comment public comment period this period of public comment is available for any person who wishes to address the state board on subjects within its authority please note that public comment should be on topics related to the state board's constitutional and statutory authority and thanks again to the members of the public who are in attendance agenda item 2.1 request for 10-minute special appearance we have two 10-minute special appearances today 2.1 a abby swatsworth has been

004request has requested and has been granted a special appearance to comment abby you have 10 minutes welcome abby thank you thank you for the opportunity to present this morning my name is abby swatsworth and i'm the executive director of out nebraska a statewide nonprofit organization working to celebrate and empower thriving lgbtq communities as a servant leader in the lgbtq community i'm testifying in support of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression soji within the health standards in the currently included age-appropriate ways according to the american college of obstetricians and gynecologists comprehensive sexuality education should begin early in childhood and continue through a person's lifespan programs should not only focus on reproductive development prevention of stis and unintended pregnancy but also teach about forms of sexual expression healthy sexual and non-sexual relationships gender identity and sexual

005orientation and questioning communication recognizing and preventing sexual violence consent and decision making in following the discussion regarding the proposed health standards thus far i've heard some common myths that i would like to address myth number one children are too young to understand the concepts of orientation and identity in truth young people are coming out at younger ages than ever before a 2008 research study of lgb youth found that 75 percent recalled feeling different in childhood and that awareness of difference usually came between 4 and 12 years old as early as 3 and 8 years on average a 2015 study of transgender youth found that the average age of talking about gender being different was five for trans girls and eight for trans boys and it is not uncommon to do so as early as two

006to three years old it is certainly true that a big part of adolescence is exploring and coming to understand your gender and sexuality young people may demonstrate an evolving understanding of these aspects of themselves this exploration and evolution does not mean that it is impossible for a young person to know who they are some young people who are questioning their soji may feel pressure from within from their peers or from their families to choose a label or figure out how they identify questioning youth should be supported and assured that it is absolutely normal to question and explore soji and that is okay not to know myth number two being lgbtq is a mental illness according to the american psychological association and supported by additional research quote sexuality occurs across a continuum same gender attraction and

007relationships are normal variations of human sexuality similarly a gender identity that is incongruent with assigned sex at birth as well as a gender expression that diverges from stereotypical cultural norms for a particular gender are normal variations of human gender being a sexual or gender minority or identifying as lgbtq is not pathological end quote it is well researched that lgbtq youth are at increased risk for poor mental health outcomes however increased minority stress often in the form of rejection and discrimination is thought to be the primary reason for the adverse mental health outcomes observed among lgbtq youth rather than lgbtq identity itself causing mental illness societal attitudes that lead to discrimination bullying toxic gender stereotyping family rejection conversion therapy and religiously based punishment of sexual and gender minority people create environments that cause harm and create

008conditions ripe for poor mental health lgbtq youth who report having at least one accepting adult were 40 percent less likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year research bears out that supportive families peers school and community environments are associated with improved psychosocial outcomes for sexual minority youth as young people come out at earlier ages it is imperative that we do all we can to increase the supportive environments available for lgbtq youth in a shared effort to improve their quality of life that means challenging the attitudes that cause harm and committing to creating those protective environments for those listening along much of this information cites sources which i have included in the written portion for the board because i believe that it is important that we follow science i also believe that including soji

009and the health standards is a matter of equity begin beginning in early elementary grades to represent a variety of family constellations shows respect for lgbtq families research estimates that in nebraska 32 percent of lgbtq adults age 25 plus are raising children we cannot pretend these families do not exist because they make some members of our communities uncomfortable furthermore it is important to include soji giving the understanding of lgbt youth in regard to their own lived experience as already referenced young people are increasingly telling us who they are it is our duty as parents educators faith and community leaders to honor their truth health standards that do not include soji send the message that lgbtq students are not worthy of being educated this erasure of students realities rejects their identities and causes harm when it is

010vital to build equitable protective environments for all students excerpts from nebraska non-discrimination and equitable education opportunities in schools position statement quote the goal of equity efforts is that all students are known heard and supported while having access to the opportunities and resources needed for success educational equity is defined by providing each student meaningful access to the educational resources they need at the right moment at the right level and with the right intensity equity requires that these opportunities and outcomes exist for all nebraskans including but not limited to and unrestricted by age citizenship status color disability economic status ethnicity family mobility family structure gender expression gender identity genetic information marital status national origin political affiliation pregnancy race religion sex sexual orientation tribal membership or veteran status end quote through this powerful position statement it is clear

011to me that the nebraska school board is committed to the learning of all students i urge you respectfully to continue your commitment to equity furthermore i respectfully urge you to listen to science over fear the science is clear evaluations of comprehensive sex education programs show that these programs can help youth delay the onset of sexual activity reduce the number of sexual partners and increase condom and contraceptive use having received a very limited sex education as a member of the lgbtq community i recall my own difficulty navigating my early feelings of being different because i did not see myself in discussions of normal relationships i tried desperately to make myself normal by engaging in risky sexual behaviors we know that today's lgbtq youth are still at increased risk of experiencing teen pregnancy and contracting stis including

012hiv after all these years the educational system is continuing to withhold vital information that can decrease these risks and improve the quality of life not just for lgbtq youth but for all youth this withholding of information could be seen as active oppression in my role again as a servant leader in the lgbtq community it is my sacred honor to advocate for all youth thank you again for the opportunity i am open for questions thank you abby thank you thank you abby 2.1 b karen bowling has requested and has been granted a special appearance to comment karen you have 10 minutes good morning commissioner blomstead and state board members as stated i'm karen bolling and i serve as the executive director of nebraska family alliance thank you for this opportunity to address the board this morning

013nebraska family alliance was established in 1988 we are a non-profit policy research education organization we represent a diverse statewide network of thousands of individuals families faith leaders from multiple denominations non-profits educators and administrators we also collaborate with 39 other state policy councils across the nation the proposed health standards provide many excellent objectives for students and we applaud those efforts ensuring that health and safety for every child we can all agree that every child and student in nebraska has inherent value and should be treated with dignity and respect regardless of ideology sexual orientation or political and religious affiliation we can also recognize that parents are the primary educators of their children ultimately they are responsible for overseeing their children's education and schools best serve students when they inform involve and respect parents and guardians we believe

014two things can be true at once students who identify as transgender deserve the same educational opportunities as their peers and should be treated with respect schools also should adopt truthful compassionate and common sense policy solutions that do not threaten the privacy safety and dignity of any student we believe schools should teach basic biological facts and anatomy without introducing age inappropriate unscientific ideas about sex sexual orientation or gender identity today my purpose is to focus on areas of concern from the first draft of health standards first the selection process for the writing team was flawed and needs clarification secondly the writing team lacked evidence-based medically accurate factual subject experts third the human growth and development standards sexualizes children with age inappropriate terms and content and finally the proposed health standards of fringe on parental rights in

015guiding their children's education clarity on the writing team there were notable absences from the writing team selected lacking representation were parents educators and accredited private school educators transparency is needed in the process to ensure those selected are committed to factual and science-based standards the current proposed standards are a change in curriculum approach in a recently released report in january 2021 by heritage the culture of american k-12 education a national survey of parents and school board members and i've noted all the references here revealed that comprehensive policies that emphasize risk reduction are not the same or as effective as policies that emphasize sexual risk avoidance around the country state educators and boards are beginning to change their curriculum approach and now 10 states have prohibited sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum in order to increase school

016accountability to parents and educations the selection process for the advisory and writing teams need to be clearly defined on how interested and qualified persons can be considered secondly writing teams should be factual and not politically motivated well-intentioned school systems often seek direction regarding their gender initiatives and may turn to political advocacy groups for education and policy guidance in this realm when these groups promote and encourage the concept of gender identity in schools there are many harmful unintended consequences sasha iaded licensed professional counselor who works exclusively with teens who began questioning their gender and adolescent has noted the direct correlation between ill-conceived gender affirmative school policies and the development of sudden painful and unnecessary suffering of teens gender dysphoria often develops after children are exposed to the concepts of gender identity i ideology and you'll note

017in your packet we have a parent's resource guide that we were part of collaborating with in just seven years there have been a nearly two thousand percent increase in children seeking treatment for sexual identity confusion in the united kingdom according to a study released in new atlantis also in your packet the proposed human growth and development standards sexualize children our third concern we recognize that sex education is being taught however the proposed health standards have moved from a biology and character-based approach the umbrella term comprehensive sexuality education encompasses sex education for school-aged children that emphasizes risk reduction techniques as opposed to character-based education that provides children with skills and tools to avoid risk children need and deserve guidance not only information whatever we tell children we also teach them what we teach them will shape

018their entire lives children are increasingly being targeted for sexual messages images and themes and this is happening at younger ages they are exposed to explicit sexual content by cultural forces including social media and entertainment but now under the proposed health standards they would even be exposed to graphic information about sex abortion and politicize ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity ideology in schools we are asking the board to let kids be kids we understand and acknowledge that sex education is already happening in schools but it needs to happen appropriately every child deserves an education that is suited for their specific needs and development as guided by their parents and one that is free of graphic sexual curriculum or promotion of abortion and soji information if children are being bullied at school because they do not

019conform to traditional views on sex or have interests that differ from their same-sex peers schools should address this through their anti-bullying policies fostering a culture of respect for difference in a pluralistic society we must educate our children to respect one another with not needing to reject their body through permanent life-altering hormone therapy and surgery other specific concur concerns are kindergartens would be taught about cohabitating and same-gender families with no mention in this curriculum of traditional married families with a mom and a dad first graders would be taught to define enter gender identity and gender role stereotypes the social construct of gender fluidity is introduced in the second grade education curriculum that introduces terms as anal and oral sex hormone blockers etc etc fall short in developing interpersonal relationships that lead to a lifetime of healthy

020non-risk behaviors in your packet as i've mentioned you will see the resource guide released in 2019. nebraska family alliance collaborated with 38 other state policy councils in appendix 6 because we continue to hear from parents their growing concern of csc health curriculums being introduced their young children came home from school confused about if they were a girl or a boy in response this research and education project was developed supporting organizations with very diverse political uh ideologies joined us the negative consequences that result when society regards bodily sex as irrelevant and public schools should never feel pressured to force boys and girls to sacrifice their bodily privacy and promote unscientific theories about human the final is on parental rights which you can read and i just want to thank you for this [Applause] anything all right

021all right thank you thanks everyone and and i didn't stop you i didn't i didn't stop you but i will ask from now on that we don't have outbursts of all right just so we can make sure that we can hear and i just will say please don't do those outbursts we understand your emotions with this and do appreciate that so we just want to make sure that we can get through as many public comments as possible um i do believe that we have uh at least a chance and we ask the board if they would decide how they want to handle this i believe we have roughly 75 people signed up so what we did last time was actually limited to two minutes per person we talked about limiting it overall and i would

022leave it up to the board for for your discussion on would you simply like to make sure everyone got two minutes to speak or would you rather limit it in some other fashion thank you commissioner and one other part uh the disruptions are going to just lengthen the time for everyone so we want to make sure we get everyone in we will now move to our public comment period of five minutes those wishing to speak signed in at the table outside of the meeting room we have 75 public comment cards turned in and the public will speak in the order the cards were handed out upon arrival agenda item 2.2 a in accordance with board policy b9 and due to the number of persons wishing to comment is there a motion regarding public comment time

023limits lisa um i would like to hear from as many people as possible if we go with the five minutes we might be leaving people out who have driven a far distance to speak so i would like to hear from as many people as possible and so that's my comment robin do you have a motion yes madam uh president i move to limit the total amount of time for public comment at this meeting to a maximum of two hours of speaking time not to include transition between times of speakers and breaks and to reduce the amount of time for each speaker from five minutes to two minutes and i would add that that is what was done in our previous meeting in april do i have a second i second that okay motion made by

024robin seconded by patsy discussion jacqueline microphone on technologically challenged the last time we were here two minutes felt really short to me um i thought that a lot of people had things to say i personally would like to up that to three minutes i know that's not um that significant um it is the extra hour that we would be here but it did really feel like people at two minutes didn't get to say everything they wanted so i would be willing to or if other people would entertain another motion i would like to do three minutes further discussion robin my concern is what we did to those folks who presented at the april board meeting i find it somewhat inequitable that all of a sudden we would change from what we did earlier deborah and

025i also um i'm delighted to have so many people here and appreciate everybody showing up and showing their interest but i found from last time that really we understood what they were saying within the two minutes and for the really detailed information there is a formal process the online process where we really hope everyone in the room is filling out and giving us the specific details about each of the standards and the grade level and so i'm i'm hoping that um we can accomplish the same thing with the two minutes and also for the point robin pointed out that in fairness to all the others that have given testimony in two minutes thank you patsy and if if you should uh be stopped if i'd have to hold up the little red sign for you

026if you should be stopped and you've prepared something and it gets cut off then if you would just make sure to hand that in to who are we having them hand them into uh on the end over here andrea andrea will pick them up and then we will have them to read we will have them to read so down on the end thank you i'll be louder next time any other discussion robin my main concern actually deals with the two hours and i'd like to hear the board uh respond to that part of the motion if they if they have something that they would like to share realizing as i've heard 75 that's going to limit numerous people in their presentation so i guess that's a bigger concern of mine i do include it in

027my motion and but i would like to hear if others feel uh that that's too restrictive or just right or whatever i do appreciate the comments that others have made about the two minutes thank you jacqueline so if we have 75 people who are signed up and we are considering two minutes that's 150 minutes which is beyond two hours so we at a minimum be looking at two and a half hours i am uncomfortable if we allowed people to sign the 75 people to sign up telling the last let's see that'd be 30 15 people that they don't get to speak when we could just extend it to two and a half hours so for that reason i would say at a minimum i believe we should be at two and a half hours lisa

028i too believe that everyone should have two minutes that's signed up at least and if that's a half an hour 45 minutes longer i'm willing to stay for that i think they took the time to come here and we're already eliminating eliminating the time to two minutes that all 75 should be heard so just what i'm hearing just so i can make sure that we're getting this right i don't believe we've heard yet um any type of amendment to the motion but i think what i was hearing was two minutes per person that signed up through the 75 is that what i'm gathering so someone would have to make an amendment to the motion or address it and such patsy um i have one question about that and my question is will we have other

029people join us and will that number keep growing i don't believe so i i think we're pretty well taken the cards of the folks that are here so i don't i think we're in good shape if that was your motion patsy that's how it was done in last month there was a cut off by the time we got to this point in the meeting there was it was cut off robin uh i appreciate the uh commissioner's point and the reason that i asked for that this discussion is so that if i needed to make a an amendment to my motion i could easily we could easily do that so that's why i wanted to hear the discussion about two hours compared to my motion would be two and a half hours my amendment excuse me

030and that would include two minutes per speaker or not correct that speaker please i've got it oh i had it on it even showed green madam chair anyway i don't know what you want me to repeat i guess i could repeat it all please do my motion would remain the same as far as the two minutes per person but i would ex if i make the motion or the amendment it would extend to two and a half hours rather than the two hours based on the discussion i want to hear from and have heard some from my colleagues so we have an amendment on the floor to limit the total number of time for public comment at this meeting to a maximum of two and a half hours of speaking time not to include transition

031time between speakers and breaks and to reduce the amount of time for each speaker from five minutes to two minutes and i need a second on that correct is there a second on this jacqueline i would second it i i also however do believe and i think we talked about this the last time we probably need to amend the motion robin just to include that we would be cutting off the sign up sheet pursuant to this motion as well so that we would stop accepting new people who signed up beyond the 75. speaker it is on it is now okay uh anyway are you making that as a as a motion uh jaclyn all right amendment excuse me that's okay yeah you can take him his friendly amendment so sure a friendly amendment that i

032i will accept that as a friendly amendment deborah did you have something okay so the friendly amendment is adding that the cutoff time b when public comment starts is that correct is that what you wanted jacqueline received already i think is what you received already cut off time i'll read this in just a second thank you the motion the motion is to limit the total amount of time for public comment at this meeting to a maximum of two and a half hours of speaking time not to include transition time between speakers and breaks and to reduce the amount of time for each speaker from five minutes to two minutes the cut off time will be what has been received at this point in time okay do i have a second on that friendly amendment if

033there's no objections they can vote on that okay are there any objections to this seeing none andrea call the roll googles yes oh she said google's i'm sorry morrison yes neri yes co john's yes freaky yes nichols yes stevens yes tim seven yes one absent okay motion passes so members of the public will speak for a period of two and a half hours of speaking time and limited to two minutes for each speaker i will announce the names of the next eight speakers so they are prepared to come forward katie mclemons dr sue greenwald please come up please quickly jason martinez janiece van winkle chad galepsy jill collapse i think i slaughtered that name i apologize angela monterosso i probably did not pronounce that correctly either julie hoffer and beth vallecki i hope i didn't

034slaughter it too much okay you will be called in the order that i read your name so be prepared katie mcclements and maureen before katie starts i just want to remind folks so um patty um coach johns will actually hold up a one minute sign and then a stop sign as i think you saw before just try to be attentive to that not trying to interrupt you and two minutes goes quickly obviously we are just going to try to make sure that we can hear everyone that's signed up as the board stated so thank you for your patience and we'll get that done and so i'll go ahead and turn it back over to that part i'll do it next okay all right welcome katie thank you good morning board my name is katie mcclemmons

035i'm a parent and educator and today i represent protect nebraska children a growing coalition of nearly 11 000 concerned individuals organ and organizations throughout our state comprised of parents grandparents teachers lawyers medical and mental health professionals youth legislators religious leaders and other concerned citizens i am providing public comment today in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which include comprehensive sexuality education and the controversial and divisive political ideology of critical race theory before this coalition was formed a petition circulated around our state garnering nearly 4 000 signatures opposing the components of cse and crt which are within these standards shortly after the state board of education meeting on april 2nd we formed a grassroots effort in response to draft one and thus this coalition our mission is to protect the health and innocence

036of children and the fundamental rights of parents to direct the education health care and upbringing of their children our objectives include the following to advocate for laws and policies that will protect children and parents and their fundamental rights to expose the harmful nature of csc gender ideology and pornographic materials and prevent any such materials programs or ideologies from being incorporated in our schools and to form and to inform and mobilize our members and all concerned citizens on behalf of the thousands of members of the protect nebraska children coalition we affirm that the current nebraska health education framework is age appropriate and medically accurate and questioned the decision to replace it we ask you each to refrain from adopting the proposed standards that will lead to the implementation of controversial csc and crt in our schools

037we know that this would lead to great division in our state because we see the results of such implementation throughout our country and the world we do not want this for nebraska and we do not want this for our children finally i will submit these comments as well as a document which clearly outlines which standards must be removed in order for the proposed health standards to be acceptable thank you thank you katie [Applause] we asked that there no be no clapping after these dr sue greenwald welcome sue welcome dr greenwald good morning my name is dr susan greenwald i'm a pediatrician from kearney i represent 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition i have 35 years of experience treating children who have been sexually abused and testifying in court as an expert witness

038in that capacity i have taught jurors to understand the process of grooming a child to accept the advances of a predator language and graphic materials are used by pedophiles to desensitize the child to sexual acts children are susceptible because they have natural curiosity they trust the adult and they can be trained to be sexual beings that explains why sexual abuse often persists for years before it is discovered statistically in a classroom of 25 there will be one or two children who have been sexually abused or are being sexually abused the cse curriculum with its emphasis from early elementary school on sexual rights and sexual pleasure is a pedophile's dream curriculum a first grader can explain how masturbation works a second grader can point out that the clitoris is for sexual pleasure a fourth grader can

039demonstrate how intercourse works in case someone wants to try it with them a fifth grader can explain how to consent to sexual activity imagine how confusing it must be for that little girl who is being molested at home she knows it hurts and she wants it to stop but her teacher explained that is normal and there must be something wrong with her imagine how much longer it might take for her to report the abuse when she thinks that she's the bad one imagine how much physical and psychological damage is taking place also the lessons for ages 14 enough use role play instructing the teacher to divide students into couples imagine that you are a 15 year old who has to role play consenting to sex with a member of the opposite sex maybe the boy

040likes the girl maybe the boy has bullied the girl but whatever their history it has to be a mortifying experience for both of them however it will teach them that sexual experimentation is encouraged thank you thank you dr greenwald uh please no applause and i i appreciate your willingness to are wanting to engage but it's best that you don't it just simply slows us down so thank you jason martinez welcome thank you good morning my name is jason martinez i'm a father and a nurse anesthetist in kearney i represent the members of the pncc our coalition of members have concerned an opposition regarding the process the ndu used to decide which standards were part of draft one we while we appreciate local educators were part of the draft process we know outside influences contributed objectionable

041portions of the draft for example upon review the national sex ed standards heavily influenced human growth and development content within the draft many of the standards were awarded in a similar manner and it was even more revealing when comparing the grade ranges and national standards to the breakdown of grades in our standards many of the variable excuse me comparable verbiage actually showed up in lower grades in the proposed nebraska standards thus exposing children to developmentally inappropriate content sooner who published these standards they were published by the future of sex education initiative a partnership between advocates for youth answer and seek us all three of these organizations are intricately intertwined with planned parenthood and these standards contain the most radical views available on children and sexuality the second edition has been quote infused with principles of

042reproductive justice racial justice social justice and equity page eight in quote and calls for significant discussions on race privilege power systemic racism and homophobia these updated standards include significant changes as new topics of consent sexual orientation and gender identity they are endorsed by the gay lesbian and straight education network and gender spectrum among others there is an obvious conflict of interest when entities that profit from sexualization sexualizing children are involved in creating or implementing sex education programs the entire draft development has been neither balanced or transparent and we are asking you to scrap the entire draft and provide us with one that is thank you for your time cheer marine maureen maureen can i ask just one point of clarification sir when you mentioned page eight i was just trying to see what page eight

043i don't i don't think i picked up exactly just so that i can kind of try to look at what people are that would be that would be on the second draft at the national sex education standards okay thank you janiece van winkle welcome janiece thank you my name is janiece van winkle i am from kearney my husband is an elementary teacher and we have six children i represent the nearly 11 000 members of protect nebraska children coalition and i am providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which includes comprehensive sexuality education and the controversial political ideology of critical race theory to illustrate why enacting the controversial health standards will only create more contention i ask you to look around this room and think about all who are waiting

044outside to speak we believe everyone here has the best interest of nebraska's children in mind but each person here will have a different opinion and probably a very strong opinion on what is appropriate to teach children about sex and at what age i ask everyone present people representing all segments of our population what do you think is appropriate sex education where do you draw the line the topics addressed and illustrated in the curricula that would meet these proposed health standards is highly explicit and promotes promiscuity and high-risk sexual behaviors to children as healthy and normal this begs the question does the government know best what children should be taught on all of these issues how does the role and rights of parents fit if there were 100 people in this room there may be 100

045different opinions on what children should be taught when it comes to controversial issues comprehensive sexuality education or cse is not traditional sex education cse programs have an almost obsessive focus on teaching children how to obtain sexual pleasures in various ways yet ironically cse programs are anything but comprehensive as they fail to teach children about all the emotional psychological and physical health risks of promiscuous sexual activity the ultimate goal of cse is to change the sexual and gender norms of society which is why cse could be more accurately called abortion promiscuity and lgbt rights education cse is a rights-based approach to sex education and promotes sexual rights to children at the expense of their sexual health this type of education harms children and has no place in our state standards thank you for your time thank

046you janice [Applause] chad pronounce your last pronounce your last name gillespie thank you yeah my name is chad gillespie and i'm from kearney nebraska i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i'm providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which includes comprehensive sexuality education there are multiple false philosophies that comprehensive sexuality programs are based upon those include children are naturally sexual from birth therefore any restrictions on their sexual expression or sexual activity violates their sexual rights to have good health children and adults should be having regular sexual experiences either alone masturbation or with persons of either gender a right to sexual pleasure even at the youngest ages is a primary human right that trumps other rights children have privacy and confidentiality rights that

047trump the rights of their parents to guide their education in the area of human sexuality children have a right to abortion and other sexual services and commodities into sexual relations without the knowledge and consent of their parents most societal sexual and gender norms especially those based in religious beliefs are repressive and unhealthy and should be changed children have the right to experiment with diverse sexual identities and orientations and the behaviors associated with them in order to develop a healthy sexuality youth are to be enlisted to combat homophobia transphobia and heterosexism and advocate for their sexual rights children under internationally recognized rights to health and education have a right to all sexual information uncensored and without parental consent i hope the information provided today will lead this board to eliminate these controversial standards nebraska's children deserve

048the best chance at a healthy future and any introduction of csc will harm children like my five little boys thank you for your time thank you chad angela welcome angela thank you i am actually from shelton nebraska and i also represent the pncc and i'm preventing comment in opposition to draft one today i want you to consider the makeup of an average classroom of elementary students in nebraska public school the type of children that might be found in such a classroom some of them are sexually innocent but some of them are not some of them are already experienced and are aware of their changing bodies but tragically some have been sexually abused others and obviously have some have been exposed to pornography they're addicted already some are going to be traumatized and hypersensitive to sexual

049issues um and these children also come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and religious backgrounds parents are intricately involved they have recognized rights duties and responsibilities to educate and protect their children how can it be possible to implement csc with elements of crt so that it will be acceptable to a majority of parents students are at all different stages of sexual development how can you tailor the information to prevent giving too much too soon and once a child has been introduced and exposed to some of the explicit content and graphic images it can't be undone so by including csc in draft one we're putting the health and safety of our children at great risk evidence shows um high sexual activity is a risk factor for adolescent health teens who are sexually active have greater

050rates of emotional problems and depression there's evidence that early sexual debut leads to higher likelihood of unstable relationships and eventual marital failure adolescent sexual activity itself is an independent risk factor for developing low self-esteem major depression suicidal attempts research also shows that when teens have sex there's a higher risk of negative life outcomes so we can't accept draft one is written we must protect our children thank you for your time thank you angela julie hawker welcome julie thank you welcome my name is julie hofer i am a parent and educator from kearney nebraska i represent the nearly 11 000 plus members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i'm providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards these standards and corresponding cse curriculum normalize child sex and desensitize children to

051sexual things in fact cse is a highly controversial rights-based approach to sex education that is more than just teaching children and youth about sexual intercourse and human reproduction sex ed focuses on the human reproductive system and helps youth understand the changes their bodies experience during puberty sex ed programs often include contraceptive or abstinence instruction in contrast cse is drastically different although cse instruction will include most of what is covered by sex ed programs it typically does not include abstinence education in any depth and uses graphic materials and visuals cse promotes sexual rights to children at the expense of their sexual health cse programs also seek to change society by changing sexual and gender norms and teaching you to advocate for their sexual rights most cse programs promote acceptance of diverse sexual identities and orientations and

052enlist youth in combating homophobia and heterosexual heterosexism these cse programs have an obsessive focus on sexual pleasure instructing children at the earliest ages on how to obtain sexual pleasure in a variety of ways some programs even encourage sexual exploration for children as young as age five planned parenthood one of the largest purveyors of sexuality education in the united states explains on their website that such education addresses values exploration safer sex sexual attitudes and values sexual orientation and sexual pleasure consider this quote from the world health organization give information about enjoyment and pleasure when touching one's own body early childhood masturbation this instruction is designed for teaching children ages zero to four this material is harmful for our children and must not be included in the state health standards thank you for your time thank you

053julie that [Applause] hello um my name is beth vivlecka i am a parent and educator from kearney i'm the mother of 11 and the grandmother of 27. i represent the almost 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i am providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which include comprehensive sexuality education cse and the controversial political ideology of critical race theory i am concerned for the children of our state who suffer who currently suffer from sexual abuse or abuse in their past the proposed health standards and the correlating cse curricula readily teach children about choice regarding sexual engagement this may at first sound positive until one considers the rationale of many elementary children especially those under the manipulation of an abuser a young student might believe that

054any abusive behavior perpetrated on them isn't actually wrong unless they verbally say no lessons for cse also teach students they can choose to have sex when they feel they are ready or when they find a trusted partner these lessons are far from comprehensive as they fail to provide data about the well-documented negative consequences of early sexual debut they also fail to encourage sexually active children to return to abstinence research has long established that premature sexual exposure leads to children becoming sexually active at an earlier age these young people are also more likely to have a higher number of casual sexual relations leading to a greater number of stis and teen pregnancies a higher rate of depression and anxiety and a greater propensity for suicidal behavior this is not the future nebraskans want for their children

055we must stand against the organizations and entities that promote early sexualization of our children and stand for the right of every child to have a childhood thank you for your time and service i appreciate it the next eight people would be robin phipps kelly kinnison lee spencer karen lind judy derr amy martinez mike meyer and peggy fong madam president lisa may i speak yes okay um i wanted to hear as i stated earlier i would like to hear from every single person we decided that we would do two and a half hours every time i just waited and listened and the clapping's getting louder which is taking up seconds which is taking away minutes from the two and a half hours i really truly want to hear from every single person who signed up so

056if you wouldn't mind i see people going like this that would be probably appropriate but i want to hear from everybody thank you lisa point well taken can i add one point of clarification i believe the motion motion's gonna allow 75 people to go but it does slow us down right we'll be here longer if we if we keep doing that so that's all i ask i do have the authority to end public comment as we expect our students in our classroom to follow instructions we as a state board have asked already numerous times to follow instructions thank you i hope this is the last time pardon me robin quickly come on up uh robin be ready to go robin i just want to support mike please i want to support my colleagues robin fitz

057welcome robin thank you i'm robin phipps mother of four grandmother of 12 and i represent the eleven thousand plus members of the protect nebraska children coalition i'm providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which includes which includes comprehensive sexuality education and the very controversial political ideology of critical race theory for children who've been sexually abused by a member of the opposite sex discussing sexual matters in a mixed setting can be an intense emotional trigger a number of cse programs require children to be instructed in sexual matters in a mixed setting in order to among other things desensitize them from sexual concepts and facilitate role playing where boys and girls have sex or seduce each other consider this excerpt from the popular curriculum published by advocates for youth partnering with

058planned parenthood entitled rights respect responsibilities for 10th graders divide the class into pairs and for the purpose of the activity i'm going to ask you to pretend you're in a romantic and sexual relationship grade 10 lesson 4 page 3. another role-playing scenario for 10th grade you think you know what person two wants that's the way the relationship's always been so you're going to let them know that tonight's the night you're going to have sex together for the first time grade 10 lesson one page five these types of role playing are a trigger for someone who's been sexually abused it can also be incredibly embarrassing for all students and encourages sexual experimentation among teens may i remind you this curriculum is for 15 year olds which in the state of nebraska is younger than the legal

059age of consent this curriculum is not age appropriate thank you robin kelly welcome kelly thank you my name is kelly kinnison i'm an engineer mother of four and an educator here in kearney and i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i am providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards these draft one health standards in the cse curricula that will fulfill these proposed standards will present abortion as a safe or positive option while omitting data on the many negative physical and mental health consequences our nebraska children will be taught they have a right to abortion and will be referred to abortion providers for information deemed medically accurate this would include sites like planned parenthood or their affiliates and partners which also provide lucrative

060services and commodities such as sexual counseling condoms other forms of contraceptives gender hormones in some states stis testing and treatment and of course abortions there is an obvious conflict of interest when an entity that profits from sexualizing children is involved in creating or implementing cse programs for more information on how planned parenthood sexualizes children for profit see w w on and www.investigateippf.org state legislators in other states such as washington oregon and california have passed standards similar in content to the nebraska draft one standards now school-based counselors can direct students to and help schedule transgender surgeries or abortions in some cases without the knowledge or permission of the parents they also encourage the use of contraceptives and dispense them through school-based clinics again without the express permission of parents parents hold the ultimate authority and have

061the rights duties and responsibilities to guide and protect our children implementing standards which include cse will harm our children thank you for this opportunity thank you kelly lee [Applause] welcome lee good morning i am an rn of over 50 years and i have spent several years working on a child adolescence unit where we took care of children from the ages of 3 to 18. most of these children came to us they were extremely violent in behavior some of the most violent children that we took care of had been sexually either abused or had been exposed to inappropriate sexual uh materials frequently this will lead to violence or self-destructive behavior violence against society and drug use i represent nearly 1 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i am providing public comment in

062opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards cse fails to establish abstinence or a return to abstinence as the expected standard for all age school-aged children while some curriculum lessons may mention abstinence in passing and clear the clear and apparent message is that all sexual activity unless unprotected is acceptable and even healthy according to the theory of risk compensation individuals will adjust their behaviors according to the theory of risk compensation individuals will adjust their behaviors according to their perception of risk if one feels more protected they will be more willing to engage in risky behaviors csc circula is consistently misleading as it promotes a risk reduction rather than a risk avoidance we must support abstinence as the standard of behavior for our children which leads to respect for themselves and for others time thank

063you lee [Applause] lee because you had documents to turn to the board they will receive the rest of your comments as all that handed in thank you karen lind my name is karen land and i am from carnegie nebraska i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children's coalition and i'm providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards in reviewing the framework used to guide nebraska sex education programs over the past decade it becomes clear that these proposed health standards represent a major shift from the medically accurate age-appropriate framework to standards based on politically motivated partisan agendas that result in age inappropriateness where childhood indoctrination is the vehicle for radical social change according to the sexuality information and education council of the united states this is a

064primary goal in implementing cse planned parenthood is also an avid supporter of cse producing many supporting curriculum programs considering planned parenthood benefits financially from sexually active teens it is unethical that such an organization is involved in the promotion of school sexuality education in 2009 the state of oregon implemented cse in contrast nebraska has had an official health education framework that promotes abstinence and return to abstinence since 1997. when you compare the data in oregon and nebraska from youth risk surveys between 2010 and 2020 oregon high school youth are consistently and substantially more sexually active from this and other research we can see that nebraska's current framework for health education is more effective at reducing risky sexual behavior in students than the cse standards implemented in oregon i would like to remind the board and all

065who are listening that cse is not sex ed sex ed is the explanation of normal physical development and basic biological sexual reproduction cse is a highly controversial rights-based organ approach to sex education that exposes children to explicit sexual material at an early age all standards that lead to this harmful ideology must be removed from draft one thank you thank you karen judy durr welcome judy good morning judy der amherst educator with a master's in clinical mental health i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children's coalition i am providing public comment and opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards cse consistently contains directions on how to negotiate sexual encounters or how to ask for or get consent from other children to engage in sexual acts with them for example in

066the rights respect and responsibility curriculum the following is from an eighth grade lesson and i quote mutual consent is essential in any relationship it's when both people actively say what they want and both people agree to any behavior that they are going to do together and when we are talking about doing something sexual in nature you need to ask your partner if they want to do it end quote grade eight lesson seven page five another role play scenario from the same curriculum quote you may think that you know what person two wants that's the way your relationship has always been you're more outgoing they're more quiet and reserved and they expect you to take charge and to make decisions that's how it is from where you're from so you're going to let them know that

067tonight is a night you're going to have sex together for the first time in quote grade 10 lesson one page five in nebraska the age of consensual sexual consent is 16. teaching a child younger than 16 how to give and request sexual consent is beyond the boundary set by law the idea of consent and protecting oneself from unwanted actions can be taught outside of a sexual context this should be the goal as we strive to teach our students how to care for others and value their own dignity and their own self-worth i thank you for your time i thank you for your consideration and for your service and i appreciate that the opportunity to speak jacqueline clarification yes please i keep hearing quotes about the cse and people's testimony can you those aren't in the

068standards that i've seen so can you point me to the source or the what you're reading these would be examples that would qual that would um satisfy the proposed standards and so those are samples out of curriculum i don't have that in front of me but i could certainly get it for you if you wanted okay thank you yeah thank you thank you judy can i ask another point did i miss somebody go ahead um are you you're not suggesting that the curriculum and the lessons that you're giving examples of are part of our standards is that correct i'm suggesting that those would satisfy any um proposed standards should they be adopted that would satisfy those kinds of proposals does that make sen does that okay thank you thank you judy thank you amy martinez

069welcome amy thank you my name is amy martinez i'm a mother and also a physician assistant from kearney nebraska i also represent members of the protect nebraska children coalition and giving public comment in opposition to the proposed health standards which include comprehensive sexuality education and the controversial political ideology of critical race theory i'd like to share to you today a few examples of how csc teaches children to consent before they are legally able to do so two examples can be found in the it's all one curriculum which is a premier cse program it's used currently in more than 150 countries and in every state in the united states it's all one is promoted by united nation agencies as a model for other csc programs the target audience is for ages 15 and up however there

070are adaptation suggestions for children as young as 10. examples are as follow and i quote today we will begin looking at what it means to give truly free and informed consent in a situation involving sex volume 2 page 76 and another plan time to discuss sexual consent in a meaningful way many young people feel ambivalent about what they want or confused about their partner's wishes explore ways to ensure mutual consent volume 1 page 81 in today's society consent is often taught under the banner of sexual abuse prevention while this may be appropriate for adults to apply such concepts to sexual encounters children of minor age should never be encouraged to consent to sex or be taught how to negotiate sexual encounters consent can be taught in an effective manner without a sexual focus thanks for

071your time and i appreciate your opportunity thank you amy clarification from board mike meyer welcome mike thank you my name is mike meyer i'm an insurance agent from kearney nebraska father of three grand buddy of two and a very concerned citizen a direct quote from this curriculum for ages 10 to 14 year olds page 48 masturbation boys and girls teenagers and grown-ups too experience sexy feelings when they masturbate some people think masturbation is wrong or harmful some religions call master base in nation a sin but masturbation cannot hurt you if there's a contradiction to religion like that can it come from any other place than religion itself i'm sorry but that reads more like someone wearing a trench coat around the corner from the school playground would tell a child where they were grooming them

072rather than from a school paid for by my tax dollars the school's job is to prepare a child to best be a productive adult not to contradict parental values and with religious excuse me with religious perversions directly from the pit of hell again some people think it's wrong or harmful some religions call masturbation a sin masturbation cannot hurt you i'm sorry that's crazy in the 1700s primary schools taught greek and latin primary schools today we teach remedial english in high school to and graduate illiterate students maybe we should attempt to teach the basics to consider such before we consider such massive swerve into the ditch of immorality as this would be shame on you for even considering this when my children were little they would occasionally ask dumb things as children do i dismiss their

073request i've never eaten a mud pie some look someone in charge doesn't give a three-year-old boy a loaded pistol to play with hand them the keys to the family car and wish him luck that would be criminal and when somebody gets hurt those in charge should expect to go to jail luke 17 2 reads it would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and thrown into the sea than cause one of these little ones to stumble thank you mike you're in charge thank you peggy fong peggy welcome peggy thank you for your time the state board of education should not allow the presentation of any of this material in our classrooms it is harmful information both to children and our society this board also needs to explain to their voters

074why they believe this material is the best they can offer and why they believe our children should be held to planned parenthood's idea of standards not only did the national director of education planned parenthood federation of america contribute to and review these standards nationally but many of the organizations endorsing these standards are also funded by planned parenthood planned parenthood is the enemy of our children and because they seek to do harm to children they should be disqualified from contributing to the children's education what you are promoting as educational standards would desensitize children to all things sexual this material would leave children vulnerable to sex crimes and human sex traffickers in the adult workplace it is considered sexual harassment to speak about sexual things people can lose their jobs over less than what you are proposing

075as the educational standard for all grades k through 12. let me remind the board that you are all elected officials you are here because good citizens had faith that you would present appropriate materials for the education of our children and i respectfully yield the rest of my time to those who need it thank you peggy the next eight the next eight speakers jennifer justin thiel ryan bruna dr anna peterson tim stratton lynn zaleski joe springer and reverend chris jorgensen jenna my name is jenna dern i'm a family medicine physician from kearney i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the protect nebraska children coalition comprehensive sexuality education is not traditional sex education what most of us think about when we hear sex ed would be education that focuses on the human reproductive system and helps

076young people understand the changes their bodies experience during puberty in contrast cse is a rights-based approach to sexuality education and promotes these rights at the expense of children's own health cse intentionally focuses on risk reduction rather than risk avoidance it also seeks to normalize all sexual behaviors and often fails to identify high-risk behavior as such curriculum may also omit or downplay pertinent medical facts related to the extremely high rates of sexually transmitted infections and the associated risks of oral and anal cancers directly from the centers of disease and control prevention website the human papillomavirus or hpv is thought to be responsible for more than 90 percent of anal and cervical cancers about 70 percent of vaginal and bulvar cancers and more than 60 of penile cancers oropharyngeal cancers traditionally have been caused by tobacco and

077alcohol but recent studies show about 70 of cancers of the oropharynx may be linked to hpv family health and sexual or family life and sexual health or flash is a curricular example which would fulfill some of the proposed standards in draft one this is example from a lesson and i quote in this fifth and sixth grade lesson we use the term sexual intercourse as an umbrella expression to represent all three risky sexual behaviors oral anal and vaginal intercourse these will be spelled out in later grades that's not to say you can't define them simply if students ask about them the curriculum however begins with this more basic information and quote of note while at least oral and anal intercourse are listed as risky some 10 and 11 year olds do not know about anal or

078oral sex so this lesson will introduce them to high risk sexual behaviors it also equates anal and oral intercourse with vaginal intercourse thus normalizing these sex acts to children as young as 10. thank you for your time and service and i appreciate the opportunity to speak today thank you jenna justin teal welcome justin thank you just real quick before my time starts i'd just like to say that for those who are out there that think that their defiance and applause is more important than our public comment i would recommend some self-reflection i am a father of three girls from saint labori i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the pncc our coalition would like each board member to have a copy of the book irreversible damaged by abigail schreier which is in front of

079you i will be submitting these copies along with my written test money today this book is fact-based balanced and fair it addresses social contagion and the affirmation of gender dysphoria gender dysphoria formerly known as gender identity disorder typically manifests around two to four years of age and persists through adolescence historically it afflicted roughly 0.01 percent of the population and almost exclusively boys in fact before 2012 there was no scientific literature on girls ages 11 to 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria however over the last decade there has been a significant increase in adolescents claimed to have gender dysphoria and identifying as transgender now for the first time in medical history teenage girls are the majority between 2016 and 17 the number of gender surgeries for teenage females in the u.s quadrupled with biological women specifically

080accounting for 70 percent of all gender surgeries with such a dramatic shift in norms one might ask why why has there been such a dramatic change in the demographic the answer lies in the concept of affirmation therapy non-affirmative psychotherapist lisa marciano says the whole premise of therapy is that you explore you open things up and you approach a symptom with curiosity affirmation is the exact opposite of curiosity it's saying i already know what this is it's taking things at face value a child may come into a therapy session declaring themselves to be trans simply agreeing with this without exploration and discussion is not therapy affirmation therapy has contributed to the growing numbers of children who claim gender dysphoria children are naturally developing the awareness of their gender either male or female around ages three to

081four gender constancy knowing that a gender is unchanging starts around age seven introducing such concepts of gender identity and gender fluidity to children as young as kindergarten will cause irreversible damage once children are introduced to certain topics this cannot be undone see you next month thank you justin ryan welcome ryan thank you i asked that you would please respect the board and not clap as justin said before um we need to respect them and uh your self-defiance isn't helping anything so thank you i hope that doesn't count against my time matt madam chair robin may i thank ryan thank you very much my name is ryan bruna and i am from kearney nebraska and a soon-to-be father i represent the nearly 11 000 members of the pncc when expressing concern regarding the proposed health standards

082we are often told that the standards were developed by medical and health experts that the science was followed however science is never settled and research is not one-sided dr kenneth zucker an american canadian psychologist oversaw development of the definition of gender dysphoria for the dsm-5 and helped write the guidelines for the world professional association for transgender health he has treated over 500 children with gender dysphoria and in the vast majority of cases therapy focused on reducing the psychopathology within the entire family resulted in the child's acceptance of their birth sex in 2014 dr paul mchugh john hopkins university distinguished professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences said quote policy makers in the media are doing no favors to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than

083as a mental disorder that deserves understanding treatment and prevention he states the current transgender craze is encouraged and improperly treated by a psychiatry profession overtaken by fad and primarily induced by peers media and school education last month one of the board education members asked quote should we be basing our education on values and not on what the evidence and the facts and what the medical professionals are saying end quote the concerns that nearly 11 000 of us share as part of our coalition are not based on values values or feelings alone introduction to transgender and gender gender identity or fluidity concepts is harmful to children there is abundant data science research and expertise from countless medical professionals that show implementation of csc which includes an emphasis on transgender and other gender identities is harmful to

084children thank you for your time thank you ryan i have a point of clarification um it's in your second paragraph dr kenneth zucker no dsm-5 what does that stand for i that is the um basically the the handbook for um identifying different behavior and mental issues okay all right thank you any other clarification thank you ryan dr anna peterson welcome thank you i am a former public school educator a counselor a wellness coordinator a mother of four and a grandmother of eighteen i'm a resident of the carney area and also represent the protect nebraska children coalition i am giving public opposition comments to this draft one and i want to look at the controversial political ideology of critical race theory crt is a theory behind wokism and council culture and encourages a cynical view of

085the founding and history of the united states this viewing of our history includes adduction in slavery genocide displacement and annexation of different groups of people private property and land without including the whole story truth and facts our history yes does include steps and missteps villains and heroes but over the course of the past 300 years the results has been a move to more liberty for more people there is nowhere on earth to go where freedom is more abundant than the united states in crt victimhood is encouraged individuals indoctrinated by this ideology do not develop healthy independence and success anxiety depression and suicide rates are rising in these insecurities students that are indoctrinated into this world view are taught that their skin color defines their identity and it is something they cannot escape crt promotes synthetic

086racism intense conflict between the power systems of different races of people institutionally and socially america was founded on the idea of individuals having the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness this does not coincide with the crt values thank you very much thank you anna jacqueline just one question for you i've i've received emails and phone calls about crt did you see i did you see that phrase or are you concerned that critical race theory is in the standards or is that phrase or term and those standards like it is included in the standards as far as identity is who the between colored people and and whites we're talking about prejudice yeah okay thank you tim stratton thank you anna my name is dr tim stratton i represent over 10 000 members of

087the protect nebraska children coalition and i stand in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards which includes csc and the political ideology of critical race theory abbreviated crt a crt is promoted with descriptions of anti-racism diversity equity and inclusion and that sounds great but in reality crt is completely opposite crt is sold as ethnic as ethnically responsive teaching however the very roots of crt are racist repressive discriminatory and divisive crt is heavily influenced by hate mongers such as karl marx and vladimir lenin the main dogmas of crt are as follows you are not a free or responsible individual you are only the color of your skin and by your level of pigment you will be judged according to crt all blacks are oppressed and all whites are racist oppressors if a white person

088disagrees and won't admit her racism well then that proves her guilt and provides evidence of systemic racism this heads i win tails you lose approach is simply unreasonable illogical and irrational the same circular reasoning wielded in the salem witch trials crt seeks to destroy the philosophical foundations of america that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights these are objective and unalienable rights that man or government ought not violate no matter how much pigment one has in their epidermis as james lindsey notes according to crt martin luther king was both wrong and naive white americans can never judge blacks by the content of their character they can only judge them by the color of their skin you are either for martin luther king or you are against

089him i stand with martin luther king i encourage nebraska's schools to stand with martin luther king so oppose critical race theory thank you thank you tim uh robin you have a point of clarification thank you for the crew here who got me uh situated appropriately with my speaker thank you guys i i'm going to follow up on on a question here and uh that jacqueline brought forth through the previous person i'm just really struggling with crt and how it relates to our health standards that really that really uh is is either i'm incapable of thinking in in that way or i i'm just not getting it i'm with you a hundred percent it shouldn't be included uh as i uh skimmed the material it seemed to me that was it around seventh grade the eighth

090grade critical race theory seems to be uh weaving its way into the curriculum and you're right i agree with you a hundred percent it has no place in these uh health standards so i thank you for recognizing that deborah if i can help hold on make sure i'm getting my question you're saying crt is in the health the first draft yes okay yes yes you are you are saying that okay i am saying that and again and again uh explain to me how you know where that where that i would point you to i was thinking of seventh grade but my colleagues are saying it's eighth grade um so i would point you to that uh part of the curriculum could you i can't quote you anything off the top of my head right now

091but i can get you that information if you'd like me to later yeah absolutely all right i'd be happy too and uh and i'd like to uh definitely allow deborah to follow up on that well i guess i had the same question uh for you i keep hearing c-s-e-n-c-r-t and our standards don't have are not comprehensive sex education and we are not um i mean the concept of critical race theory is not i mean those are political terms and we're talking about education concepts and ours are different than cse and uh i guess some of the discussion about race is already in our social studies standards is this a point of clarification to mr sorry yes um i guess the same i guess i am as people talk about those and if you can refers

092to how these are specific to cse and crt i that would be helpful uh because i didn't see them in the standards well i would encourage you to look at it more closely obviously since uh there's so many people here that have seen it i would encourage you to look at it more closely but yes around that seventh or eighth grade um point of the curriculum crt weaves its way in and it does i agree with both of you it should not be a part of uh cse and i do understand you're going to get me sir thank you thank you and i would just want to reiterate we want them to respect us please let's respect them if we want them to hear us we have to hear them so let's please be respectful

093and hold our applause from here on now thank you thank you tim lynn zaleski welcome lynn thank you a little shorter i'm lindsay leske i was a mental health therapist prior to becoming a parent and i've worked in public education for many years i'm from hastings and represented by deborah thank you to the professionals who develop these standards as public schools our focus should always be on factual information and the emotional health of our students children need to learn about our planet's amazing biodiversity its variety of reproductive ways and that human beings are part of nature they need to learn that no matter how they identify or who they love they are a valued part of our society people need to learn healthy expressions of our emotions too as physical and sexual abuse can too

094often start in a child's life early it's important to ensure our students are taught the language of body parts and the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching not knowing these names or what's inappropriate does not prevent sexual and physical abuse occurring rather the lack of knowledge mutes a child's voice in being able to express what's happening to them and to get help it is damaging to their emotional well-being allows abuse to continue and stunts a child's development early intervention is important i think the ages chosen in this curriculum are appropriate waiting until high school to teach sex education is too late by that time many students are emotionally scarred by abuse and bullying others have dropped out in middle school some students have become pregnant in fourth grade students are engaged in flirtation students identifying

095their gender can occur as early as preschool by having basic human punctuality off limits for discussion we're indicating it's not acceptable this curriculum gives the tools they need to develop into healthy functioning people as a therapist i found many adults had a hard time talking about their own sexuality saying they had a problem with it lacking the language needed to describe their problem without a good education what they had was shame regarding sex as it is a local school board's choice whether to use these standards i urge you to approve them as written it's important for a state educational institution to offer the best and most accurate information to our citizens hi thank you for your time thank you lynn find a clarification from anyone thank you lynn joe springer welcome joe thank you my

096name is joe bear springer my pronouns are she her i'm the executive director at encourage advocacy center formerly sassa crisis center encourage works proactively to address root causes of abuse and violence in adam's knuckles clay and webster counties and promote safe non-violent communities encourage endeavors to model effective relationships and combat human trafficking while empowering survivors of abuse and sexual assault i'm also someone who has spent most of my adult life as a foster parent specializing in caring for children who have experienced sexual abuse and also children who sexually abuse other children a common thread i see between my work at encourage my time as a child welfare caseworker and my work as a foster parent is shame secrecy and people exploiting children's lack of knowledge often intentionally keeping them from information in order to more

097easily do them harm i imagine that everyone here would say they showed up because they want to protect kids we want kids to have great childhoods that aren't impacted by sexual violence we want kids to grow to adults who have healthy respectful relationships we don't have to guess or wonder about how to help that happen research is very clear that information about our bodies and sexuality presented in a clear age-appropriate medically accurate science-based trauma-informed manner is what leads to the outcomes we all want for children knowledge like that included in the proposed health standards is a powerful antidote to shame and secrecy it teaches kids that their bodies are their own and they should expect to be respected it also teaches them to have the same respect for other people's bodies and other people's right

098to say no it gives kids the tools they need to protect themselves to get help if they've been harmed and to have healthy relationships throughout their lives i was raised in the way that many of the individuals here are advocating for kept from any information about sexuality thank you for your leadership on this topic thank you joe reverend chris jorgensen welcome reverend thank you good morning as you heard my name is reverend chris jorgensen i'm an ordained united methodist pastor and i live in omaha i want to thank the board for making sure that these proposed health education standards are written by teachers and health professionals and based on scientific research i'm also the mother of a child in the omaha public school system and i'm sure the school board is aware that each time

099my child has had the opportunity to receive education on human growth and development i've been invited to exclude her from any part of that education that i would like i filled out a little yellow form and i could have chosen to pull her out of any random section of that class and i understand that under the new standards school districts will also have that opportunity parents will also still have that choice personally i'm grateful that my child has had the advantage of learning about the reality of 21st century life and her health classes and i think every child should have that opportunity if parents choose to exclude their children from learning that is of course their decision however they should not make that decision for me my child and the many people who perhaps do

100not hold their particular kind of religious values i of course am a pastor and so i have religious values like our friends speaking against these standards i think we have a responsibility to protect nebraska children i would do anything to keep my child safe as well but as a christian and as a member of a democratic society i believe my responsibility is not only to my own child and when i say protect nebraska children i mean all children and the proposed standards will allow some protection for our lgbtq nebraska children from bullying and increased risk of suicide the elementary standards that we are actually discussing today and grade three simply say demonstrate ways to promote dignity and respect for people of all genders gender expressions and gender identities and this kind of education i believe

101can be truly life-saving for nebraska lgbtq kids so thank you school board for being in the business of protecting all children i ask that you stand firm in your inclusion and affirmation of all nebraskans of all gender identities and sexual orientations in the proposed standards thank you clarification in board members thank you reverend jorgensen that concludes that group of eight the next group of eight includes kathy wilmot kirby wilson amy wilson michaela peterson kelly larson tammy larson scott barker stephanie sheer please come forward kathy wilmot kathy walmart former teacher former state board of education member a researcher and so i spent a lot of time at that from your nde website i found a quote comprehensive sexual health education programs ideally start in pre-kindergarten and continue through grade 12. i disagree with that statement many

102of the human growth and development standards that we have now in this draft set of standards actually come straight from the second edition of the national sex education standards they're not health they're sex clear and simple and it says in this in the national standards that they focus on sexual orientation gender identity social racial reproductive justice and that's where the critical race theory begins to enter in is through using those national standards the youth risk behavior survey shows a trend from 2009 to 2019. we keep hearing everything's getting worse but during that time their statistics show students engaged in sexual activity at decreased black white hispanic students whoever had sex decreased illicit drug use decreased decreases also in bullying dating violence for sex until 2017-2019 so what changed i'll tell you what changed omaha lincoln

103and a bunch of those towns adopted comprehensive sex ed into their system and began teaching that abstinence was no longer the required instruction which one was on the state board it was and we even talked in our framework about abstinence instruction no sex outside of marriage monogamous marriage relationships etc in other words abstain from all the dangerous stuff and we saw declines now we're turning around someone needs to track this and see what these new standards could do to us the board's position statement s-1 that's where the evil really came in we need to go back and look at that statement that was approved in september because it talks about the racism thank you point of clarification for you kathy jacqueline then robin i don't want anyone to feel like i'm picking on them i

104promise i'm not but when people tell me where to find things i really just want to make sure i know so you said on our website you said on your website which i assumed is the nde website the term comprehensive sex education i believe your quote was starts from kindergarten through 12. what they think yeah they think it ideally begins in pre-kindergarten where was that on the website um i believe it may be footnoted in the paper i gave you but if not i can certainly give it to you it was up on the health standard somewhere but i'll look i'll find it for you if you could provide that to me i would be most appreciative i sure will thank you robin there's another question for you kathy all right i just uh first

105of all i had the same question but most importantly i wanted to thank you for your years of service on the state board thank you i was going to say i know what y'all are up against when when you've got crowds like this coming at you and i i'm glad you gave me a second here i truly appreciate the time that you're giving us i know this is a thankless job i know you get a huge paycheck check with it i know better you volunteer all your hours and you do rely heavily on the information coming to you but i know from being on the state board too it's easy to end up getting only one side of the issue because staff is always right there and they're on the cutting edge and so it

106takes a lot of research to know you know what's really driving these things where's it coming from when they hand you a policy statement what could the ramifications of that policy statement be so i i'm not jealous of what you're doing right now but i do thank you for taking the time and and trust that you'll do a good job thank you thank you kathy kirby wilson my name is kirby wilson kirby business owner thank you uh we said the pledge of allegiance earlier our nation's motto is in god we trust if this is the one we put our trust in we should probably do everything we can to teach who he is dr benjamin rush signed the declaration of independence served in three presidential administrations helped start five universities three of which still remain

107and was among the first founding fathers to propose nationwide public schools as most educators at that time believe he declared that the bible should be read in our schools in preference to all other books and for over a hundred years it basically was unfortunately our departments of education have removed the bible from the classroom which has caused them to sense a need to create a different standard of education than the one our creator gave hence the reason we are in this room today from what you've already heard there is no need for me to expound on the disgusting sexual garbage that is in the supposed curriculum standards or the lies and hate of the critical race theory which is also proposed everyone in this room knows in their heart that these are wrong for proof

108of that read romans 1 verses 18 through 20. if you'd sip i would simply like to read two verses of instruction from our creator's instruction manual and student guide book this is after jesus called a child and had him stand among the disciples and he said in matthew 18 verses 6 to 7 but if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and be drown in the depth of the sea woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin such things must come but woe to the man through whom they come i shudder the think of the eternal judgment to be handed out to those that would create a standard that

109will cause others to sin in this manner i suggest that you scrap the entirety of your proposed curriculum standards get back to teaching reading writing arithmetic logic reasoning and moral truth it is my understanding that there is no requirement by the state legislature to create these standards i would pray that you completely remove and not replace these standards thank you thank you kirby any points of clarification amy wilson good morning and thank you for being here i'm just saddened for the reason that we are all here i'm asking you to get rid of the sex education you're proposing it is a subject that is better left to the parents to teach to their children and the critical race theory does not belong anywhere in our public education i truly in my heart can't believe someone

110in the united states of america would use children as a political pawn to further their marxist communist socialist and progressive ideas we are talking about children and yes i understand if we can if you can control them now you have a better chance of controlling them later with your leftist ideas but teaching children pornography and to be racist is truly a crime i believe anyone that teaches this curriculum is exploiting children and should be put in jail for child abuse that is what this is so called health education is or whatever you want to label it child abuse any parent that allows the curriculum to be taught to their child is giving consent to exploit their child so again i ask you to please completely get rid of this so-called health education let's get back

111to teaching children reading writing and arithmetic and true history thank you for your time and please remember you are elected officials and the majority of the people you represent do not want this in our public education thank you thank you amy michaela peterson welcome michaela thank you hello my name is michaela peterson and i am a ranch wife momma of four pharmacist and health coach my husband mark and i are passionate about sex trafficking awareness and i'm hoping to bring up a point that may have not been considered last weekend i had the opportunity to visit pure hope ranch in texas for the third time in four years pure hope's mission is to restore and rehabilitate women who have survived sex trafficking as well as to strengthen families i had the privilege of speaking with

112one of the counselors and one thing she said has haunted me and brought prompted me to speak today she said with media movies and curriculums taught in some states sex traffickers don't even need to groom children anymore because they have already been desensitized and have learned inappropriate information i am not sure why we would want to make sex traffickers lives easier by implementing these standards like these into our precious children's educational experience i could not find much science that supports these new standards in fact some of the first states to implement cse were oregon california and washington and i would ask based on the events of the past year's headlines alone how is it working out for them are more well-rounded individuals coming out of these programs are they better equipped to be productive members

113of society we are the good life state as elected officials i am asking that you contend for the voice of parents like us and not only get rid of these proposed standards altogether but instead follow examples like idaho tennessee and florida and ban the teaching of csc completely in our great state thank you thank you michaela tammy larson welcome tammy thank you my name is tammy larson i'm a resident of kearney mother of three children grandmother of five four of them outside the womb all of whom live in nebraska and i'm an educator you'll notice that most of us here are older this doesn't mean old and outdated it's friday and most of those with school age or future school school-aged children are working whether at home or at other workplaces like the overwhelming majority

114of speakers this morning i am speaking out in opposition to draft one of these health standards i have nothing profound to say that hasn't already been said but i want you to know that there are many nebraska's nebraskans in opposition and i represent those who are either too fearful to speak or are unable to be here i am here for them for our community for our state i am thankful for your efforts to listen to the varying opinions of these health standards only you know the majority of the opinions however i would like to suggest that perhaps there are those promoting these new sex education standards that are counting on our past complacency but no more i also wonder about the high likelihood of non-nebraskans who are commenting on these standards whether via email surveys

115or other comments and thereby are trying to influence your decisions i'd like you also to consider the past the present and the future in the past when these standards were written were they truly written with the hearts and minds of our children or were they possibly written with a social political agenda in mind for the future if these standards were to be approved do you recognize that you will have many teachers and families who will be unwilling and unable to continue attendance many will exit the school system and quite honestly many of these teachers and families are those who are good for our schools thank you thank you tammy thank you points of clarification kelly i skipped over you i apologize so kelly larson that's quite all right it's understandable thank you my name is

116kelly larson i'm pastor cornerstone berean church here in kearney but on the document i provided you you have the names of 26 other pastors and churches that i'm representing here today i made the case before you last month that the sex education standards in this proposal are in vital conflict with christian as well as muslim and jewish beliefs and i know that you have been hearing this message repeatedly since there is nothing requiring you to adopt these standards this means that if you choose to do so you are knowingly disregarding and even supplanting the faith convictions of countless nebraskans but today i'm focusing my comments on our pastoral concern for the well-being of our children in reference to gender the proposed standards are not only not grounded in medical science but are actually in harmful

117opposition to them all agree that suicide rates among those struggling with gender dysphoria are extremely high but with this please consider that the prevalence rate of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls is skyrocketing psychology today has reported this but they've also linked this to the suggestive power of social media influencers and peer pressure in other words this dysphoria is often socially constructed meaning that exposing our children to these gender topics in school may actually increase suffering by suggestion and unless something changes this would also increase suicide you've heard that the suicide rates are blamed on a lack of social affirmation but in sweden the suicide rate among those who undergo sex reassignment surgery is still 20 times higher than that of their peers and since sweden is one of the most transgender affirming nations in the

118world this strongly suggests that neither medical treatment nor social affirmation alleviate this issue we are asking you to please recognize that to introduce these concepts into our schools is to recklessly risk the well-being of our children and not on the basis of science but in the days basis of a new belief system for these and many other reasons that i don't have time to state today we are urging that you remove all new sex education topics from these standards thank you thank you kelly clarification scott barker did i say that correctly you did thank you good morning my name is scott barker i'm the bishop of the diocese of nebraska of the episcopal church we are 52 faith communities across the state including saint luke's on the other side of the viaduct here in kearney

119my families lived in nebraska for seven generations there were no public schools when we came to the nebraska territory but once they were built every generation of my family has attended and we have flourished because of that great start in life i'm here to strongly support the standards for health education being considered today i urge you to move forward in adopting these standards unchanged nebraska's schools urgently need this resource to continue offering outstanding education for the youth of our state my support for these standards is based principally on one cherished belief i believe that at the heart of public education lies our shared responsibility to teach young people facts i believe that all the material in this plan which has sparked controversy is factual material and that if neglected as part of the health education

120of our kids may do grave damage to their human development and our social fabric it is a fact that healthy families are structured in every imaginable way under the sun and that children can flourish even in single-parent homes and in two-parent homes and with parents who embrace any sexual orientation or gender identity it is a fact that homosexuality is not a choice or a lifestyle but an orientation planted in human beings i believe by god and many of our nebraska family friends and neighbors seek only to be affirmed as human beings desiring love and liberty like everybody else it's a fact that transgender and other non-binary folks live and work in our midst all across nebraska contributing to our communities in every imaginable way and it is a fact that that population in particular often

121experiences the worst kind of discrimination and violence because of learned prejudice and ignorance and fear it's a fact that comprehensive age edu age-appropriate education about human reproduction and birth control actually brings down the number of stis and unintended pregnancies in the community i respect that for some folks including many here today these facts are uncomfortable they will say these standards are political or unscientific but that is inaccurate as the leader of a large nebraska faith community i thank you for your service and urge you to support these measures and the board will receive the rest of your comments thank you scott can i ask a question point of clarification scott i didn't hear what faith community you represented i'm sorry the episcopal church i'm the bishop of the diocese of nebraska and the diet so

122that's the whole state it's the whole state thank you i appreciate you thank you stephanie sheer welcome stephanie thank you my name is stephanie scheer i'm a mother of four with children in the nebraska school system uh thank you for listening to the comments today and for your service to the board with anything new being proposed there will always be those in favor and those against as you know many stakeholders in the state of nebraska are extremely alarmed at the proposed health standards so maybe we can just take a step back and look at what standards are meant to accomplish it's my understanding that state standards need to be measurable how can you measure a child's understanding of gender identities when there is no existing consensus on how many gender identities actually exist how can

123you measure a child's understanding of ways to respect different family structures when each family structure may feel disrespected by different things looking through the standards it's evident that many of them are immeasurable the board should also be urged to consider the impossible position these standards would put teachers in if you've ever been around five six seven eight year olds you know they ask a lot of questions uh does the board consider it to be within the scope of the teacher's vocational responsibility to explain the spectrum of sexual orientation to third graders uh or think about what a kindergartner might ask when they are taught that a household can have two dads is it really in the best interest of our teachers students and schools to introduce young children to content that in order to be

124fully understood relies heavily on an understanding of adult sexual relationships and interactions as far as teaching young children about differences and how they look or what their families look like kids don't care they don't see the differences my kids go to a very diverse school they don't see color they don't look at someone and think oh they're different from me because they live with their grandma that is not how kids brains work it is how adult brains work however do we really want to ruin that for our children pointing out differences that our kids don't even notice will fracture the unity of our students it is my opinion as a stakeholder in the nebraska public school system that the comprehensive sexuality education and critical race theory components of the health standards be removed thank you

125thank you stephanie that concludes that group of eight dawn darling to shauna sawyer i hope i pronounced that correctly liam rodriguez i can't read the middle marty carrington chris kinzell ruby kinsey andrew gardner gartner and that would be it so dawn would those folks please come forward welcome dawn thank you good morning my name is don darling my pronouns are she her i'm a licensed independent clinical social worker in private practice in kearney providing mental health therapy and specializing in working with gender diverse people i'm here to advocate on behalf of the gender and sexually diverse children of nebraska i'm aware of the fear that the proposed health standards would negatively affect children's mental health i'm here to attest that this is simply not true in fact what negatively affects children's mental health is teaching

126them that gender and sexual diversity is wrong embarrassing or a disgrace since our schools currently do not have anything in the health standards to help guide them in teaching students about gender and sexual diversity our lgbtq children are left having to fend for themselves every day at school i work with children and their parents who tell me they have to come out to and educate their schools and their parents and their peers over and over about their diversity while also navigating the stress of being bullied rejected and discriminated against because others don't understand or accept them for who they are this is what's detrimental to children's mental health credible research shows that teaching children about gender and sexual diversity does not change their genders or sexuality but it does promote positive school outcomes helps them

127feel accepted and helps kids be more accepting of others experiences different from their own when i look at the goals of the state board of education one of your goals is to ensure that all nebraskans have equitable access to opportunities for success by providing resources to students based on what they need to be successful i'm sure that this is meant to include our gender and sexually diverse children and their best chance at success in public school and for their future is to be seen included and accepted at school i'm calling on the nebraska department of education to align themselves with the u.s department of education who advises gender diverse students are covered by title ix and to keep the proposed gender diversity and sex education topics included in the draft health standards thank you dawn

128clarification deborah yes i did i have two questions i didn't first catch your profession did you say your mental health therapist yes i am okay and you work with a variety of students is there a large population of youth that identify as transgender or glbtq that you work with here in kearney yes there are okay yes thank you thank you thank you don deshauna sawyer welcome to shauna thank you i am tashona sawyer and i work for the crisis center in grand island i have worked primarily with trafficking victims for the last four years i want you to think about what you know about trafficking take it and throw it away it is not the movie taken it is not strangers it is people that we know from people that it happens from people that

129we trust trafficking is about manipulation and coercion coercion that happens because children do not understand consent social stigma and shame the individuals i have worked with were not taken advantage of because they didn't understand we're taking it we're taken advantage of because they didn't understand they could say no they didn't have someone they could talk to when they felt something was getting out of control and they didn't know about their bodies boundaries these standards teach children how to protect themselves who to tell when someone is when something is wrong and gives them a voice about their body and their interactions it allows them to understand the world the way it is the reality of today's world can be overwhelming we cannot continue to pretend this these things are not happening kids will learn about consent

130and sexual education in their homes and that they will know what to do because that's not what happens these standards will empower them allow them to have dialogues in the open so children can avoid embarrassment and shame that no one that helps no one but the perpetrators perpetrators thrive on children not knowing what to do when they are exposed to sexual behavior and advances they find where the person is vulnerable and exploit that we need to make sure that children have the language and the knowledge to help them from being victims this curriculum doesn't teach bad behavior it teaches information it is up to parents to teach children values but gives children the language to engage in that conversation the standards teach to the level that the children understand and are built upon by the

131expertise of doctors and psychologists it takes into account developmental levels it staggers the information so children have a chance to process this and work through the questions they have with their families and trusted adults if you want to fight exploitation of nebraska's children you will vote in favor of these standards thank you to shauna clarification from anyone thank you dear lennay paul did i pronounce that correctly lucky me yes welcome lenae thank you i'm lynae hall from hastings i'm a mental health therapist a parent of lgbtq youth and i'm also a queer transgender non-binary human i'm here in support of these health education standards as proposed age-appropriate medically accurate science-based comprehensive sexuality and gender education is a protective measure trauma-informed affirming education and support protects children and youth from abuse and trauma and buffers them

132from mental and emotional health issues related to the stress of discrimination and stigmatization lgbtq youth experience higher rates of depression anxiety and suicidality invalidating messages that their experience in existence is considered defective or evil causes deep trauma this situation is entirely unacceptable when it can be proactively averted through appropriate support and education being trans is not mental illness no major medical or mental health organization considers transgender identities disordered consider this in the natural order of the world a diversity of biological sexes exists and from this a diversity of gender possibilities creation is neither binary nor limited why should we limit our perception interpretation or teaching of it queer and trans kids deserve affirming inclusive health education curriculum that acknowledges the value and validity of their humanity and their existence because their humanity and their existence

133is a gift but not only do queer and trans youth deserve this all youth deserve this comprehensive age and grade appropriate science-based trauma-informed education is protective and empowering for all and can help cultivate an affirming and respectful school environment and inform inclusive anti-discrimination policy that benefits all students i would have wanted this for my teenage self and i want it for my children i want it for the queer and trans youth whom i serve i want it for their mental and emotional well-being their wholeness their psychological and spiritual welfare their wholeness well-being and welfare is ours also i urge you to adopt these standards for the comprehensive inclusive affirming value they offer for all of our youth thank you thank you lanay uh clarification lenae i'm sorry yes you mentioned that this is um being

134transgender gay is not a mental health disorder correct but we've heard today some people quoting the dsm uh can you please help me better understand where your comments come from thank you so that is that is inaccurate information outdated information because um the american psychiatric association the american medical association the american psychological association all support the the um validity of transgender identity sexuality different orientations and that um that has been removed from the dsm-5 you were hearing that earlier that's the diagnostic statistical manual that guides our diagnostic codes being transgender or sexuality different orientations that is not included in their any longer as mental illness that's been removed thank you anyone else for clarification thank you lynnae you're welcome liam i can't pronounce i can't read the middle good morning my name is dr liam

135hirton rodriguez i have a master's degree in clinical social work and a phd in educational psychology specializing in cognition and development i'm an assistant professor of social work at uno though my testimony today is as a private citizen and does not represent any official position of the university of nebraska i appreciate the board's clear commitment to hearing from all constituencies also unsubstantiated outrage is not equivalent to scientific evidence content expertise and practice experience there's been significant fear-mongering regarding the age-appropriateness of some of the proposed standards especially those that address gender and sexuality in reality the proposed standards are deliberately matched to developmental levels and needs and intentionally sequenced across grades different factors influence developmental appropriateness at the standards level the curriculum level and the delivery level at the standards level which the board is operating

136at the primary considerations in determining developmental appropriateness is if the content is one conveyed before it is needed and two is suitably scaffold onto previous knowledge this is why it's crucial that health education including gender and sexuality is sequenced across all of the curriculum sexual risk reduction education taught at age 16 is not developmentally appropriate to the 20 of young people who have had sexual intercourse by age 15. similarly the same lesson is not developmentally appropriate for young people who have never been taught about their own bodies development autonomy consent or assertiveness the scientific evidence that supports comprehensive inclusive and medically accurate health education is overwhelming we know what protects and fosters the physical psychological and social well-being of young people i urge the board to act on that evidence and adopt the proposed health

137education standards thank you liam any clarification thank you again marty carrington i almost skipped over you welcome good morning my name is marty carrington a crier y'all my son almost died last summer my son who is a trans boy attempted suicide and we were lucky and that he was unsuccessful and he tells me he feels lucky he was unsuccessful i have raised my children to use correct words for our body parts we discuss hygiene gender respect consent healthy relationships politics religion openly and honestly we are a home full of open and difficult candid conversations we do this as a supplement to school as most caregivers do and yet still my son almost died when my son attends school for eight hours a day he feels othered he doesn't hear his reality reflected in the language

138used or the examples given or the stories told he is surrounded by many kids whose parents are just not teaching these things at home or worse some children are being taught horrific stereotypes inaccurate information and dangerous rhetoric our kids spend so much time together and when given the right tools they have the power to create a safe and trusting environment within their peer group without these tools they are blowing in the wind perhaps following what they see on social media and non-trustworthy websites my son in an attempt to seek stories similar to his own sought information online and ended up in a wormhole of message boards and blogs that encouraged him to think less of himself to consider self-harm and to ideate about suicide even with scream time rules and parents who monitor content and

139talk about disinformation he was ill-equipped without online literacy training my son almost died i asked this board to approve the proposed health standards which are evidence-based affirming and factual these standards must be passed and incorporated into our school curriculum not only for my son who has my heart but for all of our kids so we can prepare them for not only school but the world beyond thank you chris thank you thank you marty i'm sorry thank you marty clarification deborah uh thank you um at what age did your uh is it your son your son uh no uh or understand what was going on with him uh we began conversations he shared information uh with us he came out as gay when he was about eight and from there went on a journey with him

140and identified as transgender and began transitioning around age 11. and do you have other children i do i have two other children and and what is their reaction to all of this oh my my seven-year-old will be the first to provide correct pronouns if uh someone uses incorrect pronouns um and when we shared with our other children about my son's transition our youngest who is seven um was just okay and we said you know my son uses he him and this is how we'll do it he said oh so i have a brother now um it was it was pretty cool thank you thank you anyone else thank you again marty okay chris kinsey welcome chris good morning my name is chris kinsey and i am a parent of a high school-aged daughter in wayne

141nebraska i am here today in support of adopting the nebraska health education standards as a parent we are always wanting our children's education to be evolving for them to have access to the latest most relevant information when it comes to health education specifically in the area of human growth and development i feel like we are moving in the wrong direction in nebraska schools i honestly feel like less is being taught than when i was in school 30 years ago and i know that our local school has cut things from that area in the last 15 years there have been some updates to the subject and yet we are teaching less instead of more as parents we have no idea when we move to a rural community or another school district what the local school will

142or will not teach the idea that we would have a uniform standard curriculum across the state for health education and as parents would know exactly what to expect is quite comforting imagine my surprise when i realized that that awkward 5th or 6th grade meeting about puberty that we all remember was no longer taught in our local public school but was also not a requirement i was shocked to hear that outdating outdated and impractical version of sexual education my daughter learned in the eighth grade weight training which stands for why am i tempted was riddled with religious connotations and misogyny there is nothing about puberty or hormones and definitely no practical information for children struggling with their sexual orientation or identity nothing to help my struggling child who is asexual and felt there was something wrong

143with her realized that it was okay for her to not be tempted at all i understand that those who oppose this think this is a personal matter only taught at home i agree we should all be talking about sexual education in our homes i firmly believe that we can teach children the scientific standardized information at school and that let parents pick up time thank you very much your your uh document will be seen by all the rest of it thank you thank you chris robin did you have a point of clarification thank you yes i i want to make sure uh not really you don't it's not a question for you i just but when you commented it it triggered something okay so i want to make sure that we understand that standards are very

144broad and that is coming from the department but the curriculum and the teaching of that curriculum is not our privy and i just want to make sure that everybody understands that uh ultimately this is the the in my opinion the greatest example of local control that we have in the state of nebraska when we talk about this standard because ultimately the local school district is going to be responsible for this ruby kinsey welcome ruby hello my name is ruby kinsey i am 17 years old and a junior in high school in wayne nebraska i am here today in support of the nebraska health education standards as a junior in high school the only sexual education i have received in the wayne community school system was an approximately six-week program in the in the eighth grade

145called wait why am i tempted training this was an abstinence-based program focusing on not having sex before marriage although there was some good information regarding healthy relationships and dating it was quite we did learn the proper etiquette for dating and were given several ideas for wholesome dating activities and even planned a date as an activity we were told that we should not ever let a significant other pressure us into sex and the emphasis of other aspects of romantic relationships are more important than sex it was also explained to us using the it was also implied using the visual aid of a piece of duct tape getting less sticky after each use each time it was stuck to to something that the more sexual partners we had throughout our life the less value we would have

146as a romantic and sexual partner the other analogies used to discourage us from having sex before marriage were sex and marriage is like a fire in a fireplace but sex and in marriage is sex outside of marriage is like your house being on fire or sex and marriage is like a fish and it's fish role but sex outside of marriage is like a fish out of water flopping around the program ended with a graphic powerpoint presentation so one of the doctors and wayne about sexually transmitted diseases i assume to scare us the question of why am i tempted was never answered that i can remember what i was never taught in wayne community schools includes nothing about puberty and our growing bodies nothing about human reproduction or how how sex actually works honestly okay thank

147you ruby the rest of your information will be seen by the board i have a question point of clarification for ruby yes please the so sounds like to me what you're talking about was an actual curriculum is that right um so was this a part of a class in school was it part of uh like where how was it it was part of a class that we would um like these different classes that would switch each quarter which one we took and that what this was um basically half of one of those this six week program was it like a graded class i'm just trying to find out like how what part of yes it was graded but it was mostly graded on participation and was it required as part of going to school so

148um parents could exempt their kids but they would have to like go in and talk to the teacher about like the curriculum and why they wanted to exempt their kids and the teacher was a teacher that was employed by your your school district yes okay thank you anyone else thank you andrew gardner welcome andrew hello my name is andrew gartner and i just had three cups of coffee so here we go um i work at the first light child advocacy center in grand island nebraska and i work as a family advocate there family child advocacy centers what they do is they give forensic interviews to children who have been abused and that includes sexual abuse so i just want to point out that every child advocacy center in the state of nebraska approves these standards

149and i will tell you why grand island public schools usually does a thing called safe unsafe touch or good touch bad touch this is in one of the standards for the health standards for what we're talking about and it's taught at an elementary grade level every time they go over this and it's a specific time of year the rates that we need to do interviews go up and the reason for this is because most cases of abuse happen within the home so the reason that these are taught in schools is so children actually get that information and it's not being withheld from parents many of whom would be abusing their children or other adults in the home or sometimes other children so these standards will help give children the language to you know say what's

150happening to them and that includes the proper names of body parts including what a penis is and what a vagina is this makes forensic interviews so much easier because then we know exactly what they're talking about and we know um what to do going forward with abuse and i will also say that consent taught at these ages does not have to include sex at all and it usually doesn't at those ages it just stacks up so it includes you know what's a good touch what's a bad touch um you have the right to say no to hugging or kissing especially from you know relatives who are time okay thank you thank you andrew and all of your information will be disseminated to the board members that you turned in thank you just one question for

151you and if you said it i'm sorry i missed it you said at the advocacy center at which you work whenever particular things are taught at the school you see an increase in calls or intakes what is that age at which you're seeing the increase i mean if it's a certain age at which point at which the curriculum or information is taught and then you see the is there a correlation it would usually be around like kindergarten first second grade uh that's usually when they go over good touch bad touch okay and they report it to a teacher and then they report to us okay thank you um debra we're not done with you and sorry one more andrew we're not dead sorry so you're you're saying in grand island public schools yes and so

152when they teach consent they're really teaching good touch bad touch yes that is not teaching is that did i hear that correctly yes what they're doing is like teaching well we prefer the term safe unsafe touch because good and bad implies like a different okay so like safe unsafe touch is basically the same concept which is in the standards from what my reading is thank you andrew uh our next group of eight will be teddy blaylock marion holstein chad anderson rebecca gilliard gerald kirschner alicia troutman 46 is that right is that eight jody peterson and then paul hazard please come forward teddy welcome teddy hi okay hello my name is teddy blaylock and i'm a public health student at uno i'm also a proud queer and non-binary individual i would like to talk about my

153personal experience with sexual education curriculum in school i am an ex catholic that went to private school my entire life during this time i was told that being different was bad and to conform to heteronormative standards i was not allowed to express my sexuality or gender to any trusted adult in my life i found out i was queer in eighth grade since i was living in such a heavily catholic environment there was no one i could talk to i was scared alone and began to struggle with my mental health i did not feel like i could talk to my parents about this issue because of offhand comments made in the past i couldn't talk to my guidance counselor or my favorite teacher there because they would have told me my feelings were wrong and it

154was just a face when i was in high school i never talked about my sexuality or gender to anyone who i didn't know was explicitly queer though having friends who were the same as me was not enough to fix how catholic institutions broke me from my teachers refusing to teach anything about lgbt people to having debate whether gay people deserve the right to get married to hearing a teacher yell at two girls who held hands during gym class it's extremely disheartening this is why i believe the people who use the argument i don't mind gay or trans people existing as long as my kid is not exposed to it actually translates to i don't support these groups of people and would disown my kid if they came out to me it's no wonder that kids

155don't feel safe coming out to their families i eventually was able to come out to my parents as non-binary that i was changing my name and i was pursuing top surgery however what was supposed to be a moment of relief i was met with anger my parents found excuses for my feelings claiming i had a condition called rapid onset gender dysphoria this unscientific debunked disorder reinforces the idea that being transgender is a fad and what i'm feeling will fade they believe i came to this decision overnight when it had been years in the making it hurts when the people who took care of you and helped you become an adult stop supporting you i was able to create a boundary with my parents with the help of my partner who helped me see thank you

156teddy your information the rest of your speech will be given to the board members clarification thank you teddy thank you thank you marion holstein welcome marian good morning this is a good day my name is marion holstein my traditional name is winnebago woman that was given to me in our traditional medicine lodge which was our spirituality long before our land was occupied good morning president nichols school board members commissioner and nde staff thank you for all the work that you do i'm here to to repeat a few things that i've addressed the board on before first of all the projected teacher shortage and how that will affect our four schools on tribal lands uh you know we i spoke to you before about the necessity for teachers transferring from other states need to take the

157practice practice pay fifteen hundred dollars etc so i want to bring that topic up again another topic i want to discuss is the topic of mascots and how they are still used in some schools within the state and how that really affects our our children's social and emotional well-being and i think this would be a good time for me to recruit members here to also speak up for our native american children and to help protect them and their well-being and their mental health so um currently i am the executor of the nebraska indian education association we have just recently be formed been formed because we notice that there is that lack of the true and accurate history of our people being taught we were not savages we did have spirituality etc thank you thank you

158marion and if you have a document you'd like to hand in with the rest of your information excuse me andrea oh point of clarification dear robin hello miriam yes it for for the rest of you miriam has been in front of the board uh numerous times and we always appreciate um her part thank you in this um and as i'm following this you said something about something facts did anybody else catch it some that something facts are being taught and and i just i just missed it just the facts of our true culture and history i i first stood before this board because of the social study standards and how i wanted to have them improved because all after all this is education we're speaking about and how education evolves and as we do new

159research and have new information we adjust what we're teaching according to that but i having had over 30 years of experience with the head start programs who have standards which are it's up to uh for our standards it's up to the local school school districts and then the teachers to teach in that classroom and i have faith that our teachers will will teach these subjects with compassion and um and nobility i have trust that our teachers will do that and i have trust that our local school boards will get more input but i would like to see input from the students because we're always forgetting the students this is who we're serving and with technology today they probably already know most of this and if it's not taught to them it gets up in here

160and gets all mixed up and comes out a lot differently so thank you thank you thank you marian chad anderson welcome chad thank you before my time starts can i address a question that the board had previously about critical race [Music] i just wanted to provide some clarification from before uh and direct you to some uh buzzwords that were um that were in the in the proposed standards including or phrases including cultural issues social health cultural biases cultural trauma and tools of systemic racism just a few and you'd find it in this red pamphlet that you received earlier so sorry but my name is chad anderson i'm from kearney nebraska i'd like to thank you all for giving me a chance to speak today after reading through the proposed health standards i found the proposed

161curriculum that pertained to diet exercise and substance abuse contained many good things however i found that most of the curriculum that pertain to human growth and development and social emotional and mental health were absolutely unacceptable on all grade levels and here are a few reasons why i feel that way under the proposed standards children will be taught topics on sexuality at much too young of an age i believe that many of the topics should be taught at home versus the school anyway to add to that the students would be taught that being transgender or homosexual is normal or simply another way to identify themselves i believe this is wrong and goes against how we were created and the science that is involved with it emergency contraception was also listed among the things to be taught

162to young girls as a way to get out of an unplanned pregnancy this to me is also absolutely terrible and has no place in the school curriculum lastly i would like to add that i was very displeased to see that mask wearing was listed among the hand washing and coughing and sneezing etiquette in the kindergarten curriculum masks have no place in a permanent curriculum they were intended for temporary use they have no significant benefit in reducing disease thank you chad thank you pardon me sorry that's my fault i picked up the wrong thing he still has more time okay go ahead chad okay thank you i appreciate that uh they have no significant benefit in reducing disease and they are causing much harm to our children both psychologically and physically and they should never be

163instituted again thank you very much for your time thank you clarification anyone thank you chad sorry chad rebecca is it gilliard it is welcome thank you my name is rebecca gilliard i'm a mother and foster mother in kearney i'm representing members of the protect nebraska children coalition and i'm providing public comment in opposition to draft one of the proposed health standards research shows that csc sexualizes children several examples of such overt sexualization can be found in the popular curriculum rights respect and responsibility which has been implemented to some degree in the omaha public school system since 2016. the first example is for kindergarten and i quote so a person with a vulva has three holes between their legs and a very sensitive little area at the top called the clitoris this is kindergarten lesson two

164page two the second example is for second graders and i quote the vagina has great elasticity and can adjust to the size of a penis in second grade that is lesson one page four another example is for sixth graders and i quote ask the students to share the characteristics from their worksheet that describe this romantic relationship and write them beneath the words romantic relationship facilitate the discussion for these possible responses proposing them if they are not mentioned kiss and do other sexual activities that's sixth grade lesson five page two csc curriculus sexualizes our children thus failing to acknowledge that sexually active children are at high risk for multiple negative outcomes specifically in our state the groups and organizations who are part of the writing committee and or influence the contents of the draft one can

165ultimately be traced back to the sexuality information and education council of the united states and planned parenthood who are the current world leaders in creating and promoting cse sexuality information and educational council of the united states is partnered with the united nations educational scientific and cultural organization who has also published the highly controversial international guidelines on sexuality sexuality education additionally our local nebraska groups such as out nebraska and the women's fund of omaha have connections to these organizations as well this material is harmful for our children it should not be included thank you thank you rebecca gerald did i pronounce that correct thank you for thank you for giving me this time this morning uh i ended up taking a lot of notes and and finally decided i needed to park completely from what i

166had submitted to you but my name is gerald kirschner former teacher former professional and former church deacon elder and i'm here speaking not on my authority but on the authority of almighty god and i have lots of friends here who are speaking on that same authority so i have to arrive at this piece of of clarification you need to understand that critical race theory and comprehensive sex education are both stepchildren of critical theory critical theory was designed to create cultural division critical theory comes to us after world war one through the university system thanks to the frankfurt group a marxist group students of marx and engels this objection to comprehensive sex education and objection to critical theory is about those corrosive things working in our culture to divide us black lives matter is no different

167than white lives matter in fact you should just stop putting the race part in it you should say lives matter but why do we say black lives our white lives are oriental lives our asian lives because critical race theory is dominating our culture and it's destroying us now to the question of our the health issue the teaching sexuality in our schools that belongs to the parents the school has no business trying to teach something that requires moral teaching along with its manifestation you can't teach sex without teaching morality and i want my children to teach my grandchildren about sex i don't want some idiot i never met in a school teaching my grandchildren about sex and so i'm done thank you thank you gerald um clarification from anyone alicia welcome alicia hello my name is

168alecia trotman i'm a resident of hastings nebraska and i was raised in ogala nebraska i have a seven-year-old son who is in the first grade and i'm currently pregnant with my second child i'm a licensed social worker and have worked with survivors of violence for more than 10 years with a focus on providing services to survivors of sexual violence for the last six years i also attended the meeting last month in lincoln and heard many opponents of this standard comment that this education should be taught at home i completely agree with this statement but the fact is for many is not being taught at home this is especially true for those children who are most at risk for victimization as a sexual assault survivor myself my education at home did not teach me much about

169sex much less sexual assault my sex education at home consisted of simply being told that it is a sin to have sex before marriage this education did me no good in a situation that was completely out of my control my school at the time at nebraska school did provide basic such as sex education which was helpful in many ways but sexual assault was not included in the curriculum and i was not aware of my options unfortunately my story is in no way in common over the last 10 years i worked with hundreds of survivors of sexual violence many of whom even as adults are not fully aware of their options or understand what all constitutes a sexual assault minors are usually even less educated on the topic of sexual assault and less aware of their

170options i am fully in support of the revised health standards as an individual whose career has focused on sexual assault i know that teaching our children about consent safe touch and proper names for genitalia is crucial in my career i've worked with children who did not properly understand their anatomy i speak from professional experience when i say that a child who cannot explain their body parts or just as detrimental uses nicknames for their body parts can reduce the report's ability to go anywhere in court this results in no justice for the child and no accountability for the offender this is particularly concerning when ninety percent of children were abused by someone with easy access to them thank you alicia jody peterson welcome jody my name is jody peterson i'm here today to ask that you

171pass the proposed health standards i believe that these health standards address the concerns facing our children today they take into consideration physical mental and social health they acknowledge that despite our best efforts as parents and community members our children do experience trauma the standards allow our educators to be both proactive and responsive to children's needs i stand before you today as a mother my own child is gender non-conforming which means they do not experience gender in the way that we traditionally know it however i'd be remiss not to acknowledge that i also have 25 years of experience in the public school system so as much as i speak for my child today they were not the first to help me learn about these issues and understand the difficulty that they faced as well in my

172time today i want to share a little bit about my child who is presently amid the struggle of their life they yearn to be understood by their peers and the adults in their life particularly at school and yet they are trapped while the school staff has been incredibly supportive privately and in one-on-one interactions excuse me my child has been silenced within the classroom as they have made their transition this year fifth grade they have not been able to explain why they're changing their name explain why gender pronouns are important or why they've made the changes that they have it's left everyone feeling a little bit confused and my child feeling alienated school administrators had to consult their legal counsel in order to determine what my child could and couldn't say to whom and when time

173thank you thank you jody if you would like to yes turn that to andrea thank you paul hazard is that correct yes ma'am welcome paul thank you my name is paul hazard i'm a resident of kearney nebraska here i'm a father of three and retired from the law enforcement community i'm giving a public statement in opposition to draft one i'm speaking on behalf of moms dads and parents with some common sense you guys stated prior you said we expect our kids to follow rules in school and we expect you to follow the rules here too i agree i agree with that wouldn't you also agree when a kid is instructed to split into pairs of two and pretend you're in a sexual experience and you're wanting to have it have sex that's in that's in

174the documentation a kid would think they need to comply you really think they're gonna just say no i'm bowing out of this one it's a school of course they're going to comply and as a father of three i'm not okay with that guys let's bring on the law enforcement perspective you just opened a pedophile's dream if you bring this into the state of nebraska a pedophile's dream is this groom break down the walls break down the barriers expose them to things and then guess what now it's more acceptable it's a pedophile's dream and you guys are considering doing this it makes no sense so what happens when you have educated a child on sex oral sex anal sex all of those things guess what you just opened pandora's box because a child learned it in

175school it's safe that's where i'm good that's where i learned it so that's what i'm trying to partake in last thing you are all elected officials here you're all elected by good people and we expect you to do the right thing but some of you are on your phones more than you're even paying attention to this meeting thank you for the time [Music] thank you paul the next group of eight consists of oh john robin you have a point of clarification yes paul sir okay did i hear you correctly that you said in our standards there is uh in that you called it the documentation that there's this two two-person dating game or whatever it was you say that's in our standards where it has you split up into groups and you're i don't want

176to say an acting but you're you're role playing essentially some sort of a sexual type of experience absolutely that is in the nebraska standards as you read in the curriculum okay and see that's the problem guys how is it the community knows more come on i know i i i just want to see it honestly i've read this numerous times and i don't think i've ever seen that so i i really need to see it appreciate it so thank you i guess yes if i can ask a question it's similar to what robin's asking um you referred to documentation so what is the document that you are referencing because the document that we have seen doesn't have that reference in it so if you could refer me to that document you don't have to do

177it right now then we can review that but i i guess we're confused about which document you're referring to fair i think it's also fair that it's been referred to numerous times here so it's not made up we'll provide it but one last thing along those same lines it's also the guidelines you're talking about right no so no no i'm just saying what we're referring to is everything inside those guidelines it's up to each individual community to teach that's what you guys just said no the only question i'm asking is you said what you referenced today was in documentation so could you provide us the documentation you're referring to thank you that's awesome yes ma'am patty i paul we're not done no i this is not directed to paul thank you though for coming back

178i would like to just request a very short recess and i'm requesting that because having listened to all of this public comment i want to be sure that my attention is maintained and i'm at the point and i don't know if that's true of other board members but i'm at the point that i just need five minutes just to kind of it's a decompressible perfect time because we were up for the next group of eight so we will take a it's 1206 right now we will come back at uh 12 15. the next eight individuals will be jennifer thomas theresa cook bill starkey tiffany wiese jeremy erickson i believe lana bishop dwayne lineman i and caleb rohr i'm sure i mispronounced a few of these names forgive me thank you jennifer welcome jennifer thank you

179good morning and thank you for giving us the time to speak today again my name is jennifer thomas my husband and i have children in third and eighth grades in public schools please indulge me while i brag on them just a little bit academically they're in the 98th to 99th percentile in reading and math straight a's more importantly they're kind they're respectful to their classmates their teachers the number of times i've ever heard anything other than that thankfully zero they love school they love to learn we teach them to treat others with love kindness regardless of a person's physical characteristics their religion or their lifestyle choices i read the proposed health standards and quite honestly i was appalled it seems to me telling me as a parent that i don't know what i'm doing so

180it's now the mission of the board to put these standards in place to replace our moral beliefs in our home with theirs but i think my family and i are doing just fine in that arena the comprehensive sexual education outlined in the proposed standards aims to sexualize our children it's robbing our children of their innocence it's projecting the liberal adults obsession with all things sexual onto our children is grooming our children for sexual and psychological abuse it is child abuse i've seen the claim that these standards are age-appropriate and medically accurate but they're neither it's medically impossible for a girl born with xx chromosomes to be a boy or a boy born with yy chromosomes to be a girl their bodies can be surgically altered given hormones doesn't make a male a female or vice

181versa i could present you with many more examples of how this ideology is factually wrong medically inaccurate unscientific and age inappropriate much evidence exists to support that view if you believe differently anything i say here is unlikely to convince you and you're entitled to your opinion but perhaps i can appeal to what i hope is our shared american value of liberty freedom and the rights of parents to teach their children these sensitive topics in accordance with their values thank you for the extra seconds thank you jennifer any points of clarification teresa welcome teresa thank you good afternoon um i am a grandmother of three beautiful children and one of them is currently in the school system and the other two we've got one one coming up this year um after reading the proposed health standards

182i'm reaching out to you to let you know that i strongly oppose these standards and ask you to scrap every part that deals with sexuality gender relationship content content as well as critical race theory at all levels these standards are highly inappropriate for children are based on an ideology that many nebraskans find very unsettling many nebraskans including myself believe not only this but that it will sexualize our youth if the proposed health standards are passed many parents will be forced to pull their children out of public schools teachers will be forced to decide between going against their own conscience to teach these ideas and theories or to quit their jobs this is not right and it is not fair to pass these standards parents are responsible for their children and have the right to teach

183what they deem is right for their children and what they are taught in school let's get back to the fact-based core learning like math true history and science there are things that we should all support that are unifying let's teach our kids to be kind to each other and stop bullying let's teach kids patriotic love for our country and for those who gave all of our gave all for our freedom let's teach kids to look into people's hearts and and the content of their character we can come together in unity i want to be able to trust our school system our school boards the board of education please scrap these proposed health standards and the divisive critical race theory our children deserve better thank you thank you teresa clarification from anyone bill starkey welcome bill

184bill starge hastings nebraska i'm here to testify against adopting the proposed nebraska health education standards in particular the human growth and development content strand i want to give you as a conservative christian i believe that our school systems should not be taken on themselves to cross over into family cultural issues and proclaim that they are the all-knowing in the realm of comprehensive sexual education in the state of nebraska comprehensive sexual education should remain solidly in the dominion of traditional family values to take the that responsibility from the family unit and present it to our children in a cookie cutter curriculum does that does not take into account age appropriateness is morally wrong and does not fit with traditional nebraska values though i do not have issues with traditional sex education in schools at an age

185appropriate level that lays out basic reproductive responsibilities for men and women to teach recreational sex techniques and the emotional responses that are tied to it is beyond the scope and responsibilities of the schools my reasoning is simple children are not to be sexualized and by teaching about these highly sensitive topics and these proposed standards in a very public way amongst peers and strangers alike that will take us down that slope young brains cannot sort out appropriateness for complex ideas and they tend to follow the lead of older individuals in perceiving what normal is in society children are easily influenced by those individuals in positions of power in their lives children can be desensitized to the idea that sex is the expectation of any male female relationship when taught through these standards in such a graphic

186manner if a child has a question then a social worker or counselor in concert with the child's family can work together to answer those questions at an age appropriate time i say no to adopting these proposed standards for comprehensive sexual education by the board thank you thank you bill clarification points tiffany wiese did i say that correct twice twice tiffany weiss welcome tiffany thank you i'm here today to talk about the health standards and i really hope that you guys will adopt them i have many lenses that i could look at this through i am an educator i teach in the public school system i have five children who are from preschool to fifth grade but the thing that i think is most important is that i'm the parent of a gender and gender diverse

187child my son was seven when he first tried to kill himself and i can't tell you as a parent having a child that young and what you have to do to keep them safe and it was because he couldn't tell us he didn't have the words now he kept saying things like i want i want to be a boy i i'm a tomboy i heard a tomboy a lot but he didn't have language he didn't have the word transgender he didn't have the word gender diverse he didn't know how to tell us and we didn't know how to ask i mean i had never expected that to happen in my family with my children and so instead at seven years old i had a child who wanted to kill themselves he transitioned he sorry what

188finally made the difference for him is um he saw a performance by brodie ray rangi who is a carney native and who was on america's got talent and they did like a little blurb and they talked about him being transgender and my son looked at me and he said mom that is me that is it and as soon as we knew as soon as we could put language to it we found a therapist we found help we got more and more resources he transitioned at age nine at school he was in third grade and i want to say the teachers and the staff have been great but the kids haven't just he's in fifth grade now and two years or two days ago he came to me and said mom my friend said that i'm

189not really a boy because god didn't make me a boy and he gets very confused time thank you tiffany points of clarification thank you tiffany jeremy jeremy erickson is it first i wish to plant my preferred name is julia i am a trans woman i have always been a trans woman as long as i can remember i started my transition at 39 i do support this bill as i did not have words to describe this and until i was 17 and i was always signed out of the healthcare health plans as a child as long as i can remember this led to me being raped and abused many of my years unable to explain what was happening to me even until my early adult life this has required me many years of therapy even to

190now even leading to many suicide attempts and much dysphoria um and i still fight for a lot of i think i know this country is based on equality and i really think we need to really embrace it by now i'm up for any questions points of clarification debra how old were you when you knew um you felt different than the way you were born honestly even one or two i have a question are you done deborah quick question um at your young age did you have someone safe to i didn't hear if you said you had someone safe you could talk to no i did not okay i actually when i even started to try to talk to people at ages of 17 i was actually pushed back told i was just a heterocyst male

191uh basically born male and just tried to push back and i was just goofing around her joking about how i was and pushed back at that i was actually i've been terminated from jobs identifying as female so i feel like this country has always been based on accepting people for for race and everything i think we need to finally get to that point even the state so thank you thank you so much lana bishop lana okay dwayne lineman i hope i have that close enough welcome thank you i'm dwane letterman from blue hill nebraska i stand opposed to the proposed standards i'm a retired educator of 47 years and i i think there's no doubt agenda-driven progressive radicals have been entrenched for many years and their entire educational system they haven't introduced a gradual but

192constant litany of anti-family anti-christian anti-conservative and anti-american ideology but now at breakneck speed this effort has now gone to the next level under the pretext of health education to expand a social justice agenda with extreme sex education and critical race theory woven in the proposed health education standards and i'm certain through social studies and history this is indoctrination not education we remember that one size does not fit all a question i question the validity of a guide for sex education training or race theories for k-12 there's no need to blanket a curriculum standard it can be so divisive and dangerous especially in today's sad environment of abuse division pedophilia and sex trafficking i don't think we as citizens parents and educators should take a chance on being seen as grooming young people for predators that

193may sound out there but is it can you guarantee it can't and won't happen children are our greatest treasures certain culture and government entities seek to expose normalize and sexualize our children for the sake of political agenda desensitize our communities to sex and expand sexual diversions and perversions we must protect our children nurture their minds and hearts by our standards not yours we will fight for their innocence and protect them from harm you as elected officials are to represent the people in this state not some agenda orders from a higher progressive organization or liberal group think i have two questions for you can we count on you to follow that objective of adhering to the wishes of the majority the voices in this room number two how can we know that you haven't already made

194up your minds and this all is just theater theater to somehow appease us thank you thank you any points of clarification thank you very much dwight i would like to make one statement if i could an answer to a question was put out your time is up thank you caleb rohrer welcome caleb thank you i am a kearney resident and a student at the university of nebraska at kearney and today i am speaking and i represent nearly 52 000 students of the nebraska university and speaking support of 6 000 of our fellow students that have reported being the victims of sexual assault a student's coming out of our school system that is being affected by this this proposal we have to acknowledge that if the existing standards were sufficient that one in four women in

195doane university would not have been the victims of sexual assault and the one in ten students in the university of nebraska would not be the victims of sexual assault we require health standards that teach consent and respect for one another much earlier on in the developmental stage by the time we get to high school it's too late and i know that these numbers are underrepresented i know this because i did not report my own sexual assault when it happened my freshman year of college and i know that the multiple partners that i've had since have also not reported their sexual assaults when it happened to them there's a stigma against it and we are not educated from an early age how to communicate that with our fellow classmates with our teachers with our parents with

196others in our community unfortunately we are not taught well enough at home either as it has clearly led to deficiencies in college this goes on well past college as well however i cannot speak to that as i have not graduated yet i am not walking this morning because i am here thank you debra i don't want to further traumatize you with my questions so if you don't want to answer i'll understand feel free um but i'm curious um do you feel like if you would have been taught some of these concepts as a young person that it would have protected you from some of the trauma that was forced on you yeah um absolutely um simple things like understanding the way to say no um the ways that you can convey your lack of consent

197without sounding like well as my classmates uh my freshman year would call it um well i'm not gonna use that language here but you're not allowed to say that was a man often times you jacqueline just one point of clarification when you said that you were here on behalf of the students representing the university of nebraska or university of nebraska at kearney or is that in an official capacity or as a student are you a member of the student body organization member of the student body okay thank you thank you caleb thank you very much okay our next group of eight greg schack amanda ristin judy carmez kermazen lynette mitchell cynthia getty jacob reiter susan b great welcome greg good morning thank you board for being here my name is greg schacherly i live here

198in kearney i'm married to a wonderful woman and have been for 20 years we've received many blessings from god but children are not one of them we're childless i represent the average man born to the union of a man and a woman as all of you are that's the only way population increases as i understand the law the board members present today are tasked with making informed and wholesome decisions representing their voter base which will affect the children of this state that is a huge responsibility and i thank you for being willing to shoulder it it's heavy being self-employed i'm one of the privileged few who can opt to attend this meeting instead of going to work otherwise this room could not contain those who are concerned about this issue the board has heard a

199cornucopia of information and misinformation in the past several hours as i have you've also heard a plethora of opinions i'm going to leave you with one question a question asked in a famous courtroom by a famous person to even more famous person what is truth thank you for your time thank you great points of clarification thanks again greg amanda is it risting rich stein welcome dear thank you i am amanda ristein from gothenburg nebraska i am here today as a concerned parent and business owner in our state strongly opposing draft one of the proposed health standards which includes comprehensive sexuality education and the controversial political ideology of critical race theory i was privileged to be in attendance monday evening to listen to governor ricketts speak on the proposed health standards as governor rickards said monday

200the state board of education is not required to have health standards you are simply choosing to create the standards audrey werner founder and president of matthew 17 group said it best stating quote sex education is evil at its core sex education was never designed to decrease teen pregnancy or stds rather prepare a child for sex end quote several of these topics included in the proposed standards should be addressed with children at the discretion of their parents and guardians i feel it is important for families to have these conversations at home that are consistent with their values and faith you the state board of education are creating standards that represent a large group of nebraskans and i choose and chose not to include certain groups to have opinions from both sides but included out nebraska for

201their input and participation for someone trying to navigate through all the material and information this is a huge red flag and is very alarming these are far more than just health standards i continue to be very concerned with the proposed standards and how they will affect our children i'm standing with governor rickards and several other nebraskans on this one and asking the state board of education to scrap the standards thank you thank you amanda points of clarification thanks again [Music] thank you thank you board for being here today excuse me my name is judy karmazine i'm from gibbon nebraska i'm a retired senior litigation paralegal i am a member of the concerned women of america the pacific law center and protect nebraskan children and buffalo county republican women i oppose the draft and one and

202i did pro bono work in california as a paralegal as my 300 hours that i needed to do every three years i worked with women and children that came from abusive situations especially the children after a similar draft one was passed in california we found that it was harder for us to prepare our children that had been abused for court because they had come to believe that the abuse was their fault it was normal and they didn't think anything was wrong and they were as young as five this is why i oppose it because i witnessed the damage that could be done as a individual i my biological father sexually abused my older sister she was too scared to say anything to my mother i witnessed it as young as five i didn't know what

203he was doing i didn't have the names i didn't need to know the names i just knew it was wrong i told my mother and i got it stopped by not having the information i don't want our children and my children and grandchild time thank you judy thank you lynette mitchell any questions if you have a a document of your speech judy if you have a document of your speech and would like the board to see a copy of the rest of it okay thank you welcome lynette thank you i serve on my local school board so i know how much time and effort goes into to some of this so thank you for your time today i don't have any prepared written remarks i just was reading through the standards off of your website

204and as a college graduate mother of three and grandmother of two there were questions on there that were expecting elementary students to answer that i could not answer and the fact that we're looking at giving small children the information that you would need to answer the questions that these standards are looking to have answered is appalling to me i hope that you will rethink the health standards that you're looking at and get back to something that is more biological so thank you thank you lynette cynthia getty welcome cynthia good afternoon my name is cynthia getty and i'm here speaking for myself i'm a retired teacher of 34 years i'm a mother i'm a grandmother i'm a farm property owner and i'm a lifelong citizen of the state of nebraska the public schools of nebraska were

205and continue to be here and they're given the task of educating our youth this was my goal for 34 years as a teacher and just as today time is always a factor i can tell you from personal experience that i was not nor were any of my students parents or board members overly concerned or worried about many of the topics in this health education framework we were and continue to be worried about teaching our youth basic skills in reading language math so that they can be successful we want them to be successful in life and i know of no district in this state where all the students are at or above grade level in these basic skills let's have our schools use their time because this is always in short supply to educate our students

206so they can be successful so they can be happy and be protected productive and not end up in our legal system as they tell us that many or most of our incarcerated individuals are there because they lack these basic skills to be successful let's make our students successful one of the speakers earlier talked about that she had dealt with the number of the students here and it was a substantial number here in kearney when my sister asked her sitting next to her how much is substantial she said 20. i don't know what the population of the schools in corny is but i have a hearing impaired grandchild that's incarnate and i'm betting that there's probably more than 20 hearing impaired grand children in kearney public schools i don't expect them to stop the curriculum from

207the reading and the writing and the math to teach everybody sign language or to teach them how the ear functions before using our time and going off task to do other activities such as these health standards you have i suggest that our schools are here to teach the basic skills first let's have them focus on that and use their time to teach the basic skills to our children of nebraska thank you cynthia point of clarification thank you you said you were a teacher yes i was what grade i just wonder what grades you taught actually i taught k through 12. the first seven years that i taught i taught out in a rural school i was the only teacher in that school and i had grades k through eight so i taught everything from math

208to pe to health to reading and we had great in fact i still communicate with a number of my students who have kids that have now graduated after that i went into the public school where i live and i taught for 27 more years and i had their special ed program i started out and i had the whole k-12 program later on it became too much and one of my student teachers actually said i'll stay and i'll teach the k-6 but i can't handle the older kids so for the last several years i had the seven through 12 and then i also had junior high or not junior high i had all their concessions and cheerleaders and you know but all the teachers have but yeah i dealt with a number of students parents and

209yeah i ran one of the few that probably ran the gamut of k-12 during their teaching career so thank you thank you we should clap jacob jacob ryder reader susan big okay okay we will go on to our last close to our last group um dorothy renter murr [Music] i know i slaughtered that beverly williams mark bart barton neck greg swenny is that eight four jake weiss mary henny i've lost track pardon me okay dorothy renter mercades damertowski there right up to the microphone okay hello everybody welcome who do we have with us yeah okay let's get them on these shoulders okay hello my name is mercedes damertowski i'm the secretary of the tri-cities libertarian party of nebraska i also ran for nebraska state legislature district 37 last year i'm out of breath and i

210have a really cute topic in my head i'm here today to speak to you about why we need this i was born in 1990 to a teenager mother she was 16 when she happy they asked her to drop out of school she didn't she had choices she she had adoption she had abortion she chose to kept me she had choices as a child i was raped and sexually molested because of franklin scandal i was saved because of the school system i was saved because i had someone safe i could talk to i was removed not removed from the situation i was in i was giving the tools to protect myself i was able to tell someone what was happening to me because half of my family made sure i was educated in my bodily anatomy

211because of that i was able to stand up for myself as a child against my abusers i myself broke the cycle because i was enabled to do so my daughter is the age in which these people want to groom her i know because they are trying to come around and do it we need this i am 30 years old and i am a victim of this i'm tired of it i'm tired of watching it tired of the children getting lost in the system because of it i'm tired of the lack of education around it i'm a mom and it's mother's day i have my daughter sitting on my shoulders because i don't have safe child care for her in this area that's all i have to say thank you mercedes any points of clarification and

212what is your daughter's name her name is cora may she's named after her great grandmother that came here and settled in assault house she's a cutie thank you for bringing her beverly williams mark barton neck is that you i slaughtered your name mark i know i did not the first time and it won't be the last well no one usually spells my last name correctly well this is a tough act to follow does anybody want to get up on my phone you know i i um you know you've heard a lot of both sides today i some i agreed with some i totally disagree with it's hard hard choices i i guess personally i fail to see how these standards could possibly prevent some of the sad stories that we've heard you mentioned my last

213name i i went through school where i was constantly tortured and abused mentally and physically not sexually i don't know how anybody could have a standard you know health-wise or whatever that would have prevented that i could tell you a long sad sob story that includes suicide attempts i'm not sure that has a place in this conversation but what i do have as i i'll confess i did not read all the proposed standards i mean there's just too much there and to try to address point by point but in reading it i had two emotions one was sadness and the other was anger i was sad because anybody would think is proper to expose our very young to sexually explicit content in the name of education i was angry because anyone would think is proper

214to expose our very young to sexually explicit content in the name of education children are most vulnerable citizens and they're in need of proper nurturing and development sexualizing the young is hardly the hallmark of society seeking to protect their young we live in a society with very few moral constraints it's no wonder that in this vacuum of morality that human life is held so cheaply that mass shootings child sex sexual exploitation exploitation are commonplace i strongly oppose the proposed changes and ask the board time mark to do the right thing and reject them thank you thank you it's your fault mark that i didn't get that one up there it's your fault that i didn't get the one up there longer as long as it should have been it's my fault thank you thank you

215greg swinney jake whis weiss you can correct me welcome jake hi uh my name is dr jake weiss and i am a professor of mathematics and statistics at unk i am not here in any professional capacity though i'm here as a parent um but i can't get away from some numbers so i want to speak about the protect nebraska children coalition that claims to have almost 11 000 members and uh did a little quick math and that's about half a percent of the population in nebraska whereas according to the aclu there are 67 000 nebraskans who identify as lgbtq that's over six times that and that number is surely low i just think that the best way that we can protect our children's to educate them and these new new policies and curriculum i think

216are wonderful you know people are saying that they want to have the ability to educate their their kids at home and that's fine you can educate them but you know the fact is a lot of their education is ignoring the fact that these people are out there um you know there are gay and bisexual youth in school and there are transgender youth in school in fact my son is transgender my wife was up here earlier and talked about that and i wanted to mention if these are age-appropriate i have a four-year-old daughter and she completely understands that she has an aunt and uncle who lived together and are not married she understands that her friend has two moms and no dad and she understands that her brother who was assigned female at birth is a

217boy in his heart and in his mind and she has she's four years old she has no problem understanding that and you know i think that's what we need for our kids thank you thank you jake points of clarification thank you so much thank you okay we're nearing the end i have mary henning carolyn mccurry reverend tyler hopdmeyer and andy forsberg mary thank you number one thank you for sticking around people this is pretty nice over the noon hour like this uh my name is mary henning i am a grandmother of course a mother too but uh from kearney nebraska and i've been listening to this all morning and i've heard a lot of opposition to what you're doing and i think the main thing is what would happen if this was faith-based curriculum and

218we taught people to love one another and not to be so explicit about this i think our schools should teach reading writing arithmetic i don't think they need to teach sexual things i didn't learn that till i was out of college and married for heaven's sakes you know i i think it's good that we understand that people are people i taught my children long time ago you don't look at a person on the outside you look at them on the inside and i think so many times today we forget to look at the soul of somebody instead of how they're acting sometimes and i would hope that we as parents would have that and grandparents have that right to teach our children that these things are good for about everybody but teach them faith-based things

219we've lost that in our our life today and i think we need to go back to that thank you time thank you mary questions carolyn mccurry welcome carolyn thank you my name is carolyn mccurry i was born and raised in central nebraska on a farm i went to elementary school at one room country school k through eighth grade and i've been married to my husband jim for 46 years we raised our three grown married children together two became special education teachers in nebraska and one is an air force pilot instructor and serving as a major in the united states air force i am a retired elementary teacher after teaching for 36 years having named having earned a master's degree in education from doane college which is a well-known program for education i've always been an

220advocate for children and parents notice i didn't include teachers or administrators so i didn't always get along with those anyway in one of my graduate classes i learned that the reasoning part of a child's brain does not fully develop until they are 20 and for some even longer your standards do not coincide with the development of children your standards are not health education but sex education i believe that parents should be in charge of that and if they don't know how to do it then they can get somebody outside the school to help i'm totally against the local state board of education dictating and federal dictating these standards on teachers in a fits one-size-fits-all fashion who knows and loves their children best not any board of education or group of liberal teachers i ask that

221you listen to the people in your decisions making concerning these standards you as a board represent the majority after listening to all the speeches and response that the majority here does not support your standards thank you thank you carol points of clarification jacqueline i feel like i just have to be fair and ask you where you taught too i'm hot do you wanna know i taught in council bluffs my husband was a salesman i taught in council bluffs at a larger school i taught in um let's see let me think i gotta go down grand island uh wood river ansley and my last ten years were in lexington nebraska with the immigrant fan families who i love and i appreciate and those 10 years were my most challenging and most rewarding time in my life

222i did not retire because i didn't love children in education i retired because i can't deal with the way our system is treating children in a one-size-fits-all model with scripted materials i am angry right now but i'm not angry at you i'm just frustrated i have seven beautiful grandchildren and my children are all still married and they raise those children and jim and i work together to raise our children to have a moral fiber that fits with the way i believe people should be treated please please don't adopt these standards it breaks my heart to know that my little six-year-old grandchildren are having to face learning all about sex and oral sex i don't know what time they're gonna have to learn about oral sex but is this what you would want for your grandchildren

223thank you thank you thank you thank you carolyn reverend tyler hoffmeyer and last but not least andy forsberg welcome andy somebody's got to be last okay thank you since the federal government began its major contraception program in 1970 and we unread pregnancies have increased 87 percent among 15 to 19 year olds abortions among teens rose 67 percent unwed burst went up 61 percent vd has affected a generation of young people adams city high school in commerce city colorado started giving out condoms and other innovative programs three years later the birth rate rose 31 above the national average in washington dc at a an african-american school in seven in a seven year period only one out of 400 female students was found to be pregnant while under a certain abstinence-based program experience teaches that teaches us

224that the right kind of abstinence-based sex that works while a condom distribution can backfire please oppose these standards thank you thank you microphone thank you andy uh this concludes our uh public comment time agenda item 2.3 written public comment we have written public comments submitted from several members of the public the written public documents are linked in two documents in the spark data system these written comments have been made available to the board members prior to this meeting it is now 106 and at this point in time we will recess for the board to have lunch okay we have resumed uh following lunch we are now on agenda item three the commissioner's report commissioner i'm going to let you do 3.1 3.2 3.3 and 3.4 it's all yours all right um so uh first of

225all just thanks for uh this morning and being able to listen to the various comments i will i will note we actually posted some of the kind of points of clarification uh on spark around some of the common themes that that um you know that folks are kind of confusing i guess when when they're doing that so thanks also for your questions of folks to kind of help help provide that clarification um one thing before i get started too far i want to recognize steve milliken we don't have anything formal here but uh steve milliken of course has been deputy for a long time now i don't even know how long but uh steve is actually retiring he asked me to read that he could retire like a year ago and i said no so

226um we finally are going to let that happen but thank you steve for your service i know it's your last board meeting we try to make it memorable for you so [Applause] i will jump to the rules you can see the hearing drafts that are approved by the commissioner in the public hearing schedule and that's on your in your uh spark meeting you can see that we have uh well essentially rule 1 rule 2 rule 28 and the repeal of rule 29 and hearing scheduled my uh computer monitor is really small for me here all of a sudden so looks like june 1st and june 22nd we have hearings uh scheduled for uh i guess it's rule two on june 1st and then on june 22nd uh rule uh 28 so so anyway that's there

227for your for your awareness um now i'm gonna go on to the the next one uh oh i'm sorry i forgot to do the reminder on consent agenda so we'll have a consent agenda up and i don't believe we've had any no items uh to be removed from consent agenda so we'll take that up in normal order um i guess board operations information so ryan is there anything you'd like to share no i'm sorry there he is all right and then i i wanted to just there's a document within within my report there about some of the esther and various federal funds real a lot of credit to our team certainly jen udemark and lane carr both were kind of helping put this summary together i'm not going to go through it in great detail

228certainly we can we can send it to you by email too so you can see that i'm actually very nice on this is that they included some links so actually i think i will email it to you so you have it in that format as well so you can kind of look at the various uh funds obviously some of the other agenda items that we have today are in relation to where we're where we're deciding to try to invest funds to uh address these uh particular federal um well i'm gonna say funds again i'm sorry about that so anyway uh uh but certainly some of our intent and where we're trying to go with it is is described within within this particular document so with that i think i will be brief because that might

229be the best for us at the moment i think that's all that we have so i'll turn it back to you president nichols thank you mike thank you commissioner um agenda item four special presentations and discussions we have none today agenda item five the president's report and that would be me i'm just going to cut to the chase about it's the first full week in may and it constitutes teacher appreciation week so i hope that if you haven't done a shout out to your friends who are educators throughout the state that you know give it a thought it goes through tomorrow wednesday was the big day but the great thing about teacher appreciation week is that uh they get to soak up all the love and fun from people that appreciate our teachers and with

230the tough year that it's been uh through this pandemic um they they have done tremendous work they had no manual to work from to tell them how to work with kids how to get kids to trust them if they had to work remotely so they've had a a long year and on top of it being teacher appreciation week with it being may it's a month of celebrations when it comes to our schools graduation graduation not just of high school students but of kindergartners sometimes elementary grades there's a fifth or sixth grade graduation so uh it's just a time of a lot of celebration family time and then school ending well for most schools i think some kind of maybe in the omaha area metro area get out early june but you know the end of

231a year and to think about the year that we have had with the pandemic and i go back to all the work that our schools have done this year in keeping the schools open almost all year long for our students that is huge so a big shout out to our schools and our families that support our schools across the state that ends my report agenda item 6 the consent agenda is there a motion to approve the consent agenda patty i move to approve the consent agenda do i have a second i second that motion okay the motion was made by patty seconded by patsy per board policy there is no discussion on the motion to approve the consent agenda andrea please call the roll morrison yes neary yes fricky yes nichols yes stevens yes googles

232yes co john's yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes thank you andrea agenda item seven standing committee reports agenda item 7.1 the policy committee with pat being gone do i have someone from the policy committee to provide the report patty would you do that for us thank you the policy committee continues discussion of the reorganization of the state board policy reference manual and the committee really has determined that our first task is to identify and to define bylaws these are just possible codes but bylaws would be bl blw board operating policies bop agency management policies amp and then position statements ps and model policies mp state board bylaw b12 policy development is still being reviewed and discussed in conjunction with the reorganization and the committee will make appropriate changes to this bylaw as the

233reorganization progresses the committee also discussed state board bylaw b10 hearing officers the committee will continue discussion of staff's proposed revisions at our june policy committee meeting the committee began our four-year review of state board bylaw b8 which is parliamentary procedures rules of order and state board bylaw b15 board minutes this concludes the policy committee report thank you pat is there any discussion regarding the policy committee's report robin uh i think it was yeah it was on the hearing officer and i noticed that there was a change in there and i guess it had to do with wanting to make sure that attorneys were the ones who ran that was this and i'm you may or may not know the answer but was this uh a previous practice even though it wasn't in writing that that's

234what we had always done and so you just decided to put it into to writing or was there an issue i guess would be my question there there was not an issue it was included for clarification it reflects what has been the practice jacqueline do you want to add anything to that no um it was it there was not a requirement that a hearing officer be an attorney and there was not a requirement that it be an outside or an external hearing officer but since the department had been following that we just decided we would add it to the policy to make it clear going forward thank you and if i'm not mistaken was there you're creating a list or there was a list of of people who were of attorneys who were willing to

235do that and i'm trying to recall this isn't going to cause any shortage or anything like that okay that sounds good thank you thank you anyone else okay moving on to agenda item 7.2 the legislative committee robin please provide a report give me just a quick moment i'm gonna i want to get that make sure i've got that pulled up on my electronic agenda here if there is one thing that i want to want us to do in i think different times we've asked for homework uh and that kind of thing uh the commissioner and brian have been working uh with senators or want to work with senators so that we can meet we being the legislative committee can meet with the chair and the co-chair of the education committee and that sort of thing

236and maybe other people involved in education policy or legislation and so i i know you get tired of hearing me say this but at 7.2 it would be the area of 2021 2022 legislative and regulatory priorities state board draft and 423 uh 21. pay try to pull that up and and we really want to get that updated because if we're going to start visiting right away with legislators we want to have that document as updated as possible so i know all the legislative committee members are going to be working on that but we want to make sure that the four people who are not members of the legislative committee give us input on that as well and i don't i can't remember and i'm looking to my committee or or uh commissioner was there a

237date or a time that we wanted to have that information like was it the june board meeting or or anything like that i can't remember do you think it was a june board meeting so i guess what you're saying is get that in for anything you as you read through that that you can that you want to update we really want to hit the ground running visiting with the education chair and the co-chairs walls and and moorefield we really think that this document is crucial other than that um i mean we could talk about the legislative bills and where they are but all of that information is also included in our agenda here so if you you have a particular one that you're interested in that all that information should be there for you and

238and with that i re uh refer to my colleagues as to anything else that they might want to add and obviously the commissioner if there's something that you would want to make sure that that we bring forth okay maureen yeah i just uh it's my understanding that this week lb 996 uh broadband uh internet bill that i believe we supported uh was passed uh without any opposition and the governor has already signed it that already has an emergency clause so it begins right away correct uh you're giving me information that is new and but i will assume that my uh president has all of that down to a science because she usually calls me regularly and make making sure that i'm doing things correctly well i double checked on it last night and what i

239not unders what i didn't understand was uh is it was it 20 million dollars put out or 40 million dollars put out do you know no i don't and i'll look to the commissioner or i don't know if brian is is he online with us and and maybe they could update us as well i can say this that that is a very exciting thing to uh and we've heard about it at the national level we've been talking about it and struggling with it for a long time at the state level uh and that's very exciting uh information thanks maureen absolutely yes anybody know about the 20 to 40 minute uh brian oh brian is there thanks brian come to our come to my rescue good afternoon everyone brian halstead deputy commissioner i believe the bill

240that senate uh president nichols is referring to is lb 338 which did have the emergency clause it is on the second page of your list of bill documents so it has gone into effect in that regard the other one is the transportation's committee's priority bill and that one does include additional funding for broadband i don't believe the the transportation committee bill has yet made it to final reading but it's upcoming and clearly something we're hoping the legislature enacts obviously the mainline budget bill that the legislature adopted has money there for that bill so in that regard that's the two biggest pieces of broadband or internet bills this session it's just exciting news for especially our rural areas what's going on and something we've wanted for a long time on from the state board since brian

241is on there this is a great time to see if anybody else has anything we could quiz him about or stump him if at all possible obviously that's not possible brian anything else that you think maybe we should be aware of um no i mean obviously the legislature is approaching the end of its session this morning the speaker informed the body that they do not intend to take all 90 days for this session and that they're working through next week's select file debate on what he's calling spending bills and revenue bills of the state of nebraska so we'll watch next week there are several bills we are proponents of that hopefully will come up and move to final reading so lots of stuff going on and lots of late nights between now and the first

242of june patsy brian i couldn't read it microphone microphone sorry i'm looking at instead of talking in the microphone um i noticed in the paper this morning um i didn't have time to to read it like i usually do but you reported on it in the legislative committee about senator linehan and the name is going to go out of my head right now and the education committee that they were trying to put together and you said that they were making some kind of an agreement and they must have come to an agreement but you uh were obviously worried about what that was going to be do you know what it was what did she have to do i think you are referencing lb 132 which is senator deboer's priority bill that would have created or

243still does propose to create an independent school finance review commission but apparently the compromise is the bill yesterday moved to select file in the same language as introduced but senator deboer and linahan were going to work on an amendment so that the bill only appointed state senators to this commission to review school finance legislation and funding so we have to wait until it comes back up to see what the select file debate will be on that amendment but the concept is the commission would be composed only of senators in the legislature and not be an independent body appointed by the governor or others it looked it looked like the headlines said that that they had come to some agreement senator linahan and senator deboer but that's not possible right yet well they've come to an

244agreement as to whom the commission should have on it as to whether the legislature is going to agree to who the senators are on that is yet to be seen yeah okay thank you that helped unless i hear someone say differently i think that ends our report thank you robin thank you brian yes thank you okay agenda item 7.3 the commissioner's appraisal committee and that would be me the report from the appraisal committee is that all board members completed the commissioner's performance evaluation for 2020 2021. the appraisal report which summarizes the board members ratings and comments was sent to the board and the commissioner on april 23 2021. the commissioner again received an overall rating of highly effective which is the highest rating on the scale the other part was the commissioner's employment contract was

245reviewed by the attorney general's office and some minor changes are recommended a vote on the contract itself will take place at the june business meeting and that includes concludes the appraisal committee report do i have any discussion from anyone on the report deborah uh can were the attorney generals changes anything of significance or just uh we're going to talk about that in a little bit oh we are thank you you're one step ahead of me deborah which is good anyone else okay the board has completed the commissioner's performance review the commissioner was evaluated on nine performance standards as well as four performance goals we will have a public discussion on the commissioner's performance as a per as a precursor to that i will entertain a motion that the state board go into executive session to

246discuss the commissioner's job performance appraisal results and the terms of the commissioner's employment contract as necessary to protect the public interest and to prevent needless injury to the commissioner's reputation do i have a motion yes madam chair i moved that the state board go into executive session to discuss the commissioner's job performance appraisal results and terms of the commissioner's employment contract as necessary to protect the public interest and to prevent needless injury to the commissioner's reputation okay do i have a second patty i'll second the motion was made by patsy and seconded by patty is there any discussion on the motion robin the the motion which is appropriate by the way uh may indicate that we're going to do something about the the uh commissioner's reputation and i i guess i want to go on

247record that anything that i might say about that i probably would be able to say in public um and i think the commissioner would be okay with that but i understand the motion and i understand the purpose behind it but i want to make sure that from my perspective uh nothing that i will say would be something that would be out of the ordinary in a public conversation any other discussion seeing none andrea please call the role morrison yes neri yes co johns yes fricky yes goobles yes nichols yes stevens yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes the board will now go into executive session only for the purpose of discussing the commissioner's job performance for the reasons described in the motion is there a motion to come out of executive session yes madam

248president there is a motion i move that the state board go come out of executive session where we discuss the commissioner's job performance appraisal results in terms of the commissioner's employment contract as necessary to protect him and his interest from needless injury to his reputation and to share a group hug and sing kumbaya is there a second lisa motion made by patsy and seconded by was that you lisa thank you okay is there any discussion on the motion to come out of executive session seeing none andrea please call the role google's yes morrison yes neri yes co john's yes freaky yes nichols yes stevens yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes the board will now discuss the commissioner's job performance including any commendations or any concerns or suggestions for future development are there any

249questions before we begin okay discussion any discussion from anyone robin thank you commissioner we didn't hear you thank you commissioner good job anyone else patsy ditto anyone else lisa i see your microphone on oh that was a mistake patty thank you very much for your extraordinary leadership deborah i wanted to just say the same and that truly grateful to serve at this time under your lead or alongside your leadership and with your amazing team and uh thank you anyone else and yes commissioner i so appreciate your vision your continued vision and your continued communication with the stakeholders across the state and all of our administrators and districts thank you for the time you put in thank you anyone else okay thank you for that discussion now we will move to the topic of the commissioner's

250employment contract the board may contract with the commissioner for a maximum of a three-year period for state statute 79-315 the commissioner's current contract was approved by the board last june for a three-year period of july 1 2020 to june 30 2023 the commissioner receives the same benefits as other state employees the appraisal committee recommends a one-year extension of the commissioner's contract to six to june 30th 2024 other proposed changes to the contract include salary increases of 2 percent on july 1st 2021 and july 1st 2022 which mirror the negotiated increase for the department of education employees retention of language regarding an additional 40 hours of vacation time to use or lose within the next contract year the board will vote on revisions to the commissioner's contract at the june meeting this concludes our discussion of

251the items related to the commissioner's performance is there any other discussion from the board regarding these contract his contract seeing none we move to agenda item 7.4 the aquest teaching and learning and serving domain committee lisa do you have a report for us yes microphone good help yes i do madam president before i begin the report um i would like to have the commissioner uh talk about points of clarification that we had during our meeting and so if you would do so commissioner i'd appreciate it yeah and what what lisa is talking about the points of clarification on our standards draft so far we kind of hear some common misperceptions about what's in the standards what's not we saw some of that i think obviously as as we talked through it so we've actually posted

252a points of clarification i think when the committee met we didn't know exactly how we would handle that but we have gone ahead and posted this points of clarification uh to let folks know that the state board's not immediately voting on the health education standards either this month next month or until after there's already been a second draft making sure that that folks understand it's not written by activists it's written by folks from nebraska making sure that folks understand that you know certain outside groups weren't part of that process per se right and so um just just an opportunity for us to kind of um address some of those commonly held maybe misunderstandings or misbeliefs about what we're in the standards and so we'll we'll begin to talk more about what that is we'll share

253more of that um you know kind of a communications overall and that's what the committee discussed so that's already up on our on our spark site but also will be available on our website around the health standards thank you commissioner we have probably the lengthiest teaching and learning committee report that i've had since i've been on the board so that's why i'm taking off my mask it's fogging up my glasses the committee on teaching and learning and serving reports on only one action item the committee received recommendation from nde staff to approve the accreditation for educational service units for the 21 22 school year all 17 of them the committee recommends approval of this motion additionally the committee received updates related to potential changes to rule 24 endorsement revisions the nebraska council on teacher education

254policy revisions bellevue university's education preparation program approval status statewide assessment vendors contracts and the process for revisions to the english language arts content area standards in addition the committee also received an update from the commissioner and nde staff on the health education standard process the committee discussed the proposed draft to the health standards the discussion began by reviewing the goals of the health education health standards and last month the committee recommended that the nde began to analyze the public input received the committee previewed previewed a preliminary draft of the qualitative data analyses emails between march 10th and march 29th which included 2580 emails the analyses also included open-ended survey data received between march 10th and april 26 which included 9490 responses the top five themes from the data analyses include family family and parents gender

255gender identity to scrap the standards remove them were the words used and community the committee recommended to analyze the additional emails and to analyze the quantitative data from the public input survey the committee also recommended that the public input survey close next week so that data analysis can be completed to inform draft two the standards input email will remain active even though the survey is down the email will remain active and members of the public are encouraged to send feedback on draft 1 to that email address last month the committee recommended the commissioner outline the plan to develop a draft two the committee discussed the types of revisions that could be made for draft two and the types of changes discussed include changes responsive to common themes or concerns about specificity developmental appropriateness and delineation

256of parent family responsibilities changes which are changes to the structure of the standards indicators and strands and so on removal and or additions which are changes that could include the removal or additions of strands topics words phrases etc read wording which are changes that could be could include rewording topics using different words or phrases that might be confusing or misunderstood changing those nde and the standards writing team will begin work uh this month on draft two with a goal of draft two being publicly available mid to late summer once draft two is available um there will be a second public survey to give input it will open up and the committee recommended that nde simplify simplified this survey according to comments that we received and so the survey design will change thus making it easier

257for the general public to complete this concludes the teaching learning and serving committee report thank you lisa mike uh thank you lisa is there any discussion related to the information that lisa just shared deborah yeah thank you uh for your leadership and for everybody that serves on that committee i was uh very thankful i wasn't on that committee uh just kidding but i just read the points of clarification that's really helpful thank you i'm glad that will be an external document i am curious i process always um it's helpful for me to understand that and so i guess i'd like to know uh will the writing committee be all together in one space to have a discussion either face to face or online and will you be bringing the advisory committee together before the next

258draft is um presented to us i'm just curious yeah one one of the things that i think maybe a little bit of a lesson from the first draft is how to kind of ensure that there was a more of a a complete review by all of the writers and those that are on the advisory group i think we've also heard from some other groups that have an interest in at least providing some additional insights and i again we're going to try to work on that process and make sure that that works better and make sure that it has a a a broad set of stakeholders involved in it but even more important that everybody that's been so dedicated to working on that that they can kind of see it holistically and provide feedback as part

259of that process too i don't know exactly if it's like in one room or a zoom you know what i mean but i i think we're looking for feedback from from all of those folks as well as looking at the feedback that we've received from the public jacqueline so same kind of question that deborah had two parts um on the points of clarification it says a writing team of nebraska educators were selected from submitted applications so can you tell me who decides or goes through these submitted applications and decides on who will be on the writing team and who won't can you tell me historically has there been board members as part of the writing team or collaborating or are board members able to be on that team and also going forward as we convene

260again to look at the second draft who will be the people who decide if they open that up for more applicants or not yeah our process i don't know historically i can give you a little bit of my perspective on that i might be a little off on what's been done in the past but but generally it's opened up for educators across the state so teachers there's actually a provision within statute that that teachers in the profession should help write our standards and so there's an application that goes out our team reviews that that application we're looking for folks that meet all the different content areas typically it's not always we often might have to go recruit additional folks to be part of those writing teams right uh uh just depends on the on the

261uh how many people have submitted um i don't know that i know precisely if uh like folks who put their names in you know what the what the individual examination is but we look kind of for different sizes of schools different types of schools i do think i do believe we had some non-public school teachers that were part of that process as well so those types of things are considered certainly as that comes together i i don't think we have a history of changing what that writing team was in the mid in mid-stream but i think it might uh behoove us a little bit to look at the possibility of bringing others into that i i'm trying to remember all your questions jacqueline board members i i don't know if we've had a history of

262board members per se writing it what i would say in process improvement wise is that we'd be bringing that to the committee um before there was anything else of the the committee the teaching and learning committee at the very least would be able to look at that before we release the second draft um there's the dynamic of once once we have a second draft and when it becomes a public document and all those different things that we try to make sure that we consider too so madam chair i just wanted to state as a state board member and even though i'd be qualified to apply for the english language arts standards probably even the social studies standards with my geography background i would not feel comfortable being on the writing team i as a committee

263member as a state board member i i almost think that's not advantageous to to be on the board and voting and also have been a part of the process that created the standard so that's just my personal opinion jacqueline yeah sorry i i there were a couple of my questions that weren't answered so i just went yeah i i thought i maybe lost a couple along the way so that's okay so my question was once we receive or the department of education receives applications for someone to be on the writing team who at the department of education makes the decision to determine who will be the writers yeah i and our team basically i mean so underneath corey eppler for instance and then the content area person that would be doing that they review it

264for the the uh expectations of those various you know um regional size of school appropriate content area again i don't think we get so many applicants for that that that they turn very many people away but i don't know for certain so but essentially it's there it's not a decision it's a decision that's left to the academic officer typically in that in that direction so deborah then patty just when you guys were discussing another thought came to my mind that if we do another list of points of clarification i'm hoping that we can clarify because i heard this a couple times today that people think that there were not any parents on that writing committee and so i hope that we can make sure that uh people do understand that there were parents on that

265writing committee because i googled each and every person before we approved that list so thank you patty i'm going back to the question about board members serving on writing teams we have ultimate final approval of standards it would be a conflict for us to be part of the construction of those standards and i just want to share to that very point too i it's it's one of those things i'd love to kind of talk about in general standards practice on where we go in the long run too because even like i try to keep that distance a little bit like where i feel like my role is versus interjecting and not you know not being in the wrong place on that at the same point in time i want to make sure i'm in the

266right places too and so uh all of those things are considerations i think things we're learning now we've really trusted that standards writing process and it's actually worked very well for us um uh in in past content areas and so in this moment in time it it's it's worthy of that reflection to figure out how we can do it better jacqueline i i feel like i always get in these situations where my statements get people respond to them and it's kind of not the context i was asking it in the reason for which i'm asking is particularly with these health standards i feel like i have been inundated with a ton of information from people about how they feel about the standards and it seems counter-intuitive for me for the writing team to get back

267together and then bring something to the board and then we say well this is what we heard or this was the feedback that we got and we had no way to pass that information that we received as individuals along to the writing team and so that was more of the line of questioning or where i was going with that not saying i want to write anything i don't want to write anything but it's more about how do we make sure that we've captured all of the information and the voices that have come to us so that we don't have to keep going back and forth because we vote something down based on what we've heard from constituents right no actually i think that's a really great point um as we do the feedback review um

268and i i'm making this up as i go a little bit but i think it's a super great point that what i'd like to be able to do is bring you back that that full feedback to the board so you can also review that and go hey look i also heard this or that and so that would give you a chance to review that before the before the um staff and and writing team you know go too far down that path in fact very much what our conversation was yesterday i was trying to get a sense of what direction do i give the the writing team and our staff and i appreciate that one because um i'll make sure to include uh the board's review of the feedback and feeling as if the feedback that

269you heard is represented in that i think that's a great point so thank you we had mentioned something like that yesterday you know getting from the whole board input so um any other questions yes where am i supposed to recognize okay patty um just just a comment that although this has been a somewhat painful process the standards development process is working the way that it was intended to work does that mean there is no room for improvement of course there's always room to improve a process but it is working in the respect that we have received volumes of feedback that feedback is being analyzed the department is already thinking about and will soon start on a second draft and they're basing that on feedback that they've received so you know i think we just need

270to keep that perspective it's not over this is an iterative process and it's going to continue for a while but the process is working as intended to work lisa um one thing that from the phone calls and emails that i received madam president many of them weren't aware that there would be a second and possibly a third draft so in the future if we can just make sure up front there's more communication about the process that that here's input and then from that input a second draft potentially a third i would appreciate that and lisa i too feel the same that it kind of got lost in the shuffle of things and once i explained that to individuals there was just a whole different feel and i got positive feedback and looking forward because i

271would always say please stay engaged but commissioner i have a quick clarification for you and and i should have asked this in our committee meeting but when a second draft does come before the committee first if the committee says um we want to send this back now before we take it to the public is that an option or not that's one point i'm not clear on yet yeah i i think so obviously the committee will have the option to then either bring it forward or say hey do some more work on it before we bring it forward so that would be my intent yes debra last month you gave us time at the end of the meeting to kind of process and share what we heard are where our minds were at that are we

272going to have that opportunity again today and if not i then i just want to make a comment now during this discussion no today no okay then then i um then i just wanted to say uh just in regard to what you've put in your points of clarification um i just want to correct something i said earlier in the meeting in regard to this and we kept hearing about cse and crt and i made the statement that those are political terms and i that wasn't what i meant to say i was a little flustered and what i meant to say that those were topics that i are used in a political way uh and have been in a lot of the emails and phone calls that i've received but i i didn't mean that in

273general they were political terms and anyway i just wanted to say add that and thank you patsy was interesting it was interesting to me today um all of the things that they thought were in the standards and that we knew were not in the standards and this speaks to what you're talking about deborah as well and i just wanted to share it experience that happened at the end of that discussion because that might be some way a place that we could improve the process as well so one of the women who was in the audience came up and held up her phone and said here is the place where it discusses the two teenagers and their experience in the classroom where they're supposed to do this curriculum not standards but curriculum and so i said

274well may i see that so she shows it to me and it's definitely not from nde not from the department of education not our standards and i said that to her and she said i said this isn't you this isn't the standards this is it comes from this organization not nde so i think there's a lot of information that's coming from different places like pamphlets that are handed out at church and organizations and people are reading those thinking that that is the standards on nde and so i think lane helped me get her to the right place and she she said well i'm going to read this now and i said well i've read it several times and i don't remember many of the things that people were saying that were in it today being

275in it in our standards and so i don't know how we deal with that i don't know if it's the accessibility of getting to the standards or if it's uh of airplane fly across the sky saying this is how you get to them i don't know but that is something that we need to deal with so that they know just because they got it from these organizations or at church or whatever that doesn't mean that it's in the standards robin it's green all right how do i do that i'm hitting something i shouldn't be hitting first of all the conversations are fantastic that we're having and i really appreciate that i started off with uh lisa given an outstanding summary of our discussion and so i just really want to say that and then you

276know i think of uh i can't remember for shank was patty who emphasized process and uh we get we're getting some pretty some pressure from for pretty high spaces that said what's the word what do we use trash garbage do away with scrap scrap there you go i knew it'd come to me we ought to scrap these when i and i and then i hear the commissioner say uh or or maybe it was patty again or everybody's saying you know the process is really kind of working ugly messy but it's really working and and so i just really appreciate that and uh then i get this today from from uh even has our letter is that yeah it's got our letterhead on it and i just really like this stuff i i would have liked

277to have had it on everybody's seat uh and and that sort of thing because we do was it patty that asked the question patsy that asked the question about how can we do this how can we get this out you know and too many times i here will put it online great i think that's fantastic but i guess i'm going to challenge the commissioner or david or whoever that we ought to have something in every weekly paper in every daily paper in the state of nebraska that clarifies some of this maybe starts with this the next the next thing that i would recommend that we write an article for every daily newspaper in the state every weekly newspaper in the state that talks a little bit about how this is not cse this is not

278crt or whatever i hope i'm saying those right but it is this it's not some of the things that we said here how many times did i hear planned parenthood uh you know on and on and on we need to be proactive or a little bit better reactive to these things and that's what i guess to try to help answer patsy's question how do we do this well i think we on a weekly basis we get something out there and every daily and every weekly paper in the state of nebraska debra i wanted to build on that and just make one more comment um you know because cse and crt were brought up so much today and one white woman made the comment that she has a preschooler at home and you know that um

279her preschooler doesn't see race and that you know why are we implanting that information in her daughter's head and you know just making anyway i'm not quoting her very well but her point was taken from a white person's perspective and i as she was speaking i was thinking and she talked a lot about critical race theory and i was thinking about i'm auntie debbie to uh uh well at the time he was three years old and in preschool alexander and alexander came home and told his mom that he learned that day that he was on the brown team and that there was a white team and a brown team and and i and he was okay with it i mean it was and his his mom went on to you know just uh uh support

280that conversation in a way that was good for him but it gave me the awareness that while a white child may not have that awareness around race and if you are a person of color uh then it is very likely even at the age of three years old that you know being out in the community that those are things that uh you are going to be more aware of and i i kind of thought the same thing about uh people in all demographics you know uh when we think about our equity lens um you know we've often talked about how it's very easy to just consider the work we're doing from our uh you know white centered uh position and this has been a really helpful process to help me see these standards from other

281perspectives thank you patty i'm going back to robin's comments i took the initiative to write you could call it an editorial you could call it a commentary piece in some papers it was published as a guest commentator but i sent that out to i believe it was 22 papers in my district i don't know how many of them published but i know that it was published fairly widely and it was simply an explanation of the process and really trying to debunk i guess i would would say some of the misconceptions that were coming to me i had an opportunity when people emailed to respond to those individuals and so it gave me a teaching moments with all of those but i thought it was important to provide that information on a larger scale and to

282the people in my district that piece has been very well received i have gotten a number of comments back from people saying they truly appreciated information that gave them a better understanding of what the process is as well as where the department is in the process because the reality is you know today we we have people who are still reacting to draft one as though draft one is the final draft and i think it's unfortunate when we want to hear them right but i think we're moving ahead of them and i think then that that becomes kind of a disconnect it's like you were saying commissioner that you know at some point you have to cut off the comments for draft one in order to get make sure we have all of that data so

283then we're actually moving toward draft two so i guess i guess i'm just saying please as individual board members don't feel hesitant to take on the leadership to do some of that work of informing our public robin great information i actually did that unfortunately i don't think my writing must be near as good as yours i think i stirred the pot more than i i really helped but no that that's an excellent point but i still go back to the department getting something out in a statewide um communique and not just one several brief ones in my opinion would work better but i'm not the expert in that but i i challenge i guess the the commissioner and david to come up with a really good um statewide communication plan on this jacqueline and patsy

284so i didn't know we were going to go into details about the standards again today but since we're there i will tell you when i first got the sheet in front of us with the points of clarification and i saw it say draft number one i immediately hoped it was just a draft and that we had not released it and my reason for that is along the lines of what robin and patty have said but it's important for us to get out the message about the health standards but these points of clarification come off very defensive um like we're defending the standards and if our if we're here to listen to people to see what their opinions are and as one of the gentlemen said today i hope this isn't for show i hope you're

285really listening it's very difficult for me to say i'm listening to what you say and then point up put out a point of clarification that says this is not part of a worldwide plan to sexualize children if in people's minds that's what we're doing and we're just responding and saying we're not doing this we're not really educating them on what we are doing or why this is important and so it's not that i don't agree with a lot that's in our point of clarification but i think part of it is how do we get that message across or how do we rather than say what something is not i think our responsibility is to say what something is what this is is x or we if we say this is based on evidence or this

286is based on research maybe the paper shouldn't just say the proposed draft does include xyz we should point to where we got that from where is that study of what this is based on who was the doctor or who who was the educator who said i think that this is important or this is important because just saying what something's not or just telling people definitively this isn't what we're trying to do well they've already made up their mind this is what we're trying to do and two other things that i would say i was really sensitive to today i was referred to or we were referred to as coloreds that hurt i still was reeling and when someone said well your their board members up there looking down at their phone i did because i

287was so upset um and and so i hope that people understand that when we are still using those kind of words to describe people we've got a long way to go but we need to educate people about why something like that is not okay and so i even heard us say well they believe that's divisive i don't look at everybody who showed up today as they it's us we're all in this together so i just think that going forward with the process we really need to be careful with our words the language that we choose the tone that we choose because that is going to dictate how this process goes forward and even with like i said these points of clarification if we're going to truly educate people we need to give more information on

288what this is and why we're doing it versus just saying they're wrong patsy okay included some of what i was going to say enough that i'm not going to do it lisa i um i guess this concludes the committee meeting but i wanted to thank the committee members patty robin president nichols a lot of thoughtful comments and questions were asked in committee and answered by staff and the commissioner yesterday and i'm very glad we had so many people here today in that we are listening and as indicated by some of my board members accuracy in some instances weren't there and how to educate and inform i guess as a better word how we do that is very important so i do want people to know we are listening and according to what i read in

289my report today what they're going to consider i gave a list of five bullets additions exclusions considerations for change and what that will look at will look like will depend on what we what we hear and what we know from the standards so thank you everybody for your comments and and questions thank you lisa uh moving on to agenda item 7.4 a lisa is there a motion on item 7.4 a yes madam president i moved to approve the accreditation for the 17 educational service units appearing on the accompanying list for the 2021-2022 school year in accordance with the provisions of rule 84. do i have a second second motion made by lisa seconded by robin is there any discussion on this motion seeing none andrea please call the roll neary yes freaky yes code johns

290yes morrison yes stevens yes nichols yes google's yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes agenda item 7.5 um the aquest student success access and support domain committee patsy do we have a report yes madam president yes madam president we do um i think don i always i hope i'm saying his name right don lowsky is supposed to be here he wanted to talk about this maybe a little maybe not okay i am here oh yay okay uh dawn you want to just summarize this for the board thank you um while we are moving forward our rule 18 interim program schools that are listed there are 14 that are listed on the company materials for the 21-22 school year these are schools that meet rule 18 regulations procedures for the approval of interim program schools

291and county detention homes institutions and juvenile emergency shelters they're kind of a unique school for students that are housed or in a in a program that for various reasons but there it's one of the one of the regulations is that they have to be in a residential program and so these meet those uh meets that requirement also thank you don um also i during the meeting the question was asked about where do you find these schools the lists of these schools and don told us that they were on the website and so if you're looking for them if you go to nd's website you would be able to find those okay does that conclude your report nope are we gonna do all the or we're gonna keep going okay all right and then um well

292we can do the action on you first yeah let's do that okay so for action or for agenda item 7.5 a patsy is there a motion on it yes madam chair there is i moved to approve the interim program schools appearing on the list with this agenda item to operate for the 2021-22 2022 school year under rule 18. do i have a second a second motion made by patsy seconded by patty is there any matter um just a point of clarification do you have any discussion about this yes yeah i'll be asking you yeah the motion was made by patsy and seconded by patty is there any discussion on the motion lisa um i was wondering if the commissioner could answer a question for me it seems like there was something in the legislature this

293session that would improve the the rule 18 interim schools will will this include those potential improvements when we vote for for this now this is simply our kind of annual review and process and so we're recommending that you approve these particular schools at this time so at this time okay thank you for the clarification any other discussion seeing none andrea please call the roll morrison yes google's yes fricky yes nichols yes neri yes co john's yes stevens yes tim seven yes one absent thank you andrea we also had um melody hopson was in to visit with us about early childhood and the next step in the meeting was um there was not an action item with that it was simply an update from her so i'm sure we'll be bringing you more about that later

294then the other thing that happened in this meeting was a report from leading for equity and excellence an update for the equity the equity policy we now have all kinds of different separate pieces concerning equity and we're wanting to put them together into a policy that we can publish as a department of education and so zainab and i worked really really hard on plan of action and a survey to send out to our committee members as to what as they read the pieces should we keep them remove them first of all review them re review them remove them or rewrite them and so um those are due to us on may 28th and then we will come back to the board with um what our findings are and what our next steps will be for

295the equity policy also included in that was a timeline we created a timeline for ourselves and we created a timeline for the committee to get it get the whole process moving and that's the end of my report i have a quick question yes i was listening but i guess i wasn't thinking hard enough while you were talking you mentioned something about bringing back to the committee something what was that about um that that is a survey that we gave our committee um with all of the pieces that we've created over the last year and a half or whatever it is that we've been working on this and it had each one of the pieces that we've created the equity educational statement um the discrim non-discrimination statement that we have um that either we created or

296it was already in existence i should say and we're asking our committee to look at them to review the all of those and to decide whether we need to what in it needs to be removed or retained kept okay and even rewrite a little if they want to go in and say add this do this that's what now this this committee is it just the four board members in zainab or are we talking about a larger circle the circle gets larger as we go um the policy committee has a part in this so it'll be going to the policy committee also the strategic plan committee and rule 10 were foreseen that it would be involved in that and then if lane and shirley are still working on the equity report card that might be a

297part of it as well but we're trying to bring everything together now and decide how we're going to fit it together and then use it okay thank you does anyone else have any discussion or questions for patsy thank you patsy you're welcome uh agenda item 7.6 the budget and finance committee patty are you taking that over for pat i am i am fat today your pat today i like that the budget and finance committee had a very good discussion and questions of each of the three consent agenda items that were reviewed the items and questions that were asked included things like which districts will be impacted how many districts will be in participating in these particular activities or events also discussion around are these continuation initiatives or are they new activities and then just general

298discussion about the scope of the work that is to be performed the committee had no concerns related to the consent agenda items we also then had a discussion and information from bryce related to the 2020 single audit report i'm not sure if bryce is available and if he would want to make comments about that or not not sure that he is i i am available okay i don't there's any i guess if there's any questions all right why don't i bryce i will just read through our committee report and then if there are questions if you'd be available that'd be great so the bryce did review the single audit findings both discussing the process for the audit and then how these findings will be reviewed by the federal government the staff noted that no findings

299were related to fraud that's a good thing and that three of the findings were related to our our sub-recipient monitoring process but the expectation is that when the federal government reviews the audit that those three findings will be cleared the remaining findings were related to process or documentation and each finding has already had a corrective action that identified and actually that is in place to address those issues noted bryce anything to add or at this point i guess if there are questions this is an action item so bryce nothing i don't have anything to add anyone have any questions for bryce okay um so i'll i'll finish the report let's do the action item action okay so patty is there a motion on 7.68 a single audit report there is thank you i moved to

300accept the 2020 single audit report is there a second second debra so the motion was made by patty and seconded by deborah is there any further discussion seeing none andrea please call the roll stevens yes frankie yes niri yes goobles yes morrison yes co john's yes nichols yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes you may continue patty thank you the committee also reviewed the monthly board travel expenses and had no concerns in addition the in-state travel authorizations were reviewed and no issues or concerns were voiced with those and that concludes the budget and finance committee report thank you patty agenda item 7.7 strategic planning performance and improvement committee deborah do you have a report i do thank you uh the strategic planning performance and improvement uh is through committees we're reporting on a committee

301update and an action item the committee received a recommendation from nde staff to exempt the 2019-2020 school year in the priority school timeline which is on the agenda for today's meeting as an action item and the committee recommends the approval of this action item and additionally uh we did discuss further about our strategic plan and how we want to update it and we had more questions than answers but the discussion was great like we're making progress and so that concludes the report the committee report for the strategic planning performance and improvement committee thank you okay is there any discussion on that report from deborah robin uh on the on the priority schools uh okay explain again what the decision uh or what the recommendation is or whether it's a decision i just want to make

302sure i understand all right so um shirley i might be calling on you but my understanding is that uh for the priority school timeline they're on a priority school is on for three years and because of the pandemic and all of the uh chaos that came about last year we're extending that add one more year on for those schools that are on the uh priority list right now is that correct thank you okay yeah and then just a follow-up first of all thank you very much uh for that do uh santee and skyler are they con consulted about this or is this just a decision that is made um and if they were consulted they're fine with it and so on and so forth sorry shirley good afternoon everyone um so i am here definitely

303as an advocate of the schools this is something that both schuyler central high school the superintendent and their local board as well as santee community schools their interim superintendent and local board have both requested this as well as if you notice on the supplemental document that was attached to maintain consistency with our federal designation process we want to go ahead and make this official to exempt the 2019-2020 school year for priority schools thank you very much patsy robin to add to what you had to say and to you shirley um i wanted just to just take a moment to reflect those of you who are on the board um when we were naming priority schools it didn't go over as a big honor right at first and as a matter of fact some people were

304upset that they were named as a priority school and now they're asking not only to stay to stay on but to lose that year and weight and still be supported by the nde and the priority school program and so i guess what i want to say is that that's a huge evolution in feeling and thought and i really wanted to thank you and the people you work with shirley because i know that a big part of that is the person you are and how you work with people and all the work you've done thank you i did all that yes okay all right um deborah is there a motion on 7.68 yes patsy will share that i moved to exempt the 2019-2020 school year in the priority school timeline due to the continuing impact of

305the covet 19 pandemic and suspension of statewide assessment and accountability classifications is there a second yes okay motion made by patsy seconded by deborah is there any further discussion on this motion seeing none andrea please call the roll yes neri yes stevens yes nichols yes morrison yes cojones yes googles yes tim seven yes one absent motion passes agenda item eight additional business there are no additional business items agenda item nine information items and reports 9.1 9.2 and 9.3 those information items and written reports for the board are for our information only and they are posted in your spark agenda item 10 good of the order the section of the agenda is intended for board members to offer informal observations of the work of the state board board members may make brief announcement about attendance at

306future events for the purpose of informing other board members no business or motions or suggested actions of the board may be offered at this point in the agenda nor should any board members engage in substantive discussion about other agenda items or introduce new agenda items does anyone have anything for the good of the order patty yes i just wanted to inform other board members that the nebraska association of school boards has graciously invited us as individual board members each month or as frequently as we would like not any more than once a month to produce a short video summarizing the month's work of the state board of education i will be doing probably the first two of those but this is not a patty thing i want this to be open to any other board

307members who would like to participate in doing that so i just wanted to let you know that that opportunity is available to all of us thank you patty we'll be taking you up on that thank you remind us about that please lisa microphone is this just using um your video here or are you going somewhere to have it taped matt belka from nasb and i are still communicating about that i was waiting until after our board meeting because i envisioned that what each of us would be presenting is just a quick summary of what the board's working on and what action was taken um it will either be us videotaping ourselves and then sending it to matt or i'm going to just check with him and see if there would be availability and he would

308be interested in having us come to nasb to do it i ca i'm not promising that because i haven't had that conversation with him but that's where it is because my tech skills are any other board members i would just like to quick add that i was on a zoom with nas or nasby early last week on a budget and finance thing and the question was asked is the fall meeting going to be held in phoenix or is it going to be held online that decision has yet to be made anyone else okay seeing none agenda item 11 adjournment thank you for those who attended in person this morning and staff who have been with us all day and who tuned in to the broadcast as needed a work session will be held on thursday

309june 3rd at a time and location to be determined a business meeting will be held on friday june 4th at 9 00 a.m at a location to be determined the may state board meeting is adjourned you