Washington state’s Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee has signed legislation mandating the teaching LGBT material in schools.
State Sen. Marko Liias, a Democrat, celebrated the legislation, adding that the material would be age-appropriate and highlight “the histories, contributions, and perspectives of the LGBTQ+” community.
“The contributions of gay Washingtonians deserve recognition, and just as importantly, students deserve to see themselves in their schoolwork,” Mr. Liias said in a press release. “That leads to better attendance, better academic achievement and better overall quality of life, ensuring success for all our students.”
The law, which will go into effect on June 6, will require that schools adopt an LGBT curriculum by October 2025.
The bill uses the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) framework to “include the histories, contributions, and perspectives of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups,” according to the language of Senate Bill 5462.
“The legislature recognizes that inclusive curricula have been shown to often improve the mental health, academic performance, attendance rates, and graduation rates of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities,” the bill states. “Research on students’ sense of belonging and community in the school setting confirms that inclusive curricula and learning environments contribute to increased school motivation, participation, and achievement.”
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The legislation directs the Washington State School Directors’ Association and the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to evaluate, revise, and create a timeline for adoption.
‘Not a Way to Categorize Children’
In a February 2024 House Education Committee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Joel McEntire challenged the legislation’s usefulness in fixing the declining scores in reading, writing, and mathematics.“As an educator, I do not believe that it will,” he said. “I do not think that this inclusive learning standards legislation is going to yield that result which we so all badly want to see—that we want to see kids that can thrive academically and gain the skills to become contributing members of society.”
Good teachers, he said, have always looked for ways to include all students and to feel welcomed without the requirement of legislation.
“Even if you have a teacher that we could say is not good, I don’t know that this would force them to change their ways to make a student feel included,” he said. “We have found ways to categorize all people by their religion, by their gender, by their age, by their abilities.”
Some of these classifications make sense and some don’t, he said.
“Some of the ways that we’re classifying people—not just people but children—do not make sense,” he said. “Assigning them to categories of sources by which they derive sexual pleasure—that is not a way to categorize children.”
Republican state Rep. Stephanie McClintock criticized the bill based on her advocacy for local control over state legislative control.
“I do not believe that the people and the parents in my school district think this is the direction they want to go,” she said. “They want to see better scores in reading. They want to see better scores in math, and they want that to be the focus.”
Ms. McClintock said it’s the local school boards that should hold the superintendents accountable for implementing inclusivity.
“We don’t need a bill like this,” she said.
Republican Rep. Travis Couture said that as a parent of four children in public schools, he’s witnessed an “enrollment crisis in our state” because of parents pulling their children out.
“The amount of seats that we’re filling in schools is less and less, it seems,” he said.
The bill ignores how to address declining test scores and instead digs deeper into a failed DEI framework, he said.
“This to me is putting the cart before the horse,” he said. “I would like to prioritize and focus on things that are at crisis level in our schools and fix those and rebuild the trust so that parents will not want to disenroll their kids. Right now we need to focus on the basics, and not the politics.”
Parental Rights Initiative
Earlier in March, the Washington state legislature passed the citizen’s Initiative 2081, which gives parents the right to review class materials and have access to school records.The governor doesn’t have to sign the initiative for it to become law.
It also gives the parents the right to opt their children out of “any surveys, assignments, questionnaires, role-playing activities, recordings of their child, or other student engagements that include questions” about a child’s “sexual experiences or attractions” or the family’s religious or political affiliations.
