In a special meeting Tuesday morning, the Central Valley School District (CVSD) Board of Directors formally opposed legislation, SB 5462, making its way through the state House of Representatives that would require schools to incorporate literature on queer history in their curriculums. In the same letter, the board also opposed a separate proposed law, HB 2331, that would make it harder for school boards to exclude identity-based educational materials from the curriculum.
Both bills have been in the legislature since at least January 12, when the legislative session began and until now, they have passed like a ship in the night, drawing no noticed organized criticism from the Inland Northwest.
The board said the main concern with both pieces of legislation was that they represented state overreach, and an early version of the resolution speculated that Central Valley parents would pull their children out of public school if the bill were to pass. Secondarily, they objected to the financial cost they worried the law would impose on CVSD.
The last-minute meeting was held at 8:30 am, and no one from the general public spoke against or for the resolution, as often happens during meetings of public bodies.
“I know that there are parents … who are kind of teetering on that fence of ‘Can I trust the district with my child?’” Board President Pam Orebaugh said during the meeting. “And if the state continues to put mandates that they don't agree with, they're going to pull their kids.”
Specifically, SB 5462 would require schools to “include the histories, contributions, and perspectives of LGBTQ people, by December 1, 2024.” HB 2331 “bars school district boards of directors (school boards) from refusing to approve or prohibiting the use of an educational material on the basis that it relates to or includes the study of the role and contributions of individuals or groups that are part of a protected class as established in public school nondiscrimination provisions.” This means a board of directors could not exclude queer stories because they explore 2SLGBTQIA+ experiences.
Lawmakers can consider the board’s letter, but the letter doesn’t force them to vote one way or the other on the legislation.
CVSD has already implemented policies that ensure inclusivity, some board members said, so the state doesn’t need to tell it what to do.
“We listened to the experts in the field,” said Director Cindy McMullen during the meeting. “We look at best practices and research, and we're very intentional about the curriculum process to get the best curriculum for our students.”
Again and again, both during the meeting and in phone calls with RANGE Tuesday afternoon, directors and CVSD Superintendent John Parker emphasized that the board is not against inclusive literature.
“I have been contacted by folks who have seen the resolution,” McMullen said during the meeting. “I want to make it clear that I am against these bills because of the bureaucracy and the outside interference of agencies that should not be responsible for these decisions. I most certainly support inclusion, making sure that our students see themselves in their classroom every day in their curriculum, in their library books, that we teach our children about the world around us and that we follow the process that we already have in place, which includes our parents and our community.”
Asked whether CVSD schools already contain a robust representation of queer history, neither Orebaugh nor Parker could say. But Parker noted that students can request representative material be added onto the core curriculum.
Though the stated main concern with the bill was that of an encroaching state, the resolution referred to the financial burden in dire terms.
“The financial burden to meet these bills, if enacted into law, would be crippling, further taking away from needed resources our students require,” the final text of the resolution says.
Parker said in a phone interview later on Tuesday that revising curriculum is expensive. It can cost CVSD up to $1.5 million if a curriculum change concerns a core class that most students are required to take. He said that that price tag does not include administrative costs associated with paying for the staff time needed to change the curriculum.
“We pay all of our people to do this work,” Parker said.
He also noted that CVSD – like many local jurisdictions – is struggling with a budget that’s too meager to absorb such new costs. Though CVSD voters passed two levies in the February 13 election that will help modernize facilities and educational costs, not all of that money is aimed at curriculum.
“We haven't adopted a lot of new curriculum lately here in the Central Valley School District,” Parker said. “A little bit problematic because it's not new, but we also haven't had a budget to do that lately.”
The board said it held the meeting outside of its normal schedule because the Washington State House of Representatives had scheduled a hearing on SB 5462 at 4 pm the same day, and they wanted to send it to the legislators before that hearing. Orebaugh, Parker and Director Tere Landa said they had all prepared over the weekend to get ready for Tuesday’s meeting. The board was careful to note that it gave the required 24-hour notice and didn’t break any public meetings laws.
“We have been very aware of the requirements of the Open Public Meetings Act,” McMullen said during the meeting. “The board members have not been discussing this offline. They know that these things can raise concerns in the community, especially when we have special meetings. And of course this one happened on a holiday weekend on top of everything else. And so folks may wonder what's been going on. This was a matter of urgency because of the timing of the legislature.”
The legislative meeting on SB 5462 was not a hearing but an executive session of the House Committee on Education, and no votes or public comment were taken. The CVSD board had also discussed the law at its meeting on February 12.
On Tuesday, the board voted unanimously to pass the resolution opposing the law.
The board’s vote comes at a time when far-right activists have attempted to ban hundreds of books – primarily ones that represent Black and queer people – from public places in a nationwide campaign. The most prominent recent example of this in the Inland Northwest began in 2021, when a concerned citizen tried to get the memoir Gender Queer banned from Liberty Lake’s municipal library, an effort that culminated late last year when the city council voted to take control of the library’s policy making. (The book remains on the shelves.)
But a statement that accompanied the resolution, written by Orebaugh, said that the national controversy over school curriculum had nothing to do with the resolution. In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Orebaugh reiterated that the larger context has nothing to do with this action. Rather, she said, it was about state overreach.
“We're already doing a lot to ensure full inclusivity and a sense of belonging for all of our students,” Orebaugh said. “We have been painfully clear to make statements that we recognize and value all of our students, whether you are from the LGBTQ community, whether you're Native American, whether you're a white male, whether you have a particular religion, we value all of our children.”
An early version of the resolution said that the law, if passed, “would push more parents to withdraw their children from our district.” Landa said during the meeting that she thought that language could be read as threatening and successfully lobbied to strike it from the final version.
Landa said in a phone interview later Tuesday that she supported the inclusive goals of the legislation but opposed the laws because she does not believe the state should tell local school districts how to craft their curricula.
“We don't want another layer of bureaucracy, is how we've looked at it, coming down with a dictate and interfering with what many of our patrons value most: the concept of local control,” said Landa, who pointed out she was speaking for herself and not the entire board. “It seemed like overreach, and so for that reason, I can't think of a reason that I would support the bill.”
The board sent the resolution to the state legislative Committee on Education just after 2 pm, Orebaugh said.
Directors Anniece Barker, who is the legislative representative on the board, and Stephanie Jerdon did not return requests for comment. Both candidates were backed by Citizens for CVSD Transparency, a parent’s rights group whose website mentions some subjects at the center of right-wing book-banning campaigns.
The website reads: The board “are more concerned about Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and Gender Ideology than academics.”
Each of those subjects has been challenged in recent years by book-banning campaigns and are frequent targets of prominent conservative politicians, pundits and activists trying to purge queer material from classrooms.
McMullen did not return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Erin Sellers contributed to this report.
