Dept. of Ed Removes LGBTQ Lesson Plan For Kindergartners From Website
The Maine DOE has removed a controversial lesson plan for kindergartners from its site following a GOP ad campaign.
There are just about six months left until state election polls open, and liberals and conservatives are continuing to push their political agendas into public school debates. The pandemic opened many parents’ eyes to controversial practices taking place inside public school classrooms, and many GOP leaders have taken the initiative to fight for these parental rights amid heated races in congress. In Maine, the state’s GOP leaders recently released their first TV ad campaign, with a focus on a controversial lesson plan for kindergartners. Because of the backlash the Maine DOE received in the aftermath, they have now removed the lesson plan from their site.
See the ad campaign below.
According to reports from News Center Maine, the Maine DOE has removed the controversial lesson plan aimed at discussing what a transgender person is to kids in Kindergarten. The ad, which aired on Wednesday, May 18th stated that the current Democratic Governor, Janet Mills, approved of the lesson plan. The instructional video was removed from the site that same day, and a spokesperson for the governor said she was not aware of the video’s existence.
Within the short ad, the video calls the instructional video part of the governor and the Maine DOE’s radical agenda. Furthermore, it concluded that this lesson plan is an example of what young school children are learning, instead of math, science, and reading. After the lesson plan was removed, the governor’s office announced that Mills did not approve of the controversial instruction.
The now-removed video was added to the Maine DOE online site back at the beginning of the pandemic. The department had created an online resource hub during the confusing time for teachers to share lesson plans throughout the state. More than 400 instructional videos were uploaded.
The video in question came from Maine Online Opportunities for Sustained Education, otherwise known as MOOSE. Within the video, the female educator is heard talking about Freedom Holidays for this kindergartner lesson. She then moves on to a discussion of sexual identity. With this, she says that doctors often times get the gender wrong at birth. She then goes on to say that as some people get older, they realize the doctor was wrong about their gender. It is unknown how often, if ever, kindergarten teachers utilized this video that was listed on the Maine DOE’s site.
This incident involving the Maine DOE providing controversial lesson plans to very young children is part of a growing trend being exposed in public schools across the nation. To teach young children about different gender roles and identities, many schools are using a gender unicorn. It is being questioned and criticized by many parents, as it aims to teach young students about identity, expression, sex, and physical and emotional attraction. Many parents feel that these conversations should be left to family discussions at home, especially when children are that young.
With more and more parents speaking out at district board meetings, Republican lawmakers have taken the opportunity to latch on to these topics in a fight for government control. Whether or not politicians’ real concern is in the right place, which should always be the students, is always up for debate. But for now, parents can rest easy knowing that their Kindergartners will not be shown this contentious video, as it has been officially removed from the Maine DOE website as an approved part of the state’s curricula.
