Most oppose resolutions rehashing debate over the state’s health and physical education standards approved back in August
OCEAN CITY – Although public comment was mixed at the March 16 Ocean City Board of Education meeting, the majority was against reviving the topic of the New Jersey Health and Physical Education Standards.
Before the board voted 9-3 against two resolutions put forward by member Robin Shaffer and supported by Catherine Panico and Liz Nicoletti (see related story), members of the public lined up to weigh in.
Tazmine Weisgerber, who works in the field of sexuality education at Rutgers University and trains educators across the country, most recently has worked to help New Jersey school districts adjust to the new standards. She explained the rationale behind the standards, which some have criticized as being too explicit for young children.
“We need to protect our students,” she said, adding that polls show most parents want schools to teach sex ed “since they know they don’t have the content expertise, nor training in how to teach these topics. Believe it or not, just because you’ve had sex doesn’t mean you can adequately teach about sex.”
Weisgerber asked board members to think about families outside of their own, where parents and guardians won’t provide that education, “sometimes because they are the ones abusing them.”
She said another study showed the average young person is first exposed to pornography at age 12. “None of us want porn to be the primary sex educator for our children,” Weisgerber said. “We must allow our teachers to do what they are trained to do so that students know how to make the healthiest decisions for themselves.”
She said half of the kids who are sexually abused are abused by relatives. Providing children information about sexual abuse “protects them from being groomed and abused.”
“Education is how we protect our students,” she added.
Comprehensive health education also gives young people the knowledge to make better decisions. She said studies have shown sex ed has led to lower rates of teenage pregnancies and sexuality transmitted diseases and encourage them to wait longer until they have sex.
Weisgerber presented data that shows the states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama, “all of which provide limited to no sex ed.” The lowest pregnancy rates are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and New Jersey, “all of which provide comprehensive sex ed.”
She said the new standards are “100 percent age and developmentally appropriate” and the information in parentheses (which has raised the most objections) is not required to be taught.
The Rev. Cricket Denton of Upper Township, an Ocean City High School alumna, said she wanted to speak against the resolutions as a parent and faith leader.
Referring to a comment by Nicoletti about how prayer could help students with some of the issues in school, Denton said she believes in prayer and that “really fast prayer” has never been taken out of public schools. “Lord knows, before a test, I was praying,” she said, but added the reference to prayer made by the board member was to a Christian god, but not everyone in public schools is Christian and praying to the same god.
Denton said the resolutions would have little impact on the standards – one was to rescind the board’s vote in August to adopt the standards and the other to send a message to the state asking they be revised. However, she said the resolutions would have a big impact on the students.
Even by presenting the resolutions, Denton said, the board “is telling an entire community of students that they don’t matter. It is telling an entire community of students that they’re being ignored and it’s telling an entire community of students that they’re invisible.” Her comments referred to how a political/campaign rally opposing the standards incorporated language attacking the LGBTQ+ community.
“Think about what it would be like to teach love and acceptance in our schools,” she said. “As a pastor and as a parent, that’s the kind of school I want to send my child to.”
Lisa Mansfield, speaking against the resolutions, asked the board to stop distracting from all the positive things happening in the schools, to stop politicizing the schools, and to stop insinuating the teachers and staff don’t understand the community and would promote age-inappropriate content.
She added she did not see “a stampede of parents” coming in upset about the standards.
Mansfield said the board members were there to represent all of the students and they should stop “grandstanding” with those types of resolutions.
Upper Township’s Jenna Smith said she didn’t want “Moms for Liberty” board members “creating nightmares for teachers.” (Moms for Liberty, which endorsed Shaffer, Panico and Nicoletti, is a conservative national political organization that is pro parental rights and against curriculums involving race and LGBT rights and against books in school libraries regarding gender identity.)
Smith said she has been attending board meetings in Ocean City and Upper Township “for months in order to make sure that the ignorance of some won’t dictate the education of all.”
She added that these board members are “setting the stage for Ocean City to make national headlines.” She said one is advertising for a banned books group to review books that have been banned and others with questionable content that haven’t been banned.
“As disappointed as we are that fascism is trying to leak into our community, it is important to note that we are hopeful for the future,” Smith said. “We know that most of our board as well as the staff and families in Ocean City are actual allies who believe in both acceptance and science, and so we are committed to standing up to their bigotry with intelligence, to their hatred with love and to their moral panic with common sense.”
Marie and Dave Hayes, Ocean City residents and retired college professors, spoke up to support the resolution presented by Shaffer, Panico and Nicoletti.
“We have heard several speakers tonight on the newly mandated sex education standards that force-feed our students the concepts of vaginal, oral, anal sex, masturbation, and abortion by the eighth grade as well as radical gender and sexual ideologies,” Marie Hayes said. “The radical, extremist proponents of the sex education mandates claim that this is not an issue, and that the three new school board members are merely engaging in politics, but parents and taxpayers have spoken and they strongly disagree with Governor Murphy’s new state sex education standards.” She added citizens showed that by voting out four incumbents in the November school board election.
She said the divisiveness is coming from the other side. “… in truth, it is the radical extremists who have consistently resorted to mockery, harassment, and name-calling since last summer. They turned the campaign into dishonest, divisive, and hateful attacks and, even now, are treating the three new board members disrespectfully,” she said, noting the only issue is about parents controlling the sexual education of minor children.
Dave Hayes also called the proponents of the standards “extremists” and that “studies have clearly shown that pushing sex education to children as young as second grade can be very confusing and detrimental to their development.”
He said the “overwhelming majority” of Ocean City voters agreed with the three board members and want the district to follow the “courageous example” of other districts that have parents opt-in to the standards rather than opt-out, and have sex ed done in modules to be taken home and done under parental supervision.
Dr. Jeanmarie Mason, a former high school teacher and administrator now teaching at Rowan and St. Joseph’s universities, said she wanted to applaud and thank the school board for approving the standards.
“As someone who supervised health and physical education standards in a public school district, I stand before you to let you know the standards and resulting curriculum did help to protect the health and safety of our students,” she said.
Mason said it was important to teach children the correct anatomical parts of their body so they can accurately report abuse.
Dr. Joeigh Perella of Vineland said she came to talk to the board about aspects of her childhood and the struggles she had growing up because she didn’t have access to much of the information the curricula in the standards provides students today.
“I suffered years of undiagnosed depression, I suffered years of suicidal ideations, I suffered years of never knowing or loving myself for who I am,” she said. Perella asked the board to support the guidelines and the faculty implementing them “so your students don’t have to have the childhood that I had.”
“We should be seen and accepted for who we are. We should be believed when we speak up about who we are,” she said. “Resolutions that stand against these standards are a dog whistle to members of my community telling us that you are not welcome. I know that is not true for Ocean City, New Jersey. You have always welcomed me into your community.”
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff