Legal group claims school district's 'graphic' sex-ed program undermines parental rights
The Alliance Defending Freedom has denounced a sex education curriculum at a Colorado school district, labeling it "graphic" and "ideologically driven."
The legal nonprofit group sent a letter on Tuesday to the Roaring Fork Schools Board of Education and Roaring Fork Superintendent Anna Cole regarding the 3Rs curriculum.
Short for “Rights, Respect, Responsibility,” ADF said the curriculum “includes graphic visuals and ideologically driven content" targeting students as young as 5 years old.
ADF also took issue with “Roaring Fork’s failure to provide adequate notice and opt-out rights to parents in violation of their fundamental constitutional rights.”
ADF called on the school district to either drop the 3Rs curriculum altogether or, at the least, “immediately implement an opt-in procedure that ensures parents can exercise their fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children by automatically exempting all children from this explicit content except for those children whose parents choose to opt in.”
According to the letter, for kindergarteners, the curriculum features slides of illustrated naked children’s bodies and asks students to identify private parts of male and female bodies.
The second-grade content encourages children to reject the gender binary, while a third-grade assignment encourages the acceptance of same-sex parenting and to draw a “family pride flag.”
“Thousands of Roaring Fork parents don’t even know that their children are seeing this content or participating in these activities—and that is by design,” continued the ADF letter.
“Roaring Fork has failed the parents it serves. By design, Roaring Fork implemented a vulgar sexual-education program with ineffective notice and opt-out opportunities for parents.”
“Parents have the constitutional right to know what their children are taught about sex, gender, and their own bodies, and to opt out when curriculum conflicts with their beliefs,” said Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights, in a statement released Tuesday.
“Roaring Fork Schools is not only introducing kindergarteners to explicit content but also burying the information from parents and denying them a meaningful choice to opt their children out—by design.”
In May 2023, following nearly two years of research and community and professional feedback, the Roaring Fork School Board voted to approve the new health curriculum.
According to the Post Independent, the district ultimately selected roughly 18 lessons out of more than 100 available within the broader 3Rs curriculum bank, in part because officials determined some lessons and resources were inappropriate given their content, intended age group or the needs of the Roaring Fork Valley community.
Supporters of the new curriculum included the LGBT activist group the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, which argued that the educational content was beneficial to students.
"Some of you in this room have the privilege of thinking that this is a simple curriculum change," PFLAG member Ashley Stahl said at the meeting, according to The Glenwood Springs Post Independent, "but for others of us sitting here, we cannot help realize the position you take might be the difference between life and death for children in this valley."
Earlier this year, during a school board meeting update on the implementation of the sex-ed curriculum, Cole defended it, saying it was "really focused on safety."
“It is evidence-based that it prevents sexual abuse, addresses critical risk factors, promotes inclusion and positive school culture, addresses consent gaps, etc.,” Cole said back in May, according to The Post Independent.
“We have a legal and ethical responsibility as mandated reporters to use prevention and trauma-informed response to help survivors heal and make sure students have access to tools and resources.”
According to a school district memo, parental opt-out rates for the curriculum tend to range from less than 1% to about 5% at each grade level, though a couple of elementary schools reported opt-out rates as high as 12% to 13%.
For her part, Cole argued against the proposed idea of out-in rather than opt-out, claiming that the school district’s “goal here is to maximize student access to the curriculum that we believe is essential to creating safe schools” and that an opt-in policy “undermines the validity of that effort, and frames it as something that’s taboo, rather than something we believe is beneficial to all students.”
