The Fairfax County school board is in hot water once again.

This time, it’s trying to make controversial changes to “family life education” (FLE) classes. And although it put off voting on that particular issue until sometime later in June, a number of parents decided to show up at Luther Jackson Middle School on Thursday to make their opposition known.

According to a Fox News report, the controversial changes come down to this: Virginia’s Fairfax County school board is looking to change FLE classes, invoking the need for greater “equity” as the reason. The school board’s sex-ed committee has recommended eliminating the requirement to keep boys and girls apart during these classes.

Instead, children of both genders in 4th through 8th-grade classes will be mixed during all lessons on puberty, the human reproductive system, and sexually transmitted diseases. But that’s not the half of it. The school board is also mulling more severe penalties for students who engage in what is called “malicious misgendering” or “deadnaming” fellow students. In other words, those high-spirited types who refuse to go along with this nonsense can expect harsh punishments.

But parents in the Fairfax County district aren’t having any of it.

“Too far, too much, too young,” one Fairfax County parent named Jeff told Fox News ahead of the school board meeting.

“I asked my son this morning what he was going to learn,” he continued. “He said, ‘math, science, language arts, writing. And he said, ‘oh, science.’ That’s what we want to hear, right? We don’t want to hear, ‘I got punished today because I called somebody by the wrong pronoun.’ Or what this regulation identifies as ‘malicious misgendering.’”

After all, it’s not as if Virginia schools are shining beacons of student achievement and intellectuality. Recent assessments have discovered that the state’s schools are, to put it mildly, falling behind. Only about a third of 8th graders in the district are functionally literate, with the numbers only slightly better for 4th graders. So, for some reason, students become less literate the further they progress through Virginia’s schools.

At least they’ll know not to misgender someone, or use the wrong pronouns—even if, alas, they don’t know what a pronoun is.

Elizabeth McCauley, a local parent, wasn’t shy about expressing her opinion on the issue.

“I think just the basic of saying what is falsehood is true,” she told Fox News. “Boys are boys and girls are girls. And God has uniquely designed each individual the way they are. And starting at a very young age and preying upon young children. Grooming young children. Having pornographic, pedophilia literature in schools. That’s very problematic. And also doing that and focusing so much effort on that, when kids are falling behind in academics.”

And she didn’t hold back when describing the borderline pornographic nature of the materials children are being exposed to in these schools.

“Some of the things that kids are being told in school or even literature that they’re receiving in school, is, if you sold it on the street, or you had it on the street, you’d be criminalized for it.”

Another parent, Stacy Langton, also explained that the business of penalizing students for “deadnaming” and the like seemed dangerously close to compelled speech.

“It’s compelling our kids to a type of behavior and speech and especially…if you’re a conservative family or a Christian family, you have a right to be able to live in reality and…address someone who is obviously male as a male,” she told Fox News. “I don’t think that that speech should be compelled.”

So the Fairfax County school board’s vote is postponed, for the time being. It remains to be seen whether the opposition from parents has any effect, or whether school administrators simply dismiss their concerns once the furor has died down and pursue their progressive agenda with redoubled vigor.

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Todd Jaquith

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"Originally from South Florida, Todd Jaquith now lives in sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico. He holds a degree in Anthropology from Florida Atlantic University."

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