Over the weekend, the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette had an interesting followup on the new state law requiring schools to teach a lesson on adoption (and abortion) to all students in grades 6-12, which we covered in depth last month.
The law was supposed to go into effect this school year, but it remains very unclear whether the lesson actually wound up being taught. The curriculum materials belatedly developed by the Arkansas Department of Education were removed from the website shortly after they appeared, the D-G reports. Heh.
Last month, I asked education department spokesperson Kim Mundell what would happen if schools failed to teach the lesson this year. “Schools are expected to follow Arkansas laws,” she told me on May 20. “Not doing so could result in a corrective action plan or standards violation.”
But now that the school year has ended, it appears that compliance was spotty, and the department is taking a mellower tone. “Can I say with 100% certainty that they all did it this year?” Stacy Smith, deputy commissioner of the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, commented to the D-G. “I can’t.” (The Division of Elementary and Secondary Education is the part of the education department responsible for K-12 schools.)
Act 637, passed by the state Legislature last year, mandates that all public schools offer an hour of instruction on “adoption awareness” to all students in grades six through 12. The legislation is not connected to Arkansas LEARNS, the omnibus K-12 education package that also passed in 2023, and it seems to have largely slipped through the cracks with all of the attention on LEARNS.
A memo from the state about this new requirement was sent out May 6, with just weeks remaining in the 2023-24 school year.
The measure is controversial for a reason that the D-G’s report downplays: It isn’t just about adoption. It also mandates that the required lesson include “the reasons adoption is preferable to abortion.” If you’re wondering what those reasons are, the law doesn’t say, and the short-lived curriculum materials offered by the state don’t either.
The lesson was supposed to happen “at the beginning of each school year,” according to the law, but apparently the education department didn’t get around to pushing it through until the year was just about over.
“As for us pulling together information — that was not done at the beginning of the year,” Smith explained to the D-G. “I know some school districts reached out for information. Our hope was to get it out faster than we did.”
As the message trickled down to educators last month, social media chatter suggested the new mandate came as a shock. It seems increasingly likely that school administrators and district officials were likewise in the dark.
Last month, I called around to five or six districts to see how they were going about implementing the requirement, but couldn’t get anyone to respond. The D-G had a little more luck, getting responses from the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District and the Pulaski County Special School District. Here’s what one had to say:
“I’m very familiar with it,” Janice Walker, assistant superintendent of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District, said recently about the requirements of Act 637 of 2023.
“But the state has not (released) those rules,” Walker said about state-issued guidelines for carrying out the law. “Until they drop the rules, we don’t know what our parameters are. Until we have those rules, it is hard for us to implement anything,” she said.
The PCSSD response was similarly murky (based on confusing language on the education department website, they mistakenly thought the requirement didn’t go into effect until next year, a spokesperson said). I’m still not certain whether either district did the lesson or not, but it doesn’t seem like it? Perhaps they were being intentionally vague so they weren’t admitting to violating the law on the record.
Confusing matters even further, the curriculum materials offered by the state, as mandated by the law, didn’t cover many of the lesson components the law required, including the controversial stuff about abortion.
The whole thing was strange. The teaching materials provided by the state basically amount to adoption recruitment videos made by the Gladney Center for Adoption, a large adoption agency in Fort Worth, Texas. A good deal of it gets into detail about the process — the sort of thing that you would show as an intro video to parents interested in adopting, for example. This seems like a weird thing to force on 6-12 graders, though more or less harmless, even if adoption policy can bring up thorny questions not covered by a short promo video.
But there was nothing at all about abortion in the lessons for grades 6-9 (or other areas mandated by the law). And in the 10-12 grade lesson, abortion got only a passing mention: The main character in the simulation is told by a health care provider that abortion is an option, but she has already decided she doesn’t want to do that, so the story just moves on to the choice between adoption and parenthood. That’s it.
Asked last month about the discrepancy between the law’s requirements and the state’s lesson plans and accompanying materials, education department spokeswoman Kim Mundell gave a non-response: “School districts have the autonomy to choose the curriculum implemented at the local level for the purpose of fulfilling the requirements related to Act 637 of 2023.”
OK. But the curriculum doesn’t cover the materials required by the law! So what exactly were schools supposed to do?
If this all sounds like a mess, it gets messier. After sending an out-of-the-blue letter about a new mandate with weeks left in school, the education department removed the curriculum materials (likewise required to be provided by law) from its website.
Education department officials did not respond to my queries about when the curriculum materials were first posted, but my guess is that it was around the beginning of May, when the letters to districts went out. If so, they were only online for a matter of weeks. Here’s the D-G:
Stacy Smith … said the state agency posted possible adoption education lessons on its website late in the just-ended school year. But the agency then deleted the lessons from its website to do further review of them — to ensure that the material was sensitive to students who are adoptees.
Smith said the department failed to anticipate concerns about current students who had been adopted and “whether there was anything triggering within the curriculum.”
Oops! The fact that the curriculum seems to have nothing to do with the law mandating its creation was not mentioned as a concern by Smith in the D-G article. According to the D-G, “the material was selected and posted without necessarily looking at whether the material was sensitive to all students and populations.”
Great work all around. This seems like an even bigger hurdle if they’re going to shove pro-life talking points in to the curriculum, as legally required, but perhaps the plan is just to ignore that part of the law.
Act 637 also requires that written materials from the lessons be provided to the parents or guardians of any student who is pregnant, in case you were wondering what the real focus of this unworkable bit of grandstanding legislation was really all about.
So did anyone actually follow the law this year?
“I think most districts probably touched on it,” Smith told the D-G. “I do feel most of the people are trying to do the right thing and follow the law and requirements.”
Who can say, really?