Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, as the mother of two teenage boys in public schools, I understand and can appreciate the need for age-appropriate content to ensure our schools remain nurturing environments for our kids, but the kinds of content that make it into these curricula and classrooms are decisions best left to professional educators working together with parents to determine what is best for our students. As a mom, it is important that our children see themselves and the situations they face in the books they read and the curriculum they are taught. This amendment is yet another attempt to broadly ban entire categories of books, forcing educators to second-guess and censor themselves. Engaging with novel and challenging topics is essential to how kids grow as students and individuals. They need to be able to confront ideas and topics that may not always be comfortable to them. This amendment is simply terrible policy in terms of providing our kids with the education they need to succeed in a complex and rapidly evolving world. Ultimately, at its core, this is a discriminatory and offensive amendment in its targeting of our LGBTQ+ people. It separates the military children attending DODEA schools, some of which identify as LGBTQ+ themselves, from their peers in other school systems in the United States, isolating them and depriving their education of perspectives critical to their own self-identification, growth, and development.…”