By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Four hundred twenty-nine House bills and 267 Senate bills have been filed in Topeka. After committees have taken their final actions Monday and Tuesday, both chambers will debate those passed out of their committees. “Turnaround Day” is Feb. 24 when bills in one house are passed to the other chamber. However, some bills can be passed through exempt committees, so some issues can return to life via that route.
Teachers in general can cross-their-fingers that HB2163 and SB145 survive since they would restore “due process” that was taken away over a decade ago. Students pursuing teacher programs in universities across Kansas dropped by half when they lost this “tenure.” Despite having a solid probationary teaching record, they could be dismissed without cause at anytime. This might slow the decline in teaching program enrollments.
HB2224 would increase school days from 186 to 195 days or equivalent. This might recover some of the learning loss that has occurred these last three years.
SB231 provides a benefit that might help recruit qualified public school teachers from out of state, by providing a waiver of out-of-state college tuition for their children.
But several bills compete for the most-detrimental-to-teaching award. SB66 would have Kansas join the interstate teacher mobility compact and allow undertrained teachers, especially weak “science teachers” from neighbor states, with hardly one-fourth the science training required in Kansas, to be fully licensed and fully paid without any requirement to make up their deficiencies. While there will likely be few such teachers from states already heavy with vacancies, this burden on qualified teachers next door will likely encourage more of our best to leave the classroom.
In 1986, Kansas was only the second state to mandate sex education in response to the AIDS crisis of that time. Most other states followed. This included a mandatory week of sex-ed in elementary and more in high school, with KSDE inspection of schools to ensure it happened. But faced with nationwide push back, promotion of abstinence-only sex-ed, and national science associations that looked the other way, most sex-ed program requirements soon ended, including in Kansas in 2005.
Had solid sex education been provided in biology for these last four decades, it is possible that there would be a significant population that would understand that chromosomes include not only XX and XY, but XXY, XXX, XO, etc. -That everyone produces testosterone in adrenal glands and estrogens in fat tissues. -That sexual anatomy varies and is sometimes ambiguous. -That sometimes these three factors do not all align. -And that the feeling of “gender” is determined before birth, is not learned, and may also not align with the other three factors. This understanding is missing in many bills. Indeed, SB180 attempts to define biological sex with simple-minded criteria.
In complete disregard for Kansans who voted down the amendment on removing abortion protection from the State Constitution by nearly 60 percent, HB2181 would criminalize abortion. SB175 likewise makes destruction of a fertilized embryo a crime, despite the fact that up to half of natural embryos die before they implant, usually due to defects.
We don’t give patients oversight of hospitals, but several bills would in various ways give parents oversight of school content. HB2236 gives a parent right to direct the education of their children.
Medicine and law are professions that have jurisdiction over their members’ professional conduct. But SB12 is an outright abolition of the medical practices needed to align a trans child’s hormones and/or anatomy with the their brain, a blatant usurpation of professional responsibility. Sadly SB233 goes further to allow a civic case be brought against any medical surgeon who performs gender reassignment; this essentially condemns the transsexual child to being entrapped in an unwanted body into adulthood.
Legislators are not pharmacists, but SB173 dictates that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine tablets be made available over-the-counter.
Of all of the bills, SB188 is by far the most egregious, removing an affirmative defense for public, private and parochial schools from obscenity. This in effect would cause all sex education to fall silent, and perhaps even prevent the circulation of most concepts in this column.
Perhaps if Kansas had not dropped sex education in 2005, there would have been more young legislators who could have understood these problems and avoided this lack of clarity.
. . .
John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.