Va. house backs bill requiring parents be notified of sexually explicit materials

The House of Delegates approved legislation Monday that would mandate school divisions notify parents annually of “sexually explicit” material that may be taught in their classrooms. If parents request it, teachers must provide replacement, non-explicit assignments.

By defining sexually explicit content, the bill went a step further than a similar proposal taken up and ultimately rejected by the Virginia Board of Education almost two weeks ago. The House bill defines sexually explicit content as any that deals with criminal sexual assault punishable as a felony under the state code that covers rape. The education board did not see defining sexually explicit as a board matter.

Previous proposals left “sexually explicit” up to interpretation, but sponsor Del. R. Steven Landes, R-Augusta, said he sought to make the language more specific.

“It is very narrowly drawn at this point, but it still allows the parent to ask for this alternative. We’ve tried to make this very narrow in scope,” he said in a House committee meeting last week.

The measure passed 73-25 in the House of Delegates. Decried by free-speech groups and some teachers who say that definition would censor classic works of literature, the bill and similar proposals have found more favor among parents who point mainly to the importance of parental notification.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe will veto the bill if it reaches his desk, McAuliffe’s spokesman Brian Coy said Monday. The bill is now headed to the Senate.

The governor vetoed similar legislation last year that became known as the “Beloved” bill. That bill received its moniker after Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County parent, raised objections after she said her high school senior negatively reacted to scenes in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction, which she said he was reading in his Advanced Placement English class without her knowledge. She took issue with scenes in the book that depict bestiality and gang rape.

Murphy believes the bill passed by the House of Delegates on Monday will go a long way in helping local school districts define sexually explicit, and promote transparent conversations between teachers and parents.

“It is certainly reasonable to notify parents when their children will be assigned material with graphic descriptions of sexual felony criminal offenses. Again, this is not censorship as the teacher may still assign the material and no book will be removed from the classroom, library or syllabus,” she said in an email.

Parents are notified and given the option to select an alternative in sexual education classes when sexually explicit material is presented, she added, and parents are also notified about animal dissection in biology classes.

“To be consistent, parents should also be notified in the English classroom of certain books,” Murphy wrote in an email.

Del. Alfonso H. Lopez, D-Arlington, echoed free-speech groups and the American Civil Liberties Union by saying in the House on Monday that the bill created a “slippery slope to backdoor censorship.”

He argued that classic works like Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible could be interpreted as sexually explicit without the proper context. With the bill in place, students could be kept from works like those and the ideas that come from them, he said.

“This argument that we have to protect children from ideas in school is scary,” Lopez said.

Many teachers agreed, adding that conversations between parents and teachers over materials that cause parents concern already take place.

“Why does the General Assembly not trust the local school boards to handle this issue?” said Donald Wilms, the head of the Chesterfield Education Association, which represents teachers. “They are making an issue out of something that was not an issue to begin with.”

An English teacher for 29 of his 39 years as an educator, Wilms said he always provided alternative assignments to students whose parents occasionally raised objections to books. But he felt that a student who at one point read “A Tale of Two Cities” rather than “Frankenstein” because her parents said they did not believe in raising people from the dead missed out on important classroom discussion.

“Ultimately, I believe the students are harmed,” he said. “Now, are we going to take away every book that deals with rape? I don’t see any way that ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ can be considered sexually explicit. But it has something somewhat equivalent to a rape on a campus. It seems to me that rape is a real subject. Why not talk about it at home rather than stifling it?”

“Tess of the d’Urbervilles” is a book commonly asked about on AP English exams, he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia also opposes the bill.

“We oppose the use of ratings and warning labels for books as forms of censorship. Vague terms to label potentially controversial books provide no guidance on the topic and only encourage some parents to forbid their children from reading the books without knowing much more about them other than that there is an arbitrary label attached to them,” wrote Bill Farrar, spokesman for the Virginia ACLU, in an email.

Landes said HB 2191 does not create a slippery slope to censorship. Instead, it empowers parents to have a say in what their children are reading, he said.

“The purpose is to allow parents … to have a little bit of say over what material is appropriate for them,” he said.

Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia, said the rhetoric and scare tactics of the bill’s opponents are misleading and demeaning to parents who have the best interest of their children in mind.

In previous debates, Virginia Board of Education members agreed that parents should be notified, but also felt that existing regulations sufficiently resolved such issues.

Existing policies dictate that all schools provide parents with syllabi, and allow parents to request a review of any instructional materials. They require local school boards to lay out the basis on which someone can request reconsideration of materials considered “sensitive or controversial.”

According to a 2013 survey of school divisions conducted by the Virginia Department of Education staff, 74 percent of 108 districts and five professional organizations had policies allowing students to be excused from instruction related to sensitive or controversial materials.

Forty-eight percent of those respondents required that parents receive notice before potentially sensitive or controversial materials are used in the classroom.

Sen. Amanda F. Chase, R-Chesterfield, said that existing system isn’t working.

“Parents know our kids best; that’s what it comes down to,” she said Monday. “So the problem that we have right now is that by the time that the parents find out, it’s already too late. A lot of the titles that are out there, you can’t really tell if they have sexually explicit materials.”

She had not looked specifically at the House bill and its definition of sexually explicit, she said, but she believes teachers should include books on a list of sexually explicit materials even if they think that it could raise red flags for parents. She also supported the “Beloved” bill.

“I get it, it can be subjective, but I still think we owe our due diligence to parents. We don’t necessarily know what our kids are reading because they use technology or other things. It’s almost impossible to track,” said Chase, a mother of three students in Chesterfield schools. “It’s not the role of schools to indoctrinate our children. ... A lot of times they are pushing ideas that may conflict with another parent’s belief system. So we have to be sensitive to parents’ belief systems.”