The Virginia Beach School Board voted down a resolution directing administrators to adopt the state’s new model policies on how to deal with students who claim to be the opposite sex.
The motion to adopt the resolution failed with a vote of 5-5 and one abstention on Tuesday, according to a report by the Virginian-Pilot.
The resolution would have directed school administrators to adopt the 2023 “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools” from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin greets fans during a NFL football practice at the team’s training facility on July 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
This policy would have required parents to provide written consent in order for their child to go by another name at school and be addressed with other pronouns. Parents would also have had to grant consent for their child to receive counseling services “pertaining to gender,” among other things.
“I’ve said from the beginning, nobody’s intention on this dais is to say no to the governor, but it is our intention, in a division of this size, to tweak a few things while remaining in compliance,” board member Kimberly Melnyk, who voted against the resolution, said.
Melnyk also claimed the policies need to meet the needs of all students. Other board members, however, pointed out that the issue has to do with parents’ rights when it comes to their minor children.
“We can proverbially kick the can down the road even further, looking for something that resembles perfection,” board member Michael Callan, who voted in favor of the resolution, said. “But I think the spirit around the reason for these policies is due to the fact that, culturally, we’ve gotten to a place that alarms a great number of parents.”
WATCH — Youngkin Tells Trans Student “Not Fair” for “Biological Boys” to Participate in Girls Sports:
“And that place was, a state representative could be informed of information about a child and could, with intentionality, withhold that information from a parent,” Callan added.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Youngkin stressed that “kids don’t belong to the state.”
“Parents are in charge of their children’s lives,” Youngkin said. “The kids don’t belong to the state, they belong to parents, and to families, and they have the ultimate say in decisions that that child is going to make with a parent, not with a bureaucrat.”
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“These are the exact same school systems that fought us on allowing parents to decide whether children wear a mask, or whether sexually explicit materials could be removed from curriculum, or that schools were going to stay shut for a long period of time, unnecessarily long, which resulted in massive learning loss,” Youngkin added.
“These school districts will, in fact, comply with the law, because it is the law, and they don’t have a choice,” the Virginia governor declared.
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