The Fairfax County School Board has voted to delay the public comment period on a proposal to combine genders in sex and gender education classes. School board officials cited concerns over community feedback and a possible backlash.

The public comment period will now happen in the fall, which will likely push back the possible implementation of the proposed changes to the 2023-2024 school year. That’s if the Board ultimately approves them, following the community engagement process.

“We’ve got to be sure we’re bringing our community along, that they understand the rationale, the best practice, so they can feel fully engaged and fully supportive of whatever changes,” said Fairfax Superintendent Scott Brabrand, who supported the delay.

In discussion at a work session on Tuesday, several Board members appeared uncomfortable with the proposed changes. Members acknowledged findings accompanying the proposal that combined-gender education is a best practice. But many seemed to be bracing for a possible community backlash.

Groups of vocal conservative parents have previously expressed outrage at the school system and the school board over other inclusive policies for LGBTQ youth, racial equity efforts at a Fairfax magnet school, and library books by queer authors or authors of color. Speakers at school board meetings often reference overtly homophobic tropes about pedophilia and “grooming” of children.

Several school board members expressed concerns that an uproar over the family life curriculum could lead to more families choosing to opt their children out of the lessons, skipping instruction about safety and bodily autonomy, healthy relationships, and more. Currently, opt-out numbers are very low, at 3% of elementary school students, 1.7% in middle school, and 1.6% in high school.

What’s being proposed

The changes are laid out in a report from the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee (FLECAC), an appointed group of parents, teachers, community members, health experts, and students. The group advises Fairfax’s Family Life Education coordinator on updates to the county’s existing curriculum, which covers a range of topics, including puberty, sex education, relationships, dating violence, gender identity, and more.

This year, the committee is recommending that the school board combine genders for Human Growth and Development units in grades 4-8, and combine genders in grade 10 for a lesson on self-examinations for breast and testicular cancer. Currently, students self-assign themselves to boys’ or girls’ groups for the lessons, a model critics say reinforces social taboos about bodies and excludes transgender or nonbinary students. (Genders are already combined in family life lessons after eighth grade, with the tenth grade lesson a current exception to the rule.)

The committee is also recommending emphasizing that a grade 10 lesson on human sexuality includes a discussion of gender identity. They propose adding a reference in the title description of the lesson as well as in the objectives for the lesson. Separately, the committee is asking the school board to approve a new piece of media for teaching about puberty in sixth and seventh grades.

The committee also says it wants to spend next school year examining how the family life curriculum deals with the subject of gender identity in elementary schools, and how to make the whole family life curriculum more inclusive of students with disabilities, English language learners, and transgender and nonbinary students.

Experts say that combining genders for discussions about puberty and reproduction helps de-stigmatize bodies and lifts taboos, the committee’s report argues. It also makes the lessons more inclusive for transgender and nonbinary students.

“In a gender-combined class students also have opportunity to learn about individuals who are different from themselves and practice communicating about sensitive topics building skills that will be important to healthy relationships,” the committee report says, citing a paper put forward by Gender Spectrum, a national nonprofit supporting children of different gender identities.

The group’s recommendation for gender-combined teaching in sex and health education are also supported by the National Association of School Psychologists, which finds “no evidence” to support the practice of gender segregation when discussing such topics.

Other public school systems across the state and in Northern Virginia already combine genders for sex and puberty education, according to the committee report. That includes neighboring Arlington and Alexandria, which put all students together for lessons but offer some gender differentiated small-group discussions after lessons about puberty.

Some local school systems, including in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, mostly offer gender-combined classes, but with some variation from school to school or between individual class lessons. Others keep the genders separate earlier in elementary school or even until high school, which is the case in Loudoun and Prince William counties.

Board concerns over community feedback

While the whole Fairfax board acknowledged that combined-gender education was a best practice, multiple members raised questions about if elementary school students would be able to digest information about puberty in a mixed setting, without being embarrassed or having the information feed into bullying.

Mason District representative Dr. Ricardy Anderson said that as a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher in Prince George’s County Schools, she’d taught human development to a mixed-gender group of students. But she’d also hosted other opportunities for students who were nervous about speaking up in the big group.

“I had students, primarily female students, who would not ask any questions even though they had those questions,” she said. “So while I am fine with the combination because again, I was in a system where that was done, I would like for some consideration … so that students who would not be vocal in the full group can have an opportunity to expand their knowledge.”

“There are things that happen with the bodies — the maturity aspect of a 10-year-old having that as, you know, playground ammo to tease kids,” said Megan McLaughlin, who represents Braddock District. “I just want to understand that better. I want our families to be able to have that conversation.”

Most school board members supported delaying the family engagement process for the new recommendations until the fall, when families might be more ready to provide feedback and learn more about the rationale behind the proposed shift. Some suggested the delay would head off possible community criticism.

“If this looks like we rushed it during the summertime on something like this, we may have a backlash that I think could be more harmful in the long run,” said McLaughlin.

Others doubted that a delay would actually help get the school community on board with the recommendations, suggesting there are intractable differences in how people view sexuality and gender.

“LGBTQ youth feel like they’re not seen. They feel like they’re not included. That is a reality that we have to recognize,” said At-Large representative Abrar Omeish, who ultimately voted to support the delay. “What that means, though, is because we had an exclusive curriculum before, in the hopes of making it more inclusive we were perhaps leaning too far into now becoming a little bit exclusive on the other end.”

Laura Jane Cohen from the Springfield District and Karl Frisch from the Providence District dissented, voting instead to put the recommendations through a regular review process, which would begin this week and conclude with a board vote in June.

“The committee has been working for years gathering enough information to come and present to us the idea of a gender-inclusive FLE from fourth grade on,” said Cohen. “I think we absolutely know it reduces stigma. We have 10-year-olds at schools who are having their periods. It’s important for the kids to know what that is and how it works and to not be ashamed or embarrassed.”

“Our job is to always take best practices and do the right thing for our kids and not let the loudest voices in our community be what determine our path forward,” she added.

Possible culture-wars backlash

Throughout the discussion, board members referred to the “elephant in the room,” seemingly a reference to heightened scrutiny and outrage from conservative parents over a host of issues, particularly those related to gender identity and LGBTQ students and staff.

At one point, the board had a back-and-forth about the danger of highly visible changes in the Fairfax curriculum becoming a political target on the state level. Currently, Virginia school divisions can either use the state’s standards of learning for family life — which FCPS staff characterized as out-of-date and not comprehensive — or develop their own curriculum, as Fairfax has done.

Karen Corbett-Sanders requested a comparison between the Fairfax curriculum and the state standards, pointing to the possibility of “stricter standards coming out of the state versus allowing us to lead.”

Frisch pushed back.

“I can’t operate as a school board member afraid of what the governor might do or what his Department of Education might do that is in conflict with science, and I will assume that they will do those types of things regardless of what we do,” Frisch said. “I hope we never find ourselves in a position where that is the judgment call that we make — that we’d rather not tangle with the governor over what is right and what is the best practice.”

Corbett-Sanders later said she meant that she didn’t want to let the school board in for further criticism of lack of family engagement, and that she wanted to understand and be able to explain the differences between the state standards and Fairfax’s curriculum.

“We want to make sure that we are doing that so that we don’t provide an impetus for people saying that Fairfax isn’t listening to parents,” she said.

Outside of the school board, some groups on either side of the issue are already taking note of the family life curriculum and combined-gender learning.

The Fairfax County Parents Association, a group that developed from the school reopening movement and which has been vocally critical of the teachers’ union, said the proposed changes were “in the name of equity,” a word that the Youngkin administration and right-leaning parents have called for removing from school programs.

“This will predictably tank the value of these classes as kids will be too embarrassed to ask questions,” the group tweeted.

Meanwhile, FCPS Pride, an affinity group for LGBTQ teachers, students, and allies, emphasized the research base supporting gender-combined instruction in a blog post.

“There seems to be no research on whether gender-separation in sex ed in fact improves upon stated goals,” the group wrote. “In fact, current research on the subject seems to indicate that gender-separated classrooms may actually prohibit the ability of students to see themselves reflected in the curricula.”