Mother Talkers

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  • oh boy... (0 / 0)

    i admire you for sticking it out.  i have seen how hard it is to get any kind of change.  did you do this alone at the high school or with a group of parents?  did you work through the parents club?

    by parentalunit1 on Fri Nov 23, 2007 at 08:45:40 PM PDT

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    • it started (0 / 0)

      with a simple phone call to the teacher to ask questions about the curriculum.  After receiving the answer that it was an "abstinence based" curriculum I batted some questions back to him and actually hung up feeling mildly satisfied.

      A couple of days later when I drove my daughter to school, the very right wing Christian anti choice crowd was protesting on the sidewalk in front of her school, holding banners with photos of aborted fetuses and handing out anti choice pamphlets to the kids as they walked on campus.  Imagine my surprise...I thought I woke up in Kansas, not California.  Of course I called the school and they informed me that they had the right to be there as they were on public property, and that they also had the right to hand the kids their pamphlets as well.  There was nothing the school could do about it, and frankly, I was told, the Vice Prinicpal thought they did a "good job".  Of course my response was that he would be ok with me being in front of the school handing out condoms to the kids....but I digress.

      It was only after this experience then that I actually cracked open the text book and began scanning the chapters into my laptop and making copies of the material on CD to pass out to anyone who would listen.  I have only lived in the district 2 years so did not have a large network of parents.

      I ended up at the school board with one other parent and a representative from Planned Parenthood, and presented a packet of info that was perpared on my behalf by the sex ed curriculum specialist that consults full time for the ACLU.

      It was quite an experience.....Very worth fighting for.  

      by val49erfan on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 01:18:10 PM PDT

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      • Was the group local? (0 / 0)

        We had an incident in our town where a Christian anti-choice group did the same thing in front of some high schools and some elementary schools in our area.  They were awful but they were not doing anything illegal so the schools and the police were kind of stuck with them.  

        They were showing extremely graphic posters of aborted fetuses.  It was really disgusting what they were doing too as they totally traumatized the elementary students.  What's worse is that they chose to do it in front of the poorest schools in the area.  There was sort of an implied racism to their tactic like it was only the people of color or poor folks who would want to abort.

        Apparently it is a group kind of like those hateful Phelps church members who travel the country doing this outside of schools.  The school officials around here were not at all pleased by the incident and admitted as much publicly but again there was nothing that they could do.  I think they did organize adults who could shield the children from the pictures on the second day but they caught everyone by surprise on the first day.  They were fairly confrontational too.  They were getting right into the faces of parents walking their children to the elementary schools.

        Mommy to Joey (12/03), Joshie (11/05) and Mary Rose (1/08)

        by music teacher on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 07:14:40 PM PDT

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        • it was this (0 / 0)

          group: teens for life and I also believe they were working in conjunction with this group: church of the divide.

          Interestingly through doing some research, I found out that my school board had rejected (by a vote of 3-2) that Intelligent Design be taught along the biology curriclulum in 2004.

          I live in Placer County, California.

          by val49erfan on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 09:39:13 PM PDT

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          • Ah, Placer County (0 / 0)

            A group of my friends lived there for a while. One of the women  was 23, 24 and going for   routine gynecology appointment, and when the office found out that she had not ever been pregnant, they asked her if she needed help with infertility.

            by shenanigans on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 09:15:52 AM PDT

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