Recently, a group of citizens have been calling for conservative policies to be adopted by the Alpena Public Schools Board of Education.

Some have accused the Alpena County Democratic Party of pushing a Leftist school agenda. Until those assertions, our party has not become involved in local school matters.

The Alpena County Democratic Party will speak to the issues/initiatives brought before the APS board by stating our principles and beliefs.

SUSPICION OF TEACHERS

The Alpena County Democratic Party believes that our educators deserve our respect and trust to teach the curriculum established by the Michigan Department of Education.

Parents are entitled to sit in on their students’ classes. Cameras/listening devices would only serve to disrupt the teaching process and prevent the free exchange of ideas and conversations so pertinent to learning. How would a teacher or student know how their questions may be construed, taken out of context, or used against them?

The Alpena County Democratic Party vehemently opposes cameras and listening devices in classrooms. We encourage parents to volunteer in the classroom and work to support the teaching process and our educators.

COVID-19 AND MASKING

The Alpena County Democratic Party strongly opposes any policies that suggest our schools operate in defiance of our District Health Department No. 4 and communitywide medical experts.

There is too much at stake in a global pandemic or any future public health crisis.

Our students and school staff deserve our protection and they deserve to be part of the solution to restore public health. Our youth are Alpena County’s treasures. Let’s treat them as such and mandate mask use during school hours.

If we save one life by mandating mask use during school hours, then we have done right by our entire community.

CLIMATE CHANGE

The Alpena County Democratic Party is aware that 97% of the world’s scientists believe climate change is real and caused by humankind.

We oppose an anti-science agenda within our public schools.

Science is not political; science is real. The Alpena County Democratic Party respects science and supports the teaching of climate change within our public-school institutions.

TRANSGENDER USE OF BATHROOMS/LOCKER ROOMS, PARTICIPATION IN SPORTS

The notion of separate but equal facilities for minorities was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (Brown v Board of Education, 1954).

The Alpena County Democrats place confidence in our public school administration to work with students and their families to determine when a student’s identity necessitates a shift in bathroom or locker room usage.

That includes how best to accommodate them in sports.

Strict policies of segregation are deemed unconstitutional.

The Michigan High School Athletic Association is developing a position on athletic equity. That will help guide APS in dealing with this question.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a legal perspective that suggests that many modern institutions and laws in America have their origins in racism and that it is useful to understand from a legal perspective.

CRT is a class taught in some law schools across the nation. It is not a public school curriculum in Alpena, nor is it part of the Michigan Department of Education’s core curriculum.

There is no Liberal initiative in Alpena to see CRT incorporated in our schools.

However, we do believe that racism has been a frequent part of American history. We also believe that history teachers in public schools need the latitude to speak to those influences as they have/have not influenced our growth as a nation. To adopt policies that forbid teachers to address issues of racism would effectively remove or limit lessons about slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Movement, current events, and much more.

We believe that public school teachers are professional enough to know how to address those topics and properly frame them for the intellectual level of their students.

FINAL COMMENTARY

Students need to be prepared for the real world. After graduation, our youth will confront the complex issues of CRT, global pandemics, and climate change, whether they are in college, the workplace, the military, within their communities, or wherever life takes them.

It is our job as parents and educators to prepare them.

How we prepare them is crucial. Let’s allow students to formulate their own impressions over time and with the education our public institutions have provided them.

A minority of citizens in Alpena County have expressed an alternate view of how our children should be taught. Thiat view goes against the very long tradition of teaching tolerance regardless of race, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation that this community broadly supports.

The Alpena Public Schools and our Board of Education are obligated by law to provide a curriculum that does not violate the civil rights of our children or the educators that have been hired to teach them.