Parent Update: NEISD Student Health Advisory Council Meets to Select New Chair and Vice Chair
ExpressNews article:
What stands between NEISD and restarting sex ed? These 40 people.
– by Elizabeth Sander, Staff writer
SAN ANTONIO — Four months after the second largest school district in San Antonio halted all its classroom sex education, the advisory committee that must approve any restart of those programs met for the first time Wednesday.
The panel had been sidelined since September as the North East Independent School District board suspended sex ed, argued over how the committee’s members should be appointed — and replaced almost half of them.
The turnover included the ousting of two parents and the panel’s chair by Trustee Steve Hilliard, who has fought for years to end the district’s “Draw the Line, Respect the Line” program for sixth graders. The election this year of two more social conservatives to the NEISD board carried the expectation of a renewed effort to dilute it and other sex ed programs.
But if that happens, the School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, has first crack at it, required by state law to review and recommend a new sex ed curriculum to the board.
The district also was required by law to update the curriculum by the start of the school year but missed the deadline. The board opted to cancel classroom sex ed instruction to avoid the risk of legal or political blowback.
Light chatter and munching on deli salads and chocolate chip cookies marked Wednesday’s lunchtime meeting, the SHAC’s first since August, led by the district’s director of physical education and health services, Jennifer Aguilar.
The SHAC was scheduled to meet Nov. 30 but illness forced it to push its first meeting to three days before the district breaks for the winter holidays.
Now consisting of 32 parents and community members appointed to represent the board’s seven single member districts, plus eight district employees, the panel must meet at least twice more before it can vote to recommend a sex education curriculum to the board.
The committee picked a chairperson after a few rounds of voting: Tony Kaman, a parent who has served on the SHAC for six years and is the current chair of its sex education standing committee. It chose another parent, Rachel Bodine, with five years of SHAC experience to serve as vice chair.
Kaman, a civil engineer with four children, two in college and two in NEISD schools, said he is passionate about health education. He acknowledged the work ahead.
“We are going to lead with abstinence first,” Kaman said after the meeting. “We know that’s the best avenue. But kids are going to be kids and there are temptations so they need to be educated on how to say no and the ramifications of being involved with sexual activity.”
He said the community needs to work together to reduce teenage pregnancy in the school district and in Bexar County.
The NEISD board voted to suspend the district’s sex education curriculum, otherwise known as Human Sexuality and Abstinence Education, on Sept. 12 to give the committee time to review an updated curriculum aligned with the latest state standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. But on Oct. 24, the board voted 6-1, with President Shannon Grona dissenting, to change the SHAC membership.
The overhaul removed seven staff members and six volunteer parents from the panel. Trustees continued to wrangle over the SHAC’s bylaws and operating policy at three subsequent meetings, approving new procedures on Nov. 28 that more tightly ensure board control over its membership and set two-year terms for the appointees.
Ultimately, Kaman said, the SHAC will attempt to match the school district to the community using the “same vision,” and there was no hint of potential division Wednesday in reaching this conclusion. But other SHAC veterans said they were inevitable.
A former member, Tina Castellanos, who spoke at a board meeting this fall about her concerns about trustees’ assertion of more direct control over the SHAC, said religious conservatives in the school district had been interrupting SHAC proceedings in recent years, to the point that it closed its subcommittee meetings to the public so its members could get their work done.
A few activists from religious conservative groups attended Wednesday’s meeting, including Kellie Gretschel, an NEISD parent representing the San Antonio Family Association. Gretschel said she has been an observer at SHAC meetings for six years and was wearing a shirt that read: “I am a PARENT not a guest.”
The association’s website states its mission is to “to continue to educate on battling abortion and defending, protecting and promoting life.”
Gretschel set up her own camera to record the meeting, which she said was to hold the committee accountable for “ethical” implications of their decisions and protest that the standing committee meetings are not open to the public, since that is where most of the work is done.
Veteran SHAC member Priscilla Sanchez-Silva, who has a kindergartener and an almost middle-schooler in NEISD schools, said she had been ready to serve on the panel for the entire decade of her youngest child’s education, but said she might not be reappointed by new Trustee Marsha Landry when her term is up.
“This used to feel like a committee that I could be a part of for the longevity of my children in this school district, and I don’t know that that’s true anymore,” she said. “If you have to choose between, ‘Do I speak my voice, or will I be ousted from the committee,’ where do you go?”
Sanchez-Silva said she believes in the sex education curriculum’s importance and doesn’t think there will be any “big recognizable changes immediately” but in the long run, the panel is “going to swing from a middle to a far right conservative” because of the trustees “who have been the most vocal.”
The suspension of this year’s sex education has frustrated her, Sanchez-Silva said.
“It feels predatory. It feels like a stall tactic. And it feels like our kids are the ones that are suffering for it,” she said.
One of Hilliard’s new appointees, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brandon Broome, who spoke at a board meeting in October with a call for parents to volunteer for the committee, said he wasn’t particularly worried about the potential for disagreement and doesn’t believe the district should drop its sex education curriculum.
“In a perfect world, I guess you could sit back and say, ‘Well, it’s not the school’s responsibility to do this. That’s the responsibility for the families or the churches.’ But that’s not reality right now,” he said in an interview before Wednesday’s meeting.
“Unfortunately, not everyone’s got a family with two parents, and not everybody goes to a, not even if it’s a church, but a good support group that might be teaching them these things,” Broome said. “I do think it has a purpose.”
He said he volunteered because parent involvement should include putting in the time to do real work.
“It bothers me a little bit when you see people that want to go out there and take time off to go sit in front of the board and let their anger come out and point fingers and complain. They get nothing accomplished at all,” Broome said. “I want to be hopefully a voice of reason that can just say, ‘Hey, based on my knowledge and my background, here’s a good suggestion.’”
https://www.expressnews.com/…/NEISD-restarting-Esex-ed…
Photo: Jennifer Aguilar, NEISD director of Physical Education and Health, talks about the mission of the district’s Student Health Advisory Council (SHAC) at its first meeting Wednesday since the district’s sex education curriculum was upended in September. Almost half the committee are entirely new members working with a new set of bylaws.
Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer
Photo by Elizabeth Sander
#SAEN#ExpressNews#ElizabethSander
NEISD SHAC Meeting
December 14, 2022
12:15 pm
North East ISD Community Learning Center (CLC)
8960 Tesoro Drive, San Antonio, Texas 78217
Agenda: ELECTION of Chair and ViceChair of SHAC