From the vault: March 2020, my third attempt going to board members, who have since gone on defense and found ways to keep parents from being notified of their kids having access to sexually explicit content. This was pre covid, and pre our family pulling our two middle school kids from GH schools to homeschool out of lack of discernment from our director of curriculum and elected board who would never respond. I have two older kids that graduated in 2016 and 2019…I’d NEVER had an issue until 2016, and the issue is primarily with school leadership and not the majority of Grand Havens teachers who have been outstanding and supportive.
Public comments to GHAPS school board 3/9/2020, see “One Man Guy”, and “The Detour” posts for my first and second public comments address….
“When I was a 13 year old kid, my mom and I moved to west Bloomfield and shared a house with my aunt and cousins. My mom hoped to have me in a “good” school district. My first month living there, I was sexually assaulted by neighborhood boys who were a few years older than me. When I went to high school a year later, they threw food at me in the cafeteria, kicked me in the back and called me a whore. I was absolutely terrified of them, and it affected my life for nearly two decades. I earnestly hoped for bad things to happen to them.
When I was 31, I found out one of these boys committed suicide. His brother wrote about him on a myspace page I came across. He detailed how Mark, one of my assaulters, had dealt with depression since age 12. How they were left alone often, having two working parents. How they’d had access to pornographic magazines and the negative impact that had on their lives.
In that moment, God opened up a window for me to see this boy who hurt me from His (Gods) vantage point instead of my own human and hurting point of view. In an instant, I realized something so profound it would change my life forever. Mark…….. was a broken child, in need of Jesus…and the thought that instantly followed was “I’m also a broken child in need of Jesus”…and that’s how this Jew received Christ and learned about real forgiveness.
I learned a KEY lesson in that experience. Exposing children to content to sexually arouse them with no Parent involvement to counsel them often correlates to children acting out on those things. Is this the excellence we are pursuing for our youth?
The suggestion was made that parents should figure out every book their child has access to in our library and talk to their kids about the sexually explicit content they read. That s great for parents with unlimited time that can research YA books that may or may not make it to our library. What about the kids whose parents can’t keep up? The single moms? What about our already at risk youth who don’t have parents that always engage with them when they’ve digested a book with sexually explicit content, where do those kids go with that information? I often wonder what would have happened to Mark if he’d never been exposed to that content at such a young age, or if I’d had the chance to forgive him before he took his own life.
In January, I exposed a reality that we have sexually explicit books available to students as young as 10 years old without consent. The book “One Man Guy” with students talking about which teachers they’d like to bang is still available to 12 year old kids with no consent. “The Detour” book detailing a rape attempt is available to 5th graders. The Magenta book which has excerpts such as “ I picked up her skirt, looked in her underwear…”where is your dick?”. This book is in our school library right now. This is the same book that has a man describing how he loved to give oral sex to people in his neighborhood as a six year old child.
For some children, my own included, these books with twisted and illicit sexuality are their first encounters reading about sexual relationships, is this the excellence in education we’re pursuing?
This is my third plea for you to do the right thing and develop a formal policy requiring parental consent for sexually explicit materials for minors.
We have an epidemic of childhood depression and suicide right now. What do you think giving them books like this does to them mentally? Do you think normalizing teen sex outside of marriage puts pressure on them to perform to this expectation? Is this the excellence in education we are pursuing?
Most parents desire healthy futures for our kids. It follows to say that we don’t want our schools providing materials to sexually arouse them while they’re kids or put thoughts and ideas in their heads they may not have. Explicit stuff being on the internet is NO excuse for sexually explicit materials to be distributed by the school with no parental consent. We are the adults, we set the standards.
You told me I could give you a “genre” of books my kids can’t read…I’m letting you know now, the genre my kids can’t read without my consent is “sexually explicit” . Yet this is not a genre or category available, as of yet.
You tell us you have solved the problem and the shelves are cleaned up of the books I brought up, this isn’t true. After all, your own Bucs Blades students published just this week in the latest defamation hit piece against me and I quote ”It should be noted that WE have read books from school libraries that didn’t make the list, but DO contain sexually explicit scenes and themes”- out of the mouths of babes.
You’ve asked us to trust the librarians…we’re asking you to trust parents and create a policy to notify and require parental consent for sexually explicit materials for minors. This is a reasonable request, and outrageous that this would be denied.”