HARRISBURG – Rep. Stephanie Borowicz (R-Clinton) and 20 state House Republican lawmakers are officially calling for acting Pennsylvania Education Secretary Eric Hagarty’s resignation unless he takes immediate action to reverse Gender Theory Student Indoctrination from taking hold in K-12 public schools.
“The PA Department of Education and all K-12 public school faculty and administrators have an obligation to educate, not indoctrinate,” said Borowicz. “For the sake of our children, Pennsylvania’s acting Education Secretary needs to either actively remove all traces of Gender Theory Indoctrination currently plastered throughout the department’s website/curriculum or immediately submit his resignation. This is precisely why the Legislature needs to enact an enforceable Parental Bill of Rights so families can freely direct the upbringing of their children without inappropriate sexual content or demoralizing, gender-neutral pronouns invading our taxpayer-funded classrooms.”
Touted as a resource for educators, the Department of Education’s “Gender Identity” web page, which can be viewed at https://www.education.pa.gov/EIB/Gender-GenderIdentity/Pages/default.aspx, defines “binary gender” as the “faulty concept” that there are “only two genders: male and female.”
“The PA Department of Education is espousing a secular worldview on their website, and worldviews have been barred from public schools since the 1960s,” said Rep. Barb Gleim (R-Cumberland). “The secular worldview that there are more than two genders is faulty in and of itself, and can’t be proven, and the source and provided resources for this teaching should be removed from the classroom and the website immediately. If the Secretary of Education continues down this road, I agree that he is unfit to meet the demands of his office.”
The education department’s gender identity web page also includes a lesson guide for teachers to host a “gender-neutral day” in their classrooms for grades 3-12. The guide specifies that as part of the activity, students should pick two to three ways they will reject gender stereotypes for the day, and the teacher should make specific commitments to challenge gender norms in the classroom.
“With the discovery of this reprehensible indoctrination lunacy targeting children as young as 8 years old, it’s no wonder that the governor vetoed my curriculum transparency legislation (House Bill 1332) which would have required ALL government-run public schools in the Commonwealth to post their curriculum online where parents could easily review it, ahead of the school year,” confirmed Rep. Andrew Lewis (R-Dauphin). “Today, we are calling on the Secretary of Education to immediately resign or remove this content from the PDE website and provide answers as to why someone at the department thought this confusing and divisive gender-erasing curriculum would be a good idea.”
Another section on the education department website, titled “Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools and Classrooms,” includes a tutorial on “preferred gender-neutral personal pronouns” and instructs teachers to ask before making false assumptions about someone’s gender identity.
“This is only the latest example of why record numbers of families are choosing educational options that give parents direct oversight over their child’s education such as homeschool, charter school or private school,” emphasized Rep. David Rowe (R-Union.) “Education dollars should follow the student, ensuring that every child has access to an excellent education rather than using taxpayer dollars to subject 8-year-olds to indoctrination by progressive bureaucrats who have infiltrated government-run schools. Maybe if Tom Wolf and the State Department of Education stopped wasting our tax dollars pedaling nonsensical, woke rhetoric to impressionable third-graders, they would not need to keep coming back to the General Assembly to beg for astronomical school funding increases, year after year.”
In addition to Borowicz, Gleim, Lewis and Rowe, the following lawmakers also support this “Reform or Resign Ultimatum” for acting Education Secretary Hagarty:
- Rep. Mike Armanini (R-Elk)
- Rep. Aaron Bernstine (R-Butler)
- Rep. Jim Cox (R-Berks)
- Rep. Russ Diamond (R-Lebanon)
- Rep. Joe Hamm (R-Lycoming)
- Rep. Mike Jones (R-York)
- Rep. Dawn Keefer (R-York)
- Rep. Rob Kauffman (R-Franklin)
- Rep. David Maloney (R-Berks)
- Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler)
- Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-Warren)
- Rep. Leslie Rossi (R-Westmoreland)
- Rep. Frank Ryan (R-Lebanon)
- Rep. Paul Schemel (R-Franklin)
- Rep. Brian Smith (R-Jefferson)
- Rep. Perry Stambaugh (R-Perry)
- Rep. David Zimmerman (R-Lancaster)
Author: Amaury Abreu
