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Nearly a year after the Valley Patriot exposed the Methuen School Committee’s non-existent obscenity policy, they still haven’t changed it.
The current “policy” does not require parents to be notified or given the chance to opt their children out when teachers expose students to sexually explicit material in the classroom.
They pretend that there is such a policy, but parents only get notified if the entire work (book) is considered obscene – not if it simply contains graphic sexual passages – even if those sexual passages go on for chapters at a time.
Of course, that’s not what parents had been led to believe for years.
And of course, that was the actual point – lead parents to believe that there is a parental notification policy when sexually explicit material is pushed in the classroom so they can opt out. In reality however no such policy exists.
The school committee knew this. The administration relied on it. Yet the parents and the public were completely unaware of what was being secretly peddled in the schools behind their backs.
In fact, the public only learned of this because Methuen parent Anne Kivlehan discovered teachers were reading sexually explicit material to her daughter in class.
As a side note, the teacher in charge of that class was so bothered by the sexually explicit (pornographic) material that she refused to participate and another teacher had to be assigned to her daughter’s class to have them read from the book out loud.
Students were not allowed to bring the material home, ensuring parents would never know what their children were being exposed to.
After Kivlehan contacted the Valley Patriot, we exposed the policy in the pages of this newspaper. When Kivlehan later spoke before the School Committee to protest the lack of a policy on this, she was harassed, insulted, called names, denigrated, and even compared to Nazis.
Then-Superintendent Brandi Kwong eventually confirmed what we had reported, admitting during a public meeting that the notification policy only applies when the “totality of the material” is obscene. In other words, if a book contains explicit descriptions of anal sex, orgies, or other graphic sexual content, parents are not notified unless the entire book is about those subjects.
No, you would think that revelation alone would have been enough to make the School Committee fix the policy immediately!
It wasn’t.
School Committeeman Laurie Keagan defended keeping the policy exactly as it is. Committee members Mary Beth Donovan and Martha McCarthy – both former school administrators involved in creating the policy – have done nothing to change it. Now former School Committeewoman Dan Shibilia was so bold as to orchestrate attacks on another school board member Kristen Maxwell when she tried to change the policy.
And of course there was the usual fleeting outrage by the public – for about ten minutes.
So here we are, almost a year later.
The policy is still the same.
Methuen teachers are still peddling smut to young children in the Methuen School System while parents are still kept in the dark without the right to be notified so they can opt their children out of being exposed to sexually explicit classroom material.
Sad to say, the majority of the Methuen School Committee finds this perfectly acceptable. They also support allowing boys into girls’ bathrooms.
Welcome to Methuen! Where a boy gets suspended from school for telling a girl she looks “sexy” but suffers no consequences for intruding in the girls bathroom and where teachers can read books with passages about anal sex in the classroom.
We did our part here at The Valley Patriot. We reported on it, we exposed it, and we even named names of who was responsible for it.
We can’t force the parents or the public to demand change.
That’s on them.
As Barack Hussein Obama once said, elections have consequences.
This one is on the voters of Methuen.
Tom Duggan is president and publisher of The Valley Patriot, has published three books, is a former member of the Lawrence School Committee, is a 1990 police survivor, and hosted the Paying Attention (daily and weekend) Radio Show for 26 years. He continues to do the show as a video and audio podcast on Facebook, YouTube, GooglePlay, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Podbean and most podcast platforms. You can email him at valleypatriot@aol.com. ◊