RALEIGH, N.C. — For the third year in a row, alarmed parents have turned to an Alliance Defense Fund attorney to help ensure that public officials in charge of the Governor’s School, a state-run, summer academic program for accelerated students, will obey state statutes and refrain from unlawful indoctrination of students.
ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson sent a letter Friday to the North Carolina Attorney General’s office documenting the history of parental concerns with the Governor’s School, and requesting that the program be closely monitored during its upcoming summer session. The letter asks that the Attorney General’s office ensure that the 2007 Governor’s School remains free this year of any seminars or unapproved sexuality education curricula, and that religious viewpoints will not be unconstitutionally maligned, but instead treated with equal dignity and respect.
“Schools should be required to follow the law. And the law says schools must notify parents and get their authorization before teaching sexually-oriented material, and certainly never discriminate against persons who maintain traditional values,” said Johnson. “Last year we were successful in holding the Governor’s School accountable to North Carolina statutes, and we want to make sure students and parents are protected again this year.”
The controversy began in 2005, when the Governor’s School included on the last night of its six-week session a seminar entitled, “The New Gay Teenager.” The seminar, offered without prior parental notification or permission, included an in-depth discussion and endorsement of homosexual behavior, and was devoted in part to an instructor-led discussion, critique, and analysis of religious “faith claims.” One of the seminar leaders was later criminally investigated for having homosexual relations with a minor student.
Alarmed parents contacted ADF, and Johnson assisted them in obtaining assurances from state officials that the unlawful activity would be stopped. Under ADF’s scrutiny, during the 2006 session, plans of Governor’s School officials to show the graphic, sexually explicit film
American History X were ultimately thwarted and the film pulled from the student program.
“We will continue to defend the rights of North Carolina’s families through scrutiny of the Governor’s School curricula, and through any affirmative legal action that becomes necessary,” said Johnson. “We trust the state Department of Justice will do the same.”
A copy of the letter Johnson sent to Governor’s School officials can be read at
www.telladf.org/UserDocs/GovernorsSchoolLetter2007.pdf.
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