Roaring Fork School District’s (RFSD) implemented sex education curriculum has recently sparked controversy.
For the past three months, tensions have continued to heighten among parents and community members as they attend school board meetings, write public comments and engage online, offering support or disdain for the K-12 sexual education program adopted three years ago. Community members in Feb. 25, March 18 and April 15 school board meetings claimed the 3Rs curriculum — Rights, Respect, Responsibility — was developmentally inappropriate and politically charged.
“Unfortunately, the ways in which this board, this superintendent and the senior leadership team has handled the valid and heartfelt concerns regarding content in the sex education curriculum — the lack of transparency with its introduction and the opt-out process and the dismissive and patronizing manner that you have treated those with concerns — has eroded all public trust in the RFSD,” Jamie Goscha, a parent with two children previously in district schools, said in March.
After several meetings with dissenters, the board has not announced whether they will be maintaining or discarding the curriculum. They did, however, make the curriculum more accessible on their website.
The 3Rs curriculum includes lessons for elementary grades that prioritize healthy relationships and boundaries, “good touch” and “bad touch,” reproductive anatomy and consent; then, in later grades, safe sexual protection methods, STD and STI prevention, birth control, reproduction, sexual assault and abuse information, sexual orientation and responsible technology usage. The approved, required and suggested lessons are available on the RFSD website.
“Sex education, and whether it belongs in schools, can be a very controversial topic,” Dr. Anna Cole, the district’s superintendent, said. “I think it really comes up against families’ values, religious values and what we think the purpose of public education is.”
Cole explained that she was a key actor in the adoption of the 3Rs curriculum. The school board assembled a committee of current health educators, school nurses, nurses and pediatric specialists from Mountain Valley Health Center, as well as a representative from Riverbridge Regional Center — a nonprofit that supports children who have been sexually abused or assaulted. The committee studied Colorado’s Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education requirements.
The mission of Colorado’s Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education is to provide instruction based on scientific evidence that is appropriate to the age and developmental level of young people. This curriculum includes “anatomy, puberty and adolescent development, healthy relationships and consent, sexual orientation and gender identity, reproduction and sexually transmitted infections [and] safety.”
Cole explained that not all districts are required to teach sexual education, but if they do, they must incorporate these aspects.
Cole said the goals of the committee were children’s safety, finding a curriculum that was available in English and Spanish and adhering to research on best practices preventing child sexual abuse and Colorado’s guidelines.
“The leading ‘why’ is that research tells us that kids who understand their own bodies and what is safe and unsafe are going to be better protected and better able to thrive in school,” Cole said. “So that is why we ultimately landed on this set of lessons to recommend and require. I would say that at the same time, we recognized this is controversial, and a lot of families are not okay with us teaching their kids this, and so we wanted to make sure that we had an opt-out process that felt clear and transparent.”
Several parents, including some who are a part of a parents’ rights activist group, claim there is not enough transparency and that the curriculum is inappropriate for the younger age group.
After he found information about the health curriculum in his kindergarten son’s take-home folder, Tanner Gianinetti, a local parent and fourth-generation Carbondale rancher, had serious concerns about sex education in RFSD, which he outlined in a YouTube video posted by Elevation Lifestyle Network titled “Removing Broader Gender Theory Radicalized Health Curriculum at Roaring Fork School District RE-1.” He said the anatomical terminology was really “that of a high school biological textbook.”
In Gianinetti social media posts and public comments, he and other community members have voiced their concerns that the curriculum is developmentally inappropriate. Gianinetti, Amelia Eshelman and others cited a second-grade lesson titled “Understanding our Bodies.”
“The vagina has great elasticity, and can adjust to the size of a penis or allow a fully developed fetus to pass from the uterus out of the body,” Eshelmen quoted from the lesson. “It’s sickening.” She also emphasized her Christian faith and how deeply she cares about protecting children from corruption.
Cole, however, maintains that the proper information is being introduced at the right time.
“National and state statistics show that young children can often demonstrate inappropriate sexualized behavior as young as preschool and kindergarten,” she said. “With smartphones, children are accessing pornography at very young ages. And we also know that sexual assault is real. Teen relationships often deal with sexual violence and sexual assault … Those are national trends, and we are absolutely not immune to those things here in the Valley.”
Hattie Johnson submitted an online public comment, stating, “When I first read through the lesson plans shared by the school, I was surprised to see this was subject matter appropriate for kindergarten. I began searching for more information on the age appropriateness of anatomical lessons and found sources such as the American Association of Pediatricians and the National Children’s Hospital citing the benefits of understanding anatomically correct language for genitalia as a protection against sexual abuse. Knowledge of correct terms portrays a level of education to abusers, and can help in abuse reporting by allowing children to be clear in what happened to them.”
Gender theory
Some believe that if the school board is trying to teach scientific anatomy and sex, it should be binary based.
“It was an extremely deceptive curriculum that actually introduced into this broader gender theory [and] drove home non-binary for kindergarten-aged kids,” Gianinetti said in the YouTube video.
Ashley Stahl, a mother of an RFSD student and the executive director of PFLAG Roaring Fork Valley, supported the 3Rs curriculum when it was first considered and regularly visits Gender & Sexuality Alliance school clubs throughout the Valley. She said that several young queer people have told her that this is the first time a sex-ed curriculum has acknowledged them.
“Not celebrated them, not centered them, just acknowledged that they are real,” she said during the March 18 school board meeting. “That’s how low the bar was before 2023.”
Stahl drew a comparison to parent interest groups in other states, who have used “children as a political prop” for anti-LGBTQ agendas.
But those who oppose the curriculum have stated that children are being used as a tool in a broader agenda.
“It has become very obvious that this school board is much more interested in the far-left political agenda than teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and history,” John Eaton, a community member, said in March.
Academic standing
At the same meeting, Susan Tribble, another community member, addressed the board and stated that faulty leadership and the adoption of this curriculum is to blame for low test scores and decreasing enrollment.
“The truth is, you are no longer focused on creating a well-educated society,” Tribble said. “Your curriculum choices appear more about dumbing down our children and sexually stimulating them at the earliest age possible than it is about educating them on the fundamentals.”
However, according to the Keystone Policy Center, RFSD proficiency rates in literacy and math match, or are higher than, Colorado’s public school averages. National proficiency averages plummeted after the pandemic, and across Colorado the gap between English learners and first-language speakers persists.
“We need to improve overall student academic achievements, but student outcomes really has nothing to do with the 3Rs.” Cole said “It’s a pretty small part of a student’s life and our academic program.”