After closing public testimony on Monday without ever hearing the support for the governor’s “parents’ rights” bill they swore was out there, the House Education Committee’s conservative majority pushed ahead with a revised version of HB105 on Wednesday.
It makes some superficial changes to the provisions opponents said will make the lives of LGBTQ students more difficult than they already are and goes a step further by making the lives of every single person involved in the public school system—teachers, administrators, students and parents—a whole lot more complicated.
Instead of only requiring parents’ written permission for teachers to mention sex and gender identity in the classroom, the new version of HB 105 would require written parental permission for every single lesson taught in the classroom.
If the bill somehow becomes law as it already faces hard noes from several key senators, schools would be saddled with an administrative nightmare.
“It’s just not practical,” Lon Garrison, director of the Association of Alaska School Boards, told the Alaska Beacon about the new bill. “Right now, the curriculum is approved by the school board; it’s available for everybody to review. But there’s also additional materials that teachers can bring in as long as it’s aligned with the curriculum. And so every time that would happen, theoretically, if you read this bill, you’d have to get permission to do that.”
As for the superficial changes, the new version no longer dictates who can use what bathrooms but, instead, requires every school to provide single-person bathrooms. Instead of requiring parental permission to change a student’s pronouns, parents would provide a list of acceptable pronouns (a distinction without a difference).
Bethel Democratic Rep. CJ McCormick, the Legislature’s youngest lawmaker, didn’t mince his words when assessing the bill, calling the bill an “incredibly dark contrast” to the positive legislation heard earlier in the day. He said much of the concerns about the bill focused on what it’d do to the high rate of suicide among Alaska’s youth.
“The breadth of testimony we heard was in opposition to this bill. They outlined exactly what their issues were, and those issues still remain in this bill,” he said. “This bill makes lives harder for people, and I can tell you as a kid who graduated in 2015 from rural Alaska life is very hard. I ran to make life easier for those kids. This bill does not do that. I can never support something like this.”
Several of the Republicans who supported the legislation, including Rep. Justin Ruffridge who helped coordinate the changes in direct work with Gov. Mike Dunleavy, conceded that the legislation wasn’t perfect. Ruffridge even acknowledged that he wasn’t certain whether the legislation would make things better or worse in schools, but called it a conversation starter.
Still, much of the support for the legislation had religious undertones.
Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, commented that the “original mistake” was that states mandate schooling in the first place, a practice that started in Massachusetts in 1853. While also calling out the state’s mandatory reporting laws that require teachers and other officials who suspect child abuse or neglect to report it, Prax talked about the importance of returning to the “morality” of parents having control over how a child is raised “even if they make mistakes” and said this legislation returns to that “subservient attitude to parents.”
The bill was approved and advanced on a 4-3 vote. Republican Reps. Ruffridge, Prax, Jamie Allard and Tom “My Children Belong to Me” McKay voted in favor of the legislation. Non-Republican Reps. McCormick, Andi Story and Rebecca Himschoot voted against the legislation.
It heads next to the deeply conservative House Judiciary Committee.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
