This fall, social studies teacher Jack Carney hosted a mock election for his junior and senior students. The kids learned about the issues, ballot measures and candidates, asked questions and eventually cast mock ballots of their own.
A newly updated school board policy will ensure such classroom efforts can continue in the future.
“In social studies classes, for example, we want things about the election and about political parties,” Superintendent Bill Burr said. “We wanted to make sure that was allowed.”
The new policy ensures this. Though political discourse inside classrooms was not previously prohibited by school district policy, it was not necessarily protected either. Instead, it lived in a rather blurry, undefined gray area. Burr said part of the reason to enact the changes is so that teachers would not get in trouble for teaching about current events that are inherently political.
“It allows the teacher to play sides when it is educationally important,” Burr explained. However, teachers may only do so when it applies to “instruction that is part of the approved curriculum,” per the school district’s policy manual.
All district employees remain “prohibited from engaging in any activity in the presence of students … where the activity is designed to promote, further or assert a position on any voting issue, board issue or collective bargaining issue.”
Simply, politics are to remain separate from school grounds unless they exist in what Burr calls, “a teaching context.”
He said the policy allows for teachers to express their personal opinions in classrooms with the context of an educational background — not to try and sway students’ beliefs, but to be transparent about their own opinions and use classrooms as a place for healthy debate.
The policy was last updated in 2012, so it was well overdue for some alterations. Burr said the board’s policy committee was scheduled to review the policy anyway, and that Carney’s class mock election was a motivator for the changes.
“We want our students to be able to make their minds up,” Burr said. “And (we want) our staff to have some flexibility in presenting all sides in an education standpoint.”
The revised policy passed in first reading at the Nov. 18 school board meeting. The second reading and a vote to approve could come up at the Monday, Dec. 16, meeting.
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