A senator who tried to ban abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from teaching sex ed in schools introduced an amendment that would impose even greater restrictions on sex ed, like prohibiting most public health nurses and doctors from teaching it.<\/p>\n
The Senate Education Committee Wednesday night passed House Bill 156 with Wasilla Republican Sen. Mike Dunleavy\u2019s amendment that said only a person that possesses a valid teacher certificate and is under contract with the school can teach sex education, human reproduction education or human sexuality education.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy, Sen. Charlie Huggins, R-Wasilla, and Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, voted yes; Sen. Berta Gardner, D-Anchorage, voted no; and Sen. Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, was absent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been clear that sex education should be taught, reproduction education should be taught and the new concept that I think a lot of us are learning about \u2014 sexuality \u2014 probably should also be touched upon,\u201d Dunleavy said Wednesday night during Senate Education, which he chairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSex education is the biology. Sexuality is now the new view of sex. I think we\u2019ve got to be very careful, very careful that we have the right people in there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy\u2019s Senate Bill 89, which would\u2019ve banned abortion providers from teaching in classrooms, died in Health & Social Services Committee Tuesday night after having already passed the Senate Floor and House Education.<\/p>\n
\u201cI stayed up most of (Tuesday) night after 89 died in the other body and I thought, \u2018What\u2019s the best way to serve kids, deal with the issue of sex education, sexuality education and reproduction education?\u2019 and I don\u2019t know why I didn\u2019t think about it earlier, but the same way we deal with biology, the same way with Spanish, the same way we deal with elementary ed \u2014 have it done by a certificated teacher who\u2019s been vetted and hired and contracted with the school district,\u201d Dunleavy said.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy said his amendment doesn\u2019t block any group or any subgroup, but Erik Houser said it does much worse. Houser is spokesman for Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest and Hawaii, the organization\u2019s advocacy arm in Alaska.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis makes it so that nurses, doctors, pharmacists and peer educators are now essentially outlawed from providing sexual health education in Alaska public schools,\u201d Houser said.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy staff member Christa McDonald agreed with that point when reached by phone on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would have to be a certified teacher, a classroom teacher,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Houser said the amendment gets in the way of providing sex ed to Alaska students. He added, while Dunleavy\u2019s amendment may be aimed at Planned Parenthood, \u201cthere are many other consequences of this because there are sexual health educators across the state who are not Planned Parenthood, but who are also not people with teacher\u2019s licenses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Planned Parenthood\u2019s three full-time and one part-time educators in Alaska are not certified teachers or employed by the school district, Houser said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are invited in by teachers and principals to fill in a gap that the teacher either can\u2019t fill or wants help filling,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Alyse Galvin with the statewide, non-partisan coalition Great Alaska Schools testified Wednesday night on the committee substitute to House Bill 156, which included Dunleavy\u2019s amendment.<\/p>\n
She said the amendment creates a barrier to students receiving sex ed, \u201cWe don\u2019t have extra money right now to train up teachers to get that done right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butch Moore also testified Wednesday. Moore, whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend in 2014, helped push \u201cBree\u2019s Law\u201d in the Alaska Legislature last year. The law was included in the Alaska Safe Children\u2019s Act.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we have somebody from Providence Hospital come in and teach CPR, or somebody from the fire department come in and teach stop drop and roll, or somebody from an archery club come teach archery during a gym class, as long as there\u2019s a teacher present, then that\u2019s OK because we have a certified teacher there supervising a class,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis (amendment) is specifically singling out sex ed and reproduction education versus any other kind of education. Shouldn\u2019t it be the same for all education?\u201d Moore asked.<\/p>\n
The Senate Finance Committee, HB 156\u2019s next committee of referral, is scheduled to hear the bill Friday at 9 a.m.<\/p>\n
If the bill passes Senate Finance and the Senate Floor, it would have to go back to the House.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A senator who tried to ban abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from teaching sex ed in schools introduced an amendment that would impose even greater restrictions on sex ed, like prohibiting most public health<\/a> nurses and doctors from teaching it. The Senate Education Committee Wednesday night passed House Bill 156 with Wasilla Republican Sen. Mike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7042"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}