Gabrielle Healey

Hello and Good morning councilmembers. I have read over the text of SB33, and I adamantly oppose this bill. I understand that the intention is to ensure there is a response to parent compliant over appropriate material in schools, but I ask, what is appropriate material in schools? According to the bill as written, each individual school board will write up policies and the principal will individually decide this on a case by case basis (as in the principal responds to each compliant and crafts the school's response). Not only is this an immense amount of pressure and blame being placed on a single individual, it also creates a huge place for bias in the decision making process and massive discrepancy between schools in our state. One child may be reading material expressly banned in another school, one child may simply transfer to another school to gain access to previously determined "inappropriate" material, one child may be reading a book perfectly acceptable in one school, and then move and have that book ripped away. Under this bill, there is no consistency. It opens up massive loopholes and will pull children between drastically different environments. If we wish to control what our children are seeing in schools, why are we choosing to lose control and allow hundreds of different policies to exist at once? This bill is careless, and clearly a reckless attempt at grappling with increasing complaints from parents. This will not solve the issue it aims to resolve, if anything it will exacerbate it and create new problems. SB33 is an ill-crafted bill and will need much more nuance and revision to be anything ready for the public to see. I hope you consider my words as this bill is debated, especially at uncertain, divisive times as these. Thank you.