Providing for Consideration of H.R. Parents Bill of Rights Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Indiana for yielding the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I think we can all agree that public education plays a central role in our democracy, helping to ensure the Jeffersonian ideal of having an informed electorate to participate in the governance of our country. I think we can also agree that it is vitally important that parents, as their children's primary caregivers, play an active role in their kids' education in our public schools.

That is why governance of our public schools is entrusted to local boards of education, where most school board members are, in fact, parents and are directly responsible to the communities they serve.

In our fast-paced and online world, the glue that so often holds our communities together is our neighborhood schools, the parent-teacher and home and school organizations that support them, and the extracurricular athletics and activities that we all gather at.

That is why it is so disappointing that the Republican majority has chosen to bring to the floor a bill that undermines those community values and does nothing to address the real issues facing America's schools today.

Contrary to its title, this bill does not give parents any more rights than they already have. Even the conservative Cato Institute has criticized this bill for doing nothing to actually empower parents. In fact, many of the so-called rights this bill claims to establish, like parents' ability to meet with their child's teachers, testify at school board meetings, examine school budgets, or protect their children's privacy, are already enshrined in law and are things school districts nationwide already do and in which parents consistently participate in.

What this bill does do is promote efforts to inject divisive D.C. politics and culture wars into our neighborhood schools and create burdensome new Federal mandates for those schools, dictating to our local communities and our local taxpayers how and when to perform certain tasks.

To add insult to injury, this bill doesn't offer any funding to meet these new Federal mandates or propose resources that would actually help students and families or support our public schools, many of which are already struggling to make ends meet under inequitable funding formulas.

This bill would force schools to invest already scarce time and resources toward onerous compliance requirements and administrative costs and away from crucial measures that actually improve student outcomes, all with no additional money and with no discernible benefit to our children.

Ultimately, this bill is an act of Federal overreach that would hinder students' ability to learn and undermine the important work that educators, librarians, and other school professionals do every day. It would undermine the valuable relationships among parents and between parents, students, and teachers, relationships that are built on trust and shared goals.

The truth is that the primary concerns for too many teachers and parents are to make sure that their children have enough to eat, a bed to sleep in at night, and can get to and from school safely. This bill does not address those critical needs or, for that matter, anything else that promotes student success and well-being.

What this bill does is open the door to allowing a noisy minority to dictate what all students can and cannot read or learn, and that hurts both our kids and our communities.

We have already seen in Florida and other States that have passed versions of this bill that the provisions buried in this legislation have allowed rightwing bullies to ban books, gut history lessons, and marginalize some of our communities.

The beauty of our public schools is that they help our children become critical thinkers and functional adults by meeting and learning about the diversity of people, viewpoints, and experiences in the world around them.

Allowing some parents to dictate their worldview to all parents and students in our public schools does a disservice to our schools, our children, and our communities, particularly when, as has been so often the case recently, those efforts have sought to marginalize people of color and the LGBTQ community.

Perhaps my Republican colleagues are discounting the opportunities for parental engagement that are already baked into our public education system because the views they are pushing, to ban books and whitewash history, are not accepted by the overwhelming majority of Americans.

I know how much children benefit when parents and teachers work together to help them reach their full potential. I know this from experience. I spent a decade providing training and representation for parents and students in the public school system. I spent two decades, while my children attended public schools, as a home and school parent, a classroom volunteer, and, like my father and sister before me, a school board member to help not only my kids but all the kids in our district to succeed.

I often think that school boards are one of the purest forms of local representative democracy. Unpaid members from the community--most of them, like myself, parents--spend endless hours working together with school administrators, educators, and parents, all united by a common goal to do what is best for all of our children.

Over the years, I had countless conversations with involved parents and constituents in grocery stores, at school concerts, on soccer fields, and at formal board meetings about how our schools could best serve our children and taxpayers, where we could do better, and where our options were limited, usually by financial constraints.

Those discussions were sometimes emotional or passionate, and people didn't always agree, but everyone respected our democratic processes and the boundaries of protected speech as we sought to reach the best possible solutions for our community.

Those conversations and deliberations also reflected a core principle of our civil society, one that is important to remember as we struggle to reduce the hyperpartisanship and lack of civility in our politics and to model good behavior for our children. That is the principle of cooperation and compromise, that having the loudest voice or being a bully doesn't mean that you always get to win.

This bill, H.R. 5, does not help parents, educators, and school districts to work together more effectively. Instead, this bill pits parents against each other and against teachers in a way that creates more chaos and community discord. That hurts students and families, disregards talented educators, undermines public schools, and detracts from what should be our ultimate goal, providing the best possible public education for America's children.

Our national motto is ``e pluribus unum,'' ``out of many, one,'' not ``my way or the highway.'' We form a stronger and more perfect community when we bring our diverse talents and strengths together, and this bill undermines that goal.

I now represent a congressional district with 21 school districts in it, including one of the largest in the country, and I talk to a lot of parents in my community.

Parents in my district want to talk about how to help our kids succeed. They want to talk about hiring enough teachers, librarians, and guidance counselors. They want to talk about fixing crumbling school buildings and preparing our children for the jobs and challenges of the 21st century.

They want schools in our communities that serve the healthy food kids need to learn and grow, offer mental health resources, and teach the skills that every American needs to be engaged and informed citizens and taxpayers to ensure our long-lasting democracy.

Overwhelmingly, these parents are appalled that bills like H.R. 5 threaten to open the floodgates to book bans, more restrictions on what can be said in the classroom, and attempts to rewrite history and censor facts, all at the expense of our students.

While it sounds benign, this bill will be used to eliminate classroom conversations about racism in the American story or portrayals of LGBTQ people in books, all while refusing to deliver on what parents are actually asking for to keep their children safe, the kind of policies that House Democrats are bringing to the table to keep children safe from dangerous toxins like asbestos and lead that are still prevalent in too many schools and to keep children safe from gun violence, now the leading cause of death for American children.

We need commonsense gun safety laws that keep weapons out of classrooms and out of the hands of children so parents aren't scared that one day they will send their kids to school and they will never come home.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle often talk about being the party of small government and local control. They condemn the intrusion of the Federal Government into local affairs, but this legislation is nothing more than an attempt to nationalize our education system and mandate a one-size-fits-all approach across the country, assuming that the size that fits is a rightwing straitjacket.

Even the conservative Cato Institute has said that H.R. 5 suffers from a fundamental flaw: It is not constitutional.

We should give young people the resources they need to learn and grow, not stifle their ideas, threaten their civil rights, censor their classrooms and teachers, or take books off library shelves. We should not promote chaos and bullying in our communities.

General Leave

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Ms. SCANLON. 5, saying that the bill would create a catalyst for more book banning and censorship.
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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take a minute--or not even a minute--to correct a couple statements that were made.

First of all, I include in the Record an article from Jax Today titled: ``Duval Schools to keep 73 `diverse, inclusive' books out of classrooms.'' [From Jax Today, Dec. 22, 2022] Duval Schools To Keep 73 `Diverse, Inclusive' Books Out of Classrooms (By Claire Heddles)

Dozens of books the Duval County school district ordered in the summer of 2021 will never hit classroom shelves. That's the result of an ongoing review after the district pulled almost 200 books this spring while the Florida Legislature passed limits on what teachers can say about race, gender and sexual orientation in classrooms and set new rules for purchasing classroom materials.

After a 10-month process--delayed by staffing shortages, according to the district--47 titles are being returned to the distributor. Twenty-six others will remain in storage, awaiting further state guidance.

Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families. District staffers are sending the rejected books back to the distributor, Perfection Learning, for exchange.

The rest of the 179 books that had been held for review were determined to meet ``statutory guidelines and are useful toward our reading goals,'' and were distributed to classrooms in October, a district representative tells Jacksonville Today in an email.

All of the books are from the Essential Voices Classroom Libraries collection, which the distributor says are meant to engage students in ``independent reading through these diverse, inclusive'' stories.

Explore the full list of books that were pulled for review: `Banned books'

In September, PEN America, an organization advocating for free speech, released a tally of books they said were banned across the country, including more than 550 in Florida, the second-most of any state. Only Texas banned more.

The list included the Essential Voices books the district withheld from classrooms. Duval Schools contested the characterization as a book ban because none of the books was challenged by the public--the district pulled them before they ever went on shelves.

Ami Polonsky is the author of one of the recently rejected books, Gracefully Grayson, a transgender coming-of-age novel intended for fifth grade classrooms. A teacher herself, Polonsky believes books like hers are blocked to appease a small subset of parents.

``Books can save kids' lives, and to know this, but still refuse to take them out of storage is nonsensical, it's immoral. A parenting perspective cannot outweigh a national mental health crisis among trans children,'' Polonsky told the School Board this month. ``Books that are ordered with the best of intentions gather dust, and the LGBTQ children continue to receive the message that their existence is controversial.''

Polonsky and two other authors came to Jacksonville to address the Duval School Board in early December at the urging of national free speech organizations PEN America, We Need Diverse Books and Freedom to Read. At the time, the district had not yet publicly released the list of 106 books it now says were distributed to classrooms in October. New state laws

Another of the authors, Linda Sue Park, wrote a book about South Sudanese sisters on a two-hour walk to get water for their family called Nya's Long Walk. Her book was among the 179 titles initially pulled, but it was since distributed to kindergarten classrooms, according to the district.

Park was in Jacksonville advocating for all the books in the Essential Voices collection, many of which are written by authors of color with main characters of color.

``You never know what book is going to do it for them, what book is going to hit them, and that's why more choice, more access, more variety is so important,'' she said.

Duval decided to pull the books for review as it grappled with limited state guidance for how to implement at least three new Florida laws that restricted school curricula: HB 1467, HB 7 and HB 1557.

HB 1467, sponsored by Rep. Sam Garrison, R-Fleming Island, requires school districts to maintain a list of library materials and make it easier for the public to contest school books. Districts are also required to have a state-certified media specialist sign off on new materials.

Starting in January 2023, school librarians and media specialists will have to complete an online training program developed by the state Department of Education. In an email this week, a Duval Schools spokesperson said the remaining 26 Essential Voices book reviews will be the first use of this training.

``Once that training [is] released, the district will use this as a great opportunity to go through this process applying the required training,'' the spokesperson wrote.

Another new law, HB 7, which Gov. Ron DeSantis nicknamed the Stop WOKE Act, limited how teachers can talk about race and racism and in the classroom. A federal judge blocked the law from taking effect last month, calling it ``positively dystopian.'' The DeSantis administration is appealing the ruling in federal court.

Though HB 7 is not currently in effect, Duval Schools blocked multiple books that deal with race and history, including a Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop by Alice Faye Duncan, about Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 sanitation strike; Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga, about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee in the U.S.; and Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family's Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh, a children's book about the fight to end segregation in California schools seven years before Brown v. Board of Education--the Supreme Court decision that found school segregation unconstitutional.

A third new law, HB 1557, or Parental Rights in Education, bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in first through third grade, ``or in a manner that is not age-appropriate'' in older grades. Rather than define ``age appropriate,'' the law that critics call ``Don't Say Gay'' allows parents to sue districts if they believe something is not.

Polonsky's rejected book, Gracefully Grayson, was intended for fifth graders. Other books meant for older grade levels with LGBTQ+ stories are also being sent back, including the fourth grade book, Rainbow Revolutionaries: Fifty LGBTQ+ People Who Made History, by Sarah Prager, and The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Street, by Gayle E. Pitman for fifth graders.

Also in response to HB 1557, the Duval school district dramatically shrank its LGBTQ+ support guide, removed rainbow stickers and posters that supported LGBTQ students from classrooms and took down a 12-minute anti-bullying video that taught middle and high school students how to support their gay and transgender peers.

Ellen Oh, author and CEO of the national nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, says Duval's actions are particularly concerning because the decisions were made before any parent complained about the books.

``It's the secretive, the silent censoring part of it that is so troublesome to us,'' Oh said ahead of the Dec. 6 School Board meeting. ``Books that have been banned have been done publicly. People have challenged books. In this case, these books were pulled because of fear. We can't live in a society like that.''

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, also, it is not the first time my colleague mentioned the book ``Flamer,'' which he described as a graphic book about a child at summer camp. In fact, it is a graphic novel, which is kind of a trend that he may not be familiar with.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, there are many issues that we should be dealing with here.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to provide for consideration of a resolution that states the House's unyielding responsibility to defend and preserve Social Security and Medicare for generations to come and to affirm that it is the position of the House to reject any cuts to these vital programs.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, Social Security and Medicare are foundational to our constituents' economic and health security. Republicans have demanded unconscionable cuts to these programs in exchange for raising the debt limit and paying our Nation's bills.

Some of my Republican colleagues have recently changed their rhetoric and now say that they don't want to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Mr. Speaker, I am offering my friends the opportunity to back up their newfound position.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining?

Mr. Speaker, as a member of the Rules Committee, I do feel compelled to comment upon the amendment process that we have with respect to this rule and bill.

I am astounded that, once again, the Republican majority has reported such an imbalanced rule. This rule actually makes in order every single germane Republican amendment submitted before our meeting yesterday, but for Democratic amendments, the rule blocks 28 of the 31 germane amendments offered by the Democrats. That is a 90 percent suppression rate of the ideas submitted by the minority party, all of which were compliant with the rules of the House but have been blocked by Republicans from being debated or voted upon.

The Rules Committee Republicans actually complained about amendment disparities during the Democratic majority, saying, ``There is no context in which such a stifling of minority voices is consistent with the designs of this institution or in the best interest of the American people we represent.''

That complaint was written after we made in order 30 percent of the amendments submitted by Republicans to structured rule bills. When we do 30 percent, it is a crisis for the institution, but when they do 5 percent this month, it is okay.

Speaker McCarthy actually promised both sides ``. . . more openness, more opportunity for ideas to win at the end of the day.''

Mr. Speaker, that promise has been broken. This Republican majority knows their bills fail to address real problems, so they continue to block our good ideas from coming to the floor rather than actually debating them. It is wrong, and they need to do better.

Mr. Speaker, with respect to H.R. 5, it does not promote the rights of parents, but it does open the door to censoring teachers and textbooks, threatening the rights of students and their parents, imposing costly burdens on our neighborhood schools that they cannot afford, and infringing on core American values, including freedom of speech and ideas.

It puts rightwing politics over parents and would let a noisy minority push their own agenda and impose their beliefs of what children can or should read or learn onto all parents and students.

Our schools carry out important responsibilities of educating the next generation of Americans, and all children deserve access to an equitable and well-rounded education that equips them for the future.

We should give our schools the resources to help young people feel supported and ready to reach their full potential. We should not create hostile environments for our most marginalized students. We should not pit parents against each other and against educators, and we should not drive wedges between families and their neighborhood schools. I want to do better than that for our kids, and I hope others today want the same.

Mr. Speaker, again, I urge my colleagues to oppose the previous question and the rule.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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