My good friend works in administration at a high school, and she’s had her share of stories over the years, but wow, is this one a rollercoaster.
The high school offers sex education every year as part of the mandatory health credit. Families are free to opt their kids out of sex-ed if they wish, but the kids still have to participate in the alternative health course offering. All of the students take the same introductory portion before splitting off into the classes for sex-ed and for those who have opted out. This initial section covers, among other things, the dynamics of a healthy relationship, including matters of consent.
Immediately after the first day, a father tried to remove his son from the class. It was explained to him that he couldn’t opt out of this portion.
[Father] was furious, posting these long rants on the town Facebook page, on the school’s parent portal, and I’m sure elsewhere about how the class was “political”, we were “shaming his son for being a man”, and it was up to the families to teach these private subjects so the school should stay out.
[Father] not only took issue with the lessons on habitually asking for consent but also those on the importance of discussing emotions freely, healthy division of labor between romantic partners, and avoiding sexual harassment.
This is how this guy began to develop a following. Parents would say they disagreed with him on almost everything he was spouting, but that they were in lockstep that it wasn’t the school’s place to teach kids about personal topics like relationships.
[Father] started camping outside of the building while his son’s section of the class was being taught and shouting his own theories and beliefs at kids as they walked into the building, even handing out a pamphlet he got from some junk website.
The school is set up as such so that it’s easy to be on a public thoroughfare but still within full view of a classroom, so they didn’t have legal grounds to send him packing.
His supporters would honk their horns or even occasionally stop by to bring him cold drinks and sandwiches. It was nuts.
Then, one day, toward the end of the non-optional portion of the class, they had a police officer come in to talk to everyone about how to report a sexual assault, how to know if you’ve been assaulted, and what to expect when you go to make your report, etc.
The officer’s own daughter was a student at the high school, so he was extra protective of the whole group. When he saw [Father] standing outside the building shouting about how mutual consent is for the weak, he wasted no time shoving him off.
This happened right outside of the main administrative building. The guy tried to argue.
Father: “I’m on public land. I have a right to be here and say whatever I want.”
And he started quoting some city ordinance thinking he’d really gotten one over on the veteran police officer. Nope. The officer wasted no time informing him:
Officer: “You are causing a disturbance. You can leave or I can remove you. You’ve got about ten seconds to decide.”
The officer watched [Father] get in his car to be sure he actually left, and apparently, the guy made a few more smart comments to him about how “The Blacks are right; there really are no good cops left these days.” Luckily, the officer didn’t let any of those gross comments provoke him and just said:
Officer: “Sir, everyone certainly has a right to hold their own opinions and express their views. But when and how you do it matters in the eyes of the law. You can’t shout, ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, and you can’t contradict teachers outside of their classrooms at the school. You hearing me?”
At first blush, [Father] was not hearing him because he drove off without response, and that story in and of itself spread like wildfire around town. However, for everyone who painted him as a laughing stock for making such a display, there was someone else who saw him as a hero fighting the system. And, it turns out, he was actually listening more closely to the officer’s warnings than any of us would’ve liked.
The optional sex-ed portion began the following week. This fool had begun placing Facebook ads — not the paid kind but just posting his own ads from his account — for HIS OWN SEX-ED CLASS. (Because he can say whatever he wants in the appropriate setting, right?)
What sort of negligent, a**-backward, head-in-the-sand kind of parent you have to be to let your child leave school in the middle of the day to attend, as he dubbed it, “Sex-Ed For REAL MEN” inside the house of a stranger, a private citizen unaffiliated with the school, is beyond me.
But the group who’d begun to follow his whole campaign and support him online and such was all for it, and they actually deliberately sent their kids to him.
To be fair, he did advertise it as being totally non-sexual in nature, with his big driver being that those discussions should be left to the parents, and he was offering a class that covered “traditional morals, values, and chivalry” promising to “take us back to the good old days.”
He also had plenty of stuff about how his taxes pay the school’s salary, so if enough people made their preferences clear, the faculty would have to fall in line and stop “disseminating harmful materials.”
As far as we knew, this guy had a job, so he must’ve taken considerable time off to make this happen. A significant chunk of the male students (about a fifth) withdrew in favor of “Sex-Ed For REAL MEN” — some satirically more so than seriously, but still, even one was too many in my book regardless of reasoning.
My friend and her coworkers managed to get their hands on a copy of a portion of the “syllabus” that was leaked. It covered things like “the man’s and woman’s role in the relationship” and “what’s appropriate after how many dates/rounding the bases”, and some random survival skills training was mixed in, as well (grouped under “making yourself desirable”).
As this was going on, [Father] sent taunting letters to the school faculty letting them know how popular his class was and how great it was going, as though his son didn’t still have to continue attending there and [Father] didn’t have an ongoing relationship with the faculty — plus at least one more kid who hadn’t hit high school yet!
Whenever [Father] was on campus to watch his son in a game or just pick him up, he made a point of telling the faculty involved in health classes what a better job he was doing of teaching than they ever did and how he was saving the immoral world by righteously luring kids into his basement during school hours.
By the end of the semester, [Father] was genuinely expecting some sort of white flag from the high school’s side.
When the school called [Father] in for a meeting, he was all set to gloat, and he even charitably (or so he thought) conceded that the people at school were “just doing their jobs” and couldn’t help that he was better at teaching than they were because he was working with fewer bureaucratic restrictions.
The faculty patiently listened to this — as he wouldn’t let them get a word in edgewise — before finally informing him that his son would need to take summer school because, while sex-ed was optional, the alternative (on-campus) course was required in its place.
This man was somehow shocked to learn that his son couldn’t just be pulled out of school mid-day every week for months.
The school explained that they’d sent letters home and called but had never heard back from [Father], which is why they were having this meeting (which was a fiasco to schedule in and of itself.)
Everyone guessed that he just didn’t open any letters from the school and didn’t bother listening to their messages.
So, [Father] started talking about how his son HAD taken a health class, and he had a right to teach his own son if he preferred, and on and on. They replied that if he wanted to home-school his son he was free to do so; however, he’d have to unenroll him from public school and register his son as a home-schooler. He could not switch between his own lessons and public school on a whim.
[Father] was enraged by this and felt wholly entitled to circumvent state regulations and even federal procedures in order to… well… basically do whatever he wanted.
He said his son would just fail health and that he took it as a badge of honor. The school said that was his prerogative; however, in that case, his son would not be promoted to the next grade level, as it was a required credit.
This REALLY blustered him, and he left. Then, after a few days of thinking about it, he informed the school in writing that he would be unenrolling his son and registering him somewhere else.
The school cheerfully informed him that would be fine, but he couldn’t enroll him as matriculating into the coming grade because they could not certify his passing until he completed all required credits for his current year.
A logistical note: the other students in “Sex-Ed For REAL MEN” were not facing summer school because their health class was scheduled at a separate time, so they took it in addition to the credit-bearing in-school alternative. Those in the same period block as his son just didn’t take this guy’s class, or they withdrew from it to return to school after receiving the first notice home.
So, now, unfortunately, [Father]’s son is bearing the weight of his entitled parent’s poor choices. But not alone! School bus service is significantly decreased during summer school, so from what I understand, his father will have to wake up early every day to drive him in.
