The Nebraska State Board of Education will examine the process behind the state’s aborted attempt at creating health education standards for Nebraska schools.
Board President Maureen Nickels appointed an ad hoc committee of the board Thursday to examine what went wrong and to come up with ways to improve the process for the future.
The committee — Robin Stevens, District 7; Patti Gubbels, District 3; and Jacquelyn Morrison, District 4 — will examine a host of issues, from how writing and advisory teams are selected to how proposed standards are rolled out to the public.
Nickels asked the committee to return a report to board leadership no later than Jan. 25.
“The committee will report to the full board in February, with possible action taken at the March meeting, presenting any recommendations for standards process, policy or procedural rules implementation,†she said.
Morrison, whose district includes eastern Omaha and parts of Bellevue, Papillion, La Vista and Ralston, will chair the committee.
“We’ve got to troubleshoot what went wrong,†she said.
“We can’t deny that there’s a problem. Let’s just figure out what the themes are, figure out what we want to change and get it changed,†she said.
In March, the Nebraska Department of Education proposed health and sex education standards that were both comprehensive in scope and inclusive of diverse genders and sexual orientations.
Kindergartners, for example, were to learn about “cohabitating†and same-gender families. First graders were to learn about gender identity and gender stereotypes, and older kids about anal, oral and vaginal sex.
Ninety percent of the input received by the department was in opposition to the standards, according to an analysis of emails and survey responses reviewed by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Board members halted development of the standards Sept. 3.
Critics said the standards did not reflect the views of a majority of Nebraskans, and they questioned the behind-the-scenes efforts of board member Deb Neary.
Released emails show that Neary urged the department to use an advocate of comprehensive sex education, employed by the Women’s Fund of Omaha, as an adviser in the standards process. She also arranged to invite the standards writers and her board colleagues to an invitation-only workshop with a national sex ed advocate.
At the board meeting Thursday, Stevens said that early in the process, he asked if activists were involved and was assured that they weren’t.
He said he relayed that to constituents in a column in newspapers in his area. Now he believes that activists were involved.
“In my definition and probably in the definition of many of my constituents, there indeed were activists,†he said. “And I felt a little bit left out there, and that was difficult for me to respond to at that particular time.â€
Neary responded to him, saying that the woman she recommended, who was put on the advisory committee, was not an activist.
Lisa Schulze is “one of the most informed, scholarly people about best practices in research on sexuality education, and that’s not an activist,†she said. “That is a scholar.â€
She said her constituent group in Omaha is very different from Stevens’ in western Nebraska.
Neary said her own advocacy reflected the position of the majority of pediatricians across the country and Nebraska.
When pediatricians say the standards are medically accurate and will help youth to be successful, “those aren’t philosophical thoughts, those are scholarly facts,†she said.
Gubbels said she has “a sense that we all believe that we need to formalize the process.â€
“For example, what is the role of an advisory committee? Right? Who are subject matter experts? I think having definitions will help us in formalization of the process.â€
Several board members suggested that the state needs a written process that would involve board members earlier in the development of standards.
Photos: Looking back at how Nebraska reopened schools amid the pandemic