To coincide with the beginning of the school year, businessman and GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski and his Lt. Governor running mate, current State Representative Laura Devlin, announced a “Parental Bill of Rights” for Connecticut parents and schoolchildren aimed at empowering parents to make decisions for their children, bolstering quality education, investing more state resources in healthier and safer schools, and ensuring protections for competitive fairness and safety for girls in high school sports.

This “Parental Bill of Rights” is divided into three sections – empowering parents, quality education, and “safe and healthy” schools.

Table Of Contents

Empowering Parents

Let families, not school districts decide when and how to discuss sensitive sex education issues with young children

“We should absolutely promote diversity and acceptance in our schools, but at the same time we should not be teaching age-inappropriate sex-ed curriculum to children not old enough to reliably tie their own shoes.”

Sex education is taught in public schools on topics ranging from abstinence and reproduction to sexual orientation and sexually transmitted diseases. Sex education is primarily introduced in grades seven through twelve.

According to the Connecticut document Addressing Sexual Health in Schools : Policy Considerations — Parents and guardians are critical partners in education, especially sexual health education. As such, parents are typically notified when sexual health education will occur, informed about what course material will be provided, and given the opportunity to review curricula and to excuse their child from instruction without penalty for all or part of the instruction.

Connecticut currently has an “opt out” policy for students who do not wish to have their students attend sex education classes, which is defined on page four of the Human Sexuality Curriculum in Connecticut and California.

Restore parental choice for healthcare decisions for children

Through the COVID pandemic, we learned that there are times when government mandates may be necessary, but also that government decision-making based on politics vs. science makes for bad public policy and distrust. We support science-based decision making and we both believe in the efficacy and safety of vaccines, but we don’t believe that parents should be forced by the government to vaccinate or mask their children without any recourse to object.

According to the Connecticut COVID-19 Response, face masks are required to be worn inside PreK-12 public or non-public school buildings only if the local school board or similar local authority requires them. Ned Lamont said it’s unlikely the state would institute new mask mandates.

As of 2022, the School Immunization Requirements did not list Covid-19 vaccines as required for schools.

Social media companies are allowed a 24/7 opportunity to impact our children, many of whom are addicted to social media and its many negative influences. Parents deserve every recourse available when trying to protect their children. We will raise the age requiring parental consent in Connecticut from 13 to 16 and give parents more power to control what their children consume online.

This is covered by SB 208, which passed through the Committee on Children with unanimous, bi-partisan support. As of September 2022, this bill has not been introduced to the State Senate or House for voting.

Quality Education

Allow school choice and expand access to charter, magnet, and technical schools. Parents and their children should not be locked in failing schools just because of where they live

Parents should have options to choose the best education for their children, and no child should have their educational opportunity limited by their zip code. We support funding for public education and believe every child should have the opportunity for a top-rate education in our state. To remedy that, we will join the vast majority of other states in America who aim to provide parents and their children trapped in underperforming public school systems with vouchers and education savings accounts for better educational choices.

A total of 15 states (Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin), and the District of Columbia offer school vouchers.

There are many pros and cons to school vouchers. Some studies have showed no evidence that voucher programs significantly increase test scores. Some studies have showed when voucher systems are available, both the public and private schools in that school system have increased test scores and graduation rates.

The Pros of School Vouchers

  • School vouchers empower parents to make choices for their children, based on their children’s unique needs, interests and learning styles.
  • School vouchers eliminate the need for parents to pay twice for their children’s education: once in tax dollars and again in tuition costs.
  • School vouchers meet children’s needs more effectively by allowing them to go to the school that is the best fit for them, rather than the one that is simply in the neighborhood.
  • The government-run education system currently isn’t working; schools are failing and students are falling through the cracks.
  • A voucher system promotes competition between area schools, which raises the bar on the standard of education throughout all schools, including public schools.
  • Vouchers offer students in low-income areas with poorly performing schools a chance at a better education and the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty.

The Cons of School Vouchers

  • School vouchers take money away from the public school system – and budgets currently are so tight in many school districts across the country, additional cuts could seriously undermine the value of public education today.
  • Because many private schools are religious, the allowance of using tax dollars to pay for private schools that subscribe to a particular faith is a blatant violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
  • Vouchers do not benefit all students, since private schools still have the ability to pick and choose which students attend and could discriminate against certain students if they so choose.
  • With more schools vying for tuition money, the quality of private schooling may suffer in the process, leaving some parents actually paying out of pocket for a lesser education than they would get from public schools.
  • School vouchers skim the best students away from the public school system, making it that much more difficult for public schools to make the grade on standardized test scores and get subsequent funding for higher scores.
  • A school voucher system tends to divide the country, while public education serves to unite it.

Increase funding for tutoring programs to help combat persistent learning loss in the wake of the pandemic

The Governor and Lt. Governor’s refusal to aggressively address and reverse learning loss in our schools is unacceptable. CT Department of Education data from last year shows that student achievement is still lagging pre-pandemic levels. Despite over 500,000 K-12 students statewide and a $5 billion surplus, the state only made a small fraction available for summer school this year to help kids catch up before this school year began. We will initiate a coordinated statewide effort to identify students who have fallen behind during the pandemic and provide the resources to help them catch up to their peers and get back on track. Options for before school, after school, and during vacation need to be available to families.

Research points to intensive daily tutoring as one of the most effective ways to help academically struggling children catch up. A seminal 2016 study sorted through almost 200 well-designed experiments on improving education, from expanding preschool to reducing class size, and found that frequent one-to-one tutoring was especially effective in increasing learning rates for low-performing students

Safe and Healthy Schools

Dedicate a portion of the state’s $5 billion surplus to better fortify CT schools, protect our children and train staff

No price tag is too high when it comes to protecting our children from harm. That job is school-wide and begins as a student gets on the bus or starts their walk to school. Our proposal would provide grant funding for every public school system to better fortify their building security and enable the hiring of public safety professionals to provide the protections needed for every school in the state

The root of this issue is the increase in gun violence in the United States. The FBI reported the number of active shooters, defined as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area, increased by over 50% in 2021. This issue enjoys bi-partisan support.

Ensure the timely improvement state wide school air quality

Closely monitor the “School Indoor Air Quality Working Group” report (due Jan 2023) and ensure the transparency and urgency of actions taken the State Departments of Administration and Education on school ventilation systems. According to a recent report, only 40 percent of school facilities had central air conditioning for their entire building and only 53 percent had HVAC or high-efficiency boilers no older than their expected useful life

“The dangerous and unhealthy air quality in a majority of our schools is an outrage. Our children and staff’s health hang in the balance and we will demand information starting on day one to mitigate this statewide issue.

The report is from the Connecticut Department of Administrative Services. In May of 2022, the Department of Administrative Services is announced the passage of a reimbursement program for school HVAC system installation, repair, and upgrades, and makes multiple changes to eligible costs under the school construction reimbursement program. The initiative was passed as part of the budget implementer in the 2022 legislative session.

Ensure the physical safety of all students by prohibiting biological males from competing against girls in high school athletics

Allowing transgender biological males to compete against biological females is inherently unfair to female student-athletes and, moreover, is physically unsafe. We will first try to work with the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to amend their current policy but absent their cooperation, we will work with the state legislature. There are Title 9 protections provided to girls and women, and we are committed to ensuring these protections

The root of this issue is an opinion piece in USA Today Saturday by Chelsea Mitchell. In the opinion piece, Mitchell stated that competing against transgender women chipped away at her confidence, and she was worried that her college recruitment was impacted by competing against transgender women.

Mitchell is an 11-time state champion in Connecticut high school track and the Hartford Courant’s girls high school athlete of the year in 2019. Mitchell received a track scholarship to William and Mary and she is a sprinter/long jumper on the school’s track team.

Mitchell, along with three other women, filed a lawsuit in 2020 that objects to the inclusion of transgender student-athletes in women’s sports. The lawsuit was dismissed in April 2021, and Mitchell appealed this dismissal in May 2021.

DW News, a German based news company, went into a deep dive on transgender impact in sports. The summary of the report is this — “They found that trans women who underwent hormone therapy for one year continued to outperform non-transgender women, also known as cisgender women, though the gap largely closed after two years. But even then, trans women still ran 12% faster.”