Tim Barto: This year’s education bills, from soup to nuts

By TIM BARTO

As debates over the state’s funding of the Base Student Allocation suck the oxygen out of the education committee rooms, there are a few education-related bills worth looking at.

A couple of good ones are from staunch conservative Rep. Jamie Allard. A few surprisingly good ones are from liberal-to-center-left legislators. Then there are the requisite woke bills from staunch liberal Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson. 

SAVE GIRLS’ SPORTS. House Bill 40 is Eagle River Rep. Allard’s repeat attempt at getting girls’ sports reserved for girls – real girls and only real girls. Her bill passed the House in the final days of the last session, but the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t do anything with it. To be fair, they had very little time to do anything with it, but the time crunch provided an excellent excuse not to consider it. Fear not, Allard has – rightfully so – introduced it again. 

President Donald Trump championed this cause successfully during his 2024 presidential campaign, and polls reflect a clear majority of Americans are for keeping guys out of girls’ sports. Despite the recent actions taken by the president and U.S. House of Representatives, our state still needs a law to ensure the safety of our female athletes and the continued success of girls’ and women’s sports. If nothing else, floor votes will identify those legislators who either support girls’ sports or think it’s okay for female impersonators to compete against true females.

IT’S A GRAND OL’ FLAG. House Bill 45 is another Rep. Allard bill. This time, she has the radical notion that the American flag should be displayed at all state buildings and inside each schoolroom. Under this bill, the American flag shall have prominence when displayed, meaning no other flag will fly higher than the stars-and-stripes. Additionally, this bill will prohibit government entities from displaying flags that represent political viewpoints, including matters concerning race, sexual orientation, or gender. In other words,  gender-bending teachers who seek to indoctrinate students with pride flags of various color schemes won’t be allowed to do so. 

By the way, it’s been a heyday for capitalist-minded flag makers because, according to the Human Rights Campaign, there are now 25 different flags to represent the ever growing list of alternative lifestyles and sexual preferences. Going out on a limb here and assuming the people waving these multi-colored flags tend to be the same folks who cheer when an American flag is set on fire or an athlete makes a stand by kneeling for the red-white-and-blue, it is ironic to see such importance placed on cloth representations. Here’s just a smattering of the different flags now available:  

• Pride 
• Philadelphia Pride
• Progress Pride
• Lesbian
• Bisexual 
• Pansexual
• Intersex
• Asexual
• Nonbinary
• Genderqueer
• Gender-fluid

NO PHONES IN SCHOOL. House Bill 57 would prohibit the use of cell phones in public schools during regular school hours.  It was introduced by Rep. Zack Fields, a Democrat from Anchorage. Senate Bill 18 is a companion bill introduced in the Senate by Anchorage Democrat Sen. Bill Wielechowski. Fields and Wielechowski aren’t exactly middle of the road politicians, but these bills make sense and deserve support. Removing cell phones from school grounds will eliminate distractions for students and teachers alike, and will promote a better learning environment. 

Author’s unsolicited trip down memory lane . . . As kids, some of us used to stuff a transistor radio in our jacket or pants pockets and run a wired earpiece through our clothes so we could surreptitiously listen to postseason baseball broadcasts during school. This only occurred over a few days in October, and while it bordered on disrespectful and villainous, it was often done with a wink from the teacher. In fact, on one occasion, Miss Sciapiti, our easy-on-the-eyes sixth grade home room teacher and the first crush for many of us boys at John Muir Elementary School, told me to take out my earpiece and turn off my radio . . . and then had the play-by-play piped in through the intercom so the whole class could hear. That was it – I was smitten.

We, obviously, couldn’t do all the things with transistor radios that teachers have to put up with these days; i.e., make phone calls, watch  videos, exchange text messages, or record videos. After all, those transistors only received AM radio signals. Today’s teachers have to put up with many distractions and distracted students. Taking away the biggest sources of those distractions makes sense.

LEARNING ABOUT MONEY. Senate Bill 22 is another bill introduced by Sen. Wielechowski, and it makes sense, as it mandates a financial literacy course for all high school students. All people are going to have to deal with opening bank accounts, paying bills, and balancing checkbooks. This is pragmatic learning, and well worth our teenagers’ time to learn about banking, savings, investing, budgeting, and filing for student aid; and with credit debt at an all-time high, we can nary afford to continue ignoring this unavoidable part of life.

CIVICS CLASS MAKING A COMEBACK. Senate Bill 23, introduced Senate President Gary Stevens of Kodiak, a registered Republican who caucuses with the Democrats, is another piece of common sense education legislation. It includes topics that really should already be taught in our public schools including:  founding of the United States, including foundational documents and the principles of government; federalism; the three branches of government; civil liberties and rights; campaigns and elections; domestic and foreign policy; comparative governments; and international relations. 

That these topics are not being taught in our public schools is a tragedy. As long as credit is being given to the likes of Fields, Wielechowski, and Stevens, we might as well heed the commentary of another unlikely source: legendary musician and nonconformist, Frank Zappa, who had this to say about the dire state of constitutional knowledge and citizen awareness:

“One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics. Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it . . .”

So, now that we’ve have reached across the philosophical and political ire to give credit where credit is due, it’s time to go after the bills that will not improve our schools. 

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson of Anchorage is as nice a person as there is in the Legislature, but she is also one of the most liberal, and she seeks to spread her brand of wokeness by introducing a few unnecessary bills – and one potentially dangerous bill, such as:

ASIAN/PACIFIC ISLANDER CURRICULUM. Senate Bill 6 will require the inclusion of lessons on the history and contributions of Asian/Pacific Islanders to students in kindergarten through 12^th grade. This adds another layer of non-basic educational requirements that already keep our students from concentrating on core subjects and pragmatic lessons. 

Now, before you start hurling racist epithets at me, please know that my wife is of Japanese, Okinawan, and Filipina heritage and was born and raised in Hawaii. You can’t get much more Asian/Pacific Islander than that, and it means that the people I love and care for most – my wife and the five children we raised together – are Asian/Pacific Islander (and the kids get to throw in Slovak ethnicity as well). We made sure they learned of their varied, rich, and diverse heritages because that’s part of who they are . . . and it makes for some interesting mealtimes: chicken adobo and haluski, miso soup and stuffed cabbage. 

MANDATORY CPR TRAINING. Senate Bill 20 calls for mandatory CPR training for public school students. While not necessarily a bad thing, it becomes another state-mandated curriculum requirement that takes valuable school hours away from core subjects. It is my understanding that training of this nature is already available to any student who wants it. 

MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION. Senate Bill 41 is something of a rehash of Sen. Gray-Jackson’s previous attempts at making mental health education a part of the public school curriculum. It sounds rather innocuous, but the mandatory lessons it dictates will be crafted by state-level bureaucrats and there is a wide swath down which the topic of mental health can travel if this bill becomes law. 

Giving education bureaucrats the authority to develop mental health guidelines for children is a dangerous proposition, as we have all seen what leftist idealogues do develop curriculum. It opens the door for topics such as racism, equity, sexuality, and gender to creep their way into public schools under the guise of mental health.

Tim Barto is vice president of Alaska Family Council and a regular contributor to Must Read Alaska. 

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