House Republicans believe that every parent should play a central role in their child’s education. Parents and students matter, and we’ve worked hard to give them a greater say in the education process by passing many different pieces of legislation over the last two years. This week we passed House File 2577 which aims at creating a more transparent classroom so parents can view classroom instructional material being taught to their children. School districts would post the syllabus, textbooks, and other related classroom documents so parents can access and view all this information through an online portal.
Parents deserve to know what is being taught to their children in school. The purpose of this legislation is to empower parents, while at the same time making it as simple as possible for our educators. Under the proposal educators would update their online postings throughout the year, allowing for discussion on current events or other topics that they deem most engaging and educational. To comply with this bill, the new information being taught must be publicly accessible, for parents to view it, and it would be uploaded by the end of the week on an online portal.
In addition, we have heard a lot of concerns about obscene books and other materials in school libraries and classrooms, and this legislation seeks to address this problem from the angle of transparency. Our bill would require a catalog be published online of every book in the school library and would allow parents a protocol for preventing their child from checking out specific books that they deem as inappropriate. Parents have every right to access this information, and the steps laid out in this legislation ensure parents can have oversight on the materials their children are seeing or reading. Parents can also talk with their local school boards and superintendents to address concerns over certain materials and potentially have them removed.
The bottom line is this, parents should know what is happening in their children’s education. We want to ensure parents have this information so they are aware of the materials their children are seeing in the classroom. Parents deserve all the transparency and understanding of instructional material their children are learning. The purpose of this is to provide parents access to a child’s weekly classroom teachings and to enable them to better understand and oversee the curriculum. As stated before, parents matter and deserve transparency. House Republicans will continue to work on ways to promote the voice of parents and work alongside our fantastic educators to promote a transparent educational experience.
