Maryland senators are scrapping all mentions of gender and sexuality from a bill originally proposed to prevent parents from opting their kids out of age-appropriate health lessons mandated by state curriculum.
Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary first introduced the Comprehensive Health Education Framework bill in 2023, after Carroll County’s school board voted to ban information on LGBTQ+ identity from its classrooms. The House has passed the bill every year since, but it has never cleared the Senate until Thursday night.
The senate version looks almost nothing like the original passed by the House. It keeps the provision allowing state education leaders to withhold funding from districts who don’t comply with state curriculum standards.
But it erases any mention of health class specifically. And it cuts a controversial section that allowed parents to opt out of the mandated family life and sexuality unit — but not every mention of gender and sexuality in the classroom.
“So those materials, then, are pretty much forced on the students without the parent’s consent,” said Republican Sen. Mary Beth Carozza in a late March hearing. “That is giving the state more authority than parents on these deeply personal issues.”
Democratic Delegate Kris Fair, a co-sponsor who defended the bill in the March hearing, said it’s about ending the “pick your own adventure” in health curriculum that leaves students in some counties in the dark.
“Information is not a weapon,” Fair said. “And while I certainly appreciate that a parent is welcome to raise their child at home however they want, a school system has to acknowledge that children come as society comes in all different types, and they should be teaching all of this.”
The two chambers will now have to reconcile differences between their bill versions before the legislative session ends on Monday.
Allowing parents to opt-out of the family life unit maintains parents’ rights as outlined in the state’s health education framework passed in 2021. Fair said the original bill is meant to simply ensure local districts follow that framework, while adding sections to “meet modern-day challenges” like social media use.
It also adds “gender identity and sexual orientation” as a non-opt-outable content area, Fair said, to allow teachers to include age-appropriate and relevant information in units like healthy relationships and HIV prevention.
“All people have gender and all people have sexuality, so it doesn't even make logical sense,” Fair said. “I, as a gay man, for example, don't get to opt out of straight people's relationships when I go into a health curriculum class just because I might be offended by it.”
Sen. Mary Washington, a Democrat representing Baltimore City and County, warned that allowing districts to scrap units like Carroll County did is “similar to picking and choosing history.”
“We'll talk about the U.S., or we'll talk about a curriculum that talks about social history, but we're not going to talk about slavery,” she said as an example.
During Thursday’s vote, Republican Sen. Justin Ready from Carroll County said he appreciated the heavy changes made by the senate education committee. The current state health standards were implemented by a previous superintendent, he said.
“[It] started introducing what I would call complex and controversial, or at least older age discussions, about human sexuality, gender, all those issues,” Ready said. “And there have been folks who have been very concerned about that being a subject matter in kindergarten, first grade, second grade.”
Ready said he admits that most younger-age curriculum on gender and sexuality is “pretty general” based on what he’s seen around the state. But he still voted against the bill, even with those specific content areas cut from the senate version entirely.
