What You Need to Know:
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Education
Bill Status: PASSED
Resolutions are statements of what the legislature values, rather than changes of policies. Furthermore, unlike bills, resolutions can be brought to the floor without being placed on the agenda first. As a result, legislators may not have advance notice when resolutions are being heard.
House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 90 says that LGBTQ history should be taught to students from 7th-12th grade.
The bill includes the two specific examples of the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.
This resolution will take effect in the 2024-25 school year.
What does this mean now for …
Parents: Now more than ever, it’s crucial to know what’s being taught in your child’s school. What’s most concerning is the wide open door this presents for more school-sanctioned, sexually-charged conversations with students.
Watch especially for inappropriate material like what we saw earlier this year in Smyrna High School. If you hear of an incident like this in your child’s school, let us know using our incident report form. See our Parental Rights resource page for more tools and information.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
DE law currently allows for loan repayment for educators that teach in specific areas.
SB99 repays loans of minority teachers simply for being a minority, regardless of where they actually teach. This bill is derived from and influenced by critical race theory.
It assumes that minority teachers are not in a financial position for loan repayment, and fails to consider that white teachers that may have not come from affluent backgrounds are also struggling with student loan debt. The original repayment language simply sought to provide a service to all educators within high needs areas and did not place any sharp focus on one ethnicity. That was where they should have stopped. But of course, they didn’t. 😒
Bill Status: EXPIRED
Delaware’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) currently requires public organizations to answer to document requests from the public. SB 155 would allow those organizations to deny that request if it is “unduly burdensome” or “intended to disrupt the essential functions.”
Who decides what is “undue” or “disruptive”, and how is that defined?
Concerned parents have been able to view major curricular issues in their districts by completing FOIA requests. This bill could potentially hinder that from being possible in the future. If anything, there needs to be more transparency in public organizations, not loopholes for less.
Interestingly, some of the sponsors of who want to limit FOIA requests are also sponsoring SB149, a bill to give public access to law enforcement misconduct records through FOIA, to increase transparency and additional oversight.
Bill Status: PASSED
We can all agree on the importance of “understanding how media messages shape culture and society” as this bill reveals.
The question to ask is who will create and teach the curriculum to “recognize bias and misinformation” that the bill requires? In today’s world of censoring anyone who doesn’t agree with Facebook’s “community standards,” we can easily see how this law will be used to censor conservative and Christian perspectives. This bill gives schools the tools to train “Facebook fact-checkers,” preparing them to silence all opposing ideas.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
SB206 seeks to remedy the concerns of many parents of children in public schools who are being indoctrinated with progressive political ideologies.
Many young people now view Socialism and Marxism favorably as forms of government that promote a “common good”.
SB206 will help students have a better understanding of government by requiring schools to have a comparative political ideology course. The principles that established freedom and democracy in America are truly appreciated when they are understood. We urge all parents to be intentional about teaching and living those principles.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
SB 232 requires that all 10th and 12th grade students be given an assessment on their understanding of basic US History, including the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. For context, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services Test is eligible to be used to satisfy this requirement.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
HB277 provides additional protection to children who are sexually abused by authority figures in schools, organizations, and businesses. Currently, the school, organization, or business is not liable when employees take advantage of their place of authority to sexually abuse children. Private employers are already liable when their employees abuse children. This bill makes the standard of care consistent.
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Bill Statuses: PASSED
These two bills focus on addressing grooming and other inappropriate sexual relationships between educators and students.
This is especially important in the hyper sexualized culture that surrounds our kids.
- Children who attend a public school are not just taught the facts about the human biology and reproduction.
- “Comprehensive” sex education in schools teaches about “sexual orientation and gender identity” and specific sexual acts, deviant from human reproduction, in the name of inclusion and safety.
Can you see how these factors combined create the perfect opportunity for grooming in schools to occur more frequently?
SB 290 and SB 291 are good bills, but many of their sponsors fail to acknowledge that other policies they promote are contributing to the problem in the first place.
Schools should be welcoming and promote parental involvement, now more than ever, instead of fostering secrecy between students and school personnel. Predators thrive on secrecy!
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Bill Statuses: PASSED
Parents should be aware of any changes in public school structure for the sake of proactively protecting their children.
The need for mental health counseling is increasing among young people, and these bills seek to address this need by installing mental health centers in middle & high schools.
BEWARE: Mental health counselors in public schools are not required to tell parents anything about meetings with their child.
Mental health care is one important area that parents need to be proactively involved and fully informed about the services provided, to remain an active source of protection and guidance.
Know who’s on your school board; be involved in your child’s educational process — exercise your parental rights for the protection of your children.
Bill Status: PASSED
This policy acknowledges that sexual predation does not just happen, but that “grooming” generally takes place first. Victims are less likely to tell and more likely to stay victims longer when they are groomed. By defining grooming and providing criminal redress for the behavior, it has the potential to protect more vulnerable young people.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
SB 314 would have allocated funds towards securing our schools with video cameras, key card entrances, and bullet proof glass among other things.
Our legislators claim that they simply want to keep schools safe when they pass gun regulations. Yet SB 314, which would have increased school safety, was never even heard in committee.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
This was the third attempt this session to increase the transparency in school content for parents’ benefit. Filed again on the last day of committee hearings for the year, this bill was never heard.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
Much like the previous version of this bill, SB 206, this policy failed to make it to the Floor for a full vote. The bill would have ensured that high school students received education on political ideologies like communism and their conflicting nature with the founding principles of freedom.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
This bill was sponsored by the same author of bills SB 340 and SB 341, part of a clear mission to end the session fighting for our young people. We are thankful for his consistent frontline efforts!
Unfortunately, SB 342, which would have required a civics course for 10th and 12th graders, was never heard in committee.
These three bills to educate young people and strengthen parental rights were all filed multiple times this session and were either blocked or ignored. Policies to educate on the founding principles of our country and to strengthen parental rights should be non-partisan issues. That is not what we saw, however.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
HB 353 was passed out of House committee at the end of March, despite overwhelming opposition from those who gave public comment.
HB 353 prevents applications for new charter schools or modifications to existing charter schools until 2024. It also puts together an advisory group to review the criteria and requirements for charter applications. The composition of the advisory group does not represent charter schools well, which creates a one-sided discussion.
It was amended to alter the effective date and not affect pending applications.
Charter schools are yet another avenue for parents to have freedom of choice in the education of their children. Limits to this freedom should not be taken lightly.
Bill Status: PASSED
The purpose of HB 375 is to create a consortium that will “coordinate efforts to identify and remove systemic inequities that impact people of color in this State.”
Bill Status: EXPIRED
Current law allows law enforcement to inform schools when one of their students is arrested, which may lead to suspension or other disciplinary actions. HB 396 says law enforcement can only inform schools of student arrest when the crime is violent, has occurred on school property or at a school-sponsored event, or where the victim of the crime also attends the school.
Parents, this is something to be aware of.
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Bill Statuses: EXPIRED
The reality is that when schools promote an aggressive agenda to your children contrary to your values, you as a parent are not guaranteed to know. We hear consistent testimonies from parents who are shocked by what their children are exposed to by teachers and the curriculum.
Just this school year, a mom of a high school student in the Smyrna school district discovered unprecedented vulgarity and depictions of violent sex acts in reading material assigned in her daughter’s AP English curriculum. (By the way, AP English is where highly sexualized and pornographic (grooming) material shows up the most).
Parents were not alerted to this content, and the superintendent flippantly responded that the book would not be removed because it was “culturally relevant.” 
Relevant to what culture? Is that because the author of this book is Black? This is highly offensive! That statement implies that absolute vulgarity is foundational to Black culture; therefore this pornographic literature is “culturally sensitive” and we need to get over it. Sounds racist to me 
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Parental involvement in a child’s education is non-negotiable. HB 326 is a step toward transparency BEFORE the assignment.
HB 326 will empower parents and ensure that they know of school board meetings for the year, have access to syllabi and teaching materials, and provide a process for bringing suit if a request to view material is denied.
Bill Status: EXPIRED
The most dangerous bill this session, HB 199, was filed but never actually made it to the committee. But HB 460 is equally dangerous but just goes about it differently.
HB 460 would enshrine the “right to privacy” in Delaware’s Constitution. Remember that rights protected in the Constitution are given the highest weight of the law.
This so-called right to privacy will clash with religious liberty, parental rights, the right to and dignity of human life, and many others.
The “right to privacy” is used to support …
- the “right” to abortion, based on the premise used in Roe v. Wade.
- the “right” to assisted suicide.
- a direct invitation and open door for teachers to potentially teach comprehensive sex education (based on the cases mentioned in HB 460’s synopsis).
- a child’s right to “privacy” — meaning, parents can be excluded from their child’s medical information or school information. Remember our discussion about HB 400?
- et cetera …
The most dangerous implications of HB 460 are that it will enshrine abortion in Delaware constitution, and severely restrict parental rights when they conflict with their child’s “privacy.”