Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
Fifth grade students within Yelm Community Schools (YCS) will continue to learn comprehensive sexual health education through an updated version of a program familiar to the district: Family Life and Sexual Health — also known as FLASH.
During a YCS Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, Feb. 26, all five board members unanimously approved the recommendation of FLASH from a committee led by Kendall McNutt, YCS director of student learning.
Chris Woods, YCS superintendent, noted that the adoption of FLASH would be for fifth grade, specifically.
Fifth grade students at McKenna Elementary, Fort Stevens Elementary, Prairie Elementary, Mill Pond Elementary, Lackamas Elementary and Southworth Elementary would be slated to learn from the updated program. However, Woods noted that parents have every right to opt-out of the curriculum.
“This has been a topic of conversation, obviously, even last year, about the sensitivity to our families,” Woods said. “We talked a lot last spring about wanting to improve communication to families about meetings around what’s going to be taught, and also, their ability to opt out of any lessons.”
According to McNutt, YCS conducted a comprehensive sexual health education curriculum review on Thursday, Feb. 5, with a committee that consisted of teachers, a principal and a parent.
“We invited six teachers, one from each of the elementaries. Five of them attended. We also invited two parents, and one of the two parents was able to make it,” McNutt said. “There was good representation across the district. We spent the day on it.”
During that meeting, according to McNutt, members of the committee read through three potential comprehensive sexual health education programs to be used at the elementary level. The first program was FLASH.
She acknowledged the other two programs in consideration during the committee’s review were “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” and “UNHUSHED.”
“There are really the only three programs — other than a couple of full year programs — which are already out of the box and don’t require any changes, supplementation or authentications,” McNutt said. “The goal of the committee was to identify a curriculum that fulfills Washington state legal mandates, while remaining age appropriate and deeply respectful of the values of the Yelm community.”
According to McNutt, each member of the committee took the selection process seriously and made their decisions based on what the best choice was for students. Additionally, she said the selection of FLASH was based on three critical findings.
“First, they identify alignment with community values. The community determined that FLASH provides the most balanced approach for our local context, centering the family as the primary educator while meeting the state content requirements,” McNutt said. “Second, FLASH distinguished itself because of its delivery model and support materials included for teachers. In particular, the values question protocol was identified as a superior framework for helping educators navigate sensitive topics.
“Finally, the team appreciated the transparency that FLASH allows,” McNutt continued. “So, unlike the secondary materials for FLASH, elementary FLASH is open source, meaning that we can link our website to the FLASH website and parents have access to every aspect of the curriculum. The full deal is available online. It’s not behind a paywall.”
FLASH has previously been used by YCS for comprehensive sexual health education, and the committee recommended the adoption of an updated version of the familiar curriculum.
The new updates in the FLASH curriculum, according to McNutt, include bystander training, inclusivity and affirmative consent.
“In fifth grade context, that’s really more about that students have autonomy over their bodies and that other people should not be putting hands on them in any kind of way,” McNutt said.
Additionally, McNutt said the committee recommends that all fifth grade teachers engage in the curriculum and professional development no matter their current experience.
“The training is designed to ensure that every educator feels confident and prepared to deliver the materials,” McNutt said. “The committee reviewed proposed parent communication, including standardized templates for parent notification and opt out forms. These materials are designed to be clear and accessible, allowing teachers to easily customize them for specific instruction.”
According to McNutt, the committee also addressed the topic of family engagement and wants to “replace the traditional paperwork” that comes with the FLASH curriculum to introduce an electronic topic list. This list would feature suggested conversation prompts in an effort to allow families to “engage with materials on their own terms.”
“As a team, we remain committed to a ‘no surprises’ approach to comprehensive sexual health education. I’m really proud of the work the team did,” McNutt said. “They took it very seriously with very thoughtful sessions, and we were really grateful to their dedication in a process that really honored both our legal obligations but our commitment to the families of our community.”
At the end of McNutt’s presentation, she gave the opportunity to the school board to ask questions. Board member Ryan Jewell wanted clarification on why only two parents were invited to the comprehensive sexual health education curriculum review on Thursday, Feb. 5.
McNutt told the board that more than two parents were sought after for this review, however, only two initially committed and only one ended up making it to the activity.
“An important point to bring back up, if you recall, we had our middle school parent night at Yelm Middle School, where we had parent night for both middle schools in one location on one night,” Woods said. “We had both principals there, both assistant principals there. I was there. Kendall was there. The assistant superintendent was there. A teacher from both buildings was there, and we had one parent from each school show up.”
He added despite the low attendance, an entire presentation was still conducted. Woods said it was nice to have two teachers on hand to go through each FLASH lesson step-by-step.
“Those two parents got one-on-one attention to go through everything and ask all the questions,” Woods said. “I believe those two parents left feeling informed and comfortable with the information they had to make a decision that’s best for their family.”
He added that YCS remains committed to pushing out information and inviting participation back in. Woods said this will continue to happen in every form possible.
Board member Casey Shaw voiced that FLASH opt-out forms should be easily accessible for families to utilize.
“I think we need to do everything in our power to provide an opt out up front, multiple times,” Shaw said. “Maybe even make it available online to have the ability to opt out. There are things in some of these curriculums that are still controversial, whether they’re being medically accurate — I think that’s the new buzzword — or not, they’re still controversial and they bother people.”
The superintendent said he believes that teachers would share the same opinion as Shaw. Specifically, Woods said that teachers are scared to even teach this curriculum as they’re fearful of being put on social media.
“A child asks a question, and we all know that sometimes they’re not questions and they’re actually statements trying to be funny, or something of that nature. They go home and the parent says ‘what are you teaching our kids?’ It’s on social media and that teacher is now being ridiculed across social media,” Woods said. “Our teachers are scared. This is not comfortable for them at all. Not at any level.”
Jewell voiced his opinion again and said he doesn’t like the adoption of FLASH and that the whole topic, given the challenges that education faces already, bothers him “immensely — especially because teachers have to take extra time to teach this curriculum.”
“It’s frustrating. I know that I’ll be personally looking and searching for other curriculum and other options as well,” Jewell said. “There’s still things in this that the state continues to push and I find it unacceptable, personally. The fight is beyond this. Our community is pretty incredible and I would encourage parents to get very involved. It makes me sad to know we only had one parent show up to participate, given this is such a touchy topic. But if information comes out of the classroom that they don’t agree with, they’ll scream all across town.”
Jewell added that the action needed is preemptive and based on involvement. Additionally, Jewell said he voted in favor of “adopting the work done by the committee” but reiterated that he’s still not comfortable with the policy in general.
Bill Hauss added, “For me, personally, it’s just another unfunded mandate that the state says we have to do and they don’t give us any extra money for it. We went to a state convention a couple years ago and a guy handed out a poster of all these unfunded mandates the government put out to schools. I think it was something like 50 different programs that we had to do.”
