Student recommends that the Illinois House pass the Inclusive Education Act

The Senate Bill 3249 is also known as the Inclusion Bill. This bill makes it mandatory to teach LGBTQ history curriculum for public schools. State Senator Heather Steans sponsored this bill. It passed the Illinois Senate in March of 2018. Now the bill has to pass the Illinois House, where it is House Bill 5596. This curriculum will be limited to the public schools; it will not apply to private or religious schools. The superintendent of the school district will be required to monitor and enforce compliance with this new curriculum. The program requires all kindergarten-12^th grades to include this curriculum in their unit studying. 

Schools can still control the school environment and curriculum, but this law will require that there be some specific coverage of the contributions of LGBTQ persons. Learning about the history of LGBTQ persons teaches the importance of not discriminating against others. If this bill passes Illinois will be the second state to swap out textbooks for LGBTQ inclusive texts. California adopted similar measures in 2011; however, California just approved the LGBTQ textbooks for elementary schools in November. California was the first state to approve this bill. This idea was mainly brought on by suicides among LGBTQ youth. In the upcoming year, California students will gain an understanding of the past and present of LGBTQ community. 

This bill will have no fiscal impact. Textbooks would be purchased through the textbook block grant program whether or not the selections are restricted to textbooks that have LGBTQ content. This textbook block grant program gives annual funding to school districts. School districts can look into online textbooks, which are cheaper. California approved 10 textbooks for elementary and middle school students, so the same ten would presumably be approved for use in Illinois if the Inclusion Bill is passed into law here in Illinois

Change needs to happen. The LGBTQ community is not going to go away. Their history is just as import for students to learn about as is the African Americans, war history, the Holocaust, etc. It is time to stop erasing LGBTQ identities. It is time to acknowledge LGBTQ roles in history. It is time to acknowledge that someone like James Baldwin was an openly gay writer. LGBTQ students need to feel the support from their peers and teachers. It is important for our students to learn about role models of the LGBTQ communities. Of course changing the textbooks will be a slow process, but it something that needs to be done. It is time for Illinois to follow California and approve the Inclusive Curriculum Bill. Our youth need to know about the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community. This community is a now a part of history. 

There are several historical figures whose sexuality and sexual orientation are ambiguous, and I hope the presentation of these figures will be nuanced, and help students understand that in historical work, we cannot always be sure of our conclusions.  Also, the ideas we now have about sexual identity and orientation, and the words we use, were not prevalent in the past, so there is an interesting debate about whether our modern terms and ideas about LGBTQ apply in past times and other cultures.  All that sort of information will help students move away from the faith in categories and labels that so many of us rely upon these days.  And I think it's very healthy for children and students in our public schools to learn about different critiques of how gender and sexuality have been expressed or understood at different times and places.  Give the many disappointing aspects of mainstream heterosexuality in 21st Century North American culture (such as the high rates of domestic violence and the high incidence of rape and sexual abuse of children), I think our schools will be doing a great benefit to our society if they open up children to some critical ideas about assumptions and values prevalent in our culture.  It is especially good to know that there have always been eccentrics, misfits, and persons who rebelled against conformity, and among these people were some of the great geniuses and heroes of history, and also some of the villains.