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MOBILE, Alabama — Even in one of the most conservative counties in one of the most conservative states in the union, the public school system is pushing gender-bending ideology and other “woke” mandates. If the rot has taken hold even here in southern Alabama, it surely will be difficult to eradicate.
The schools in Baldwin County, which along with its sister Mobile comprise this state’s two-county coastal community, have adopted a “Comprehensive Counseling and Guidance Plan” that sometimes incorporates radical cultural leftism into policy. As reported by a watchdog group called Parents Defending Education, both the plan and, to a slightly lesser extent, a related “School Counselor’s
Handbook” assign dubious outlooks and duties to what were once known as “guidance counselors.”
COMPANIES GOING WOKE, BUT CONSUMERS AREN’T
To be clear, the cultural leftism isn’t as pervasive or central to the plan or handbook as some other news outlets’ reporting indicates. Still, the trend in that direction is both discordant and disordered, especially for a county and state where parents are unlikely to approve.
For example, both documents repeatedly insist that part of a school counselor’s job is to “promote equity,” the latter being a benign-sounding word that today’s Left now uses to mean something like “
equal outcomes
, especially as measured by collective group identities.” In case anyone doubts the cultural agenda at work here, the handbook repeatedly asserts that counselors ought to deliver equity that closes group “achievement gaps” by “promot[ing] systemic change.”
In essence, the handbook gives counselors a politicized role. This isn’t about providing individual student care and guidance but instead about acting (as repeatedly written) as an “advocate” and, again, “systemic change agent.” Likewise, one definition in the Guidance Plan combines all three woke-ish elements within the one definition of “culturally sustaining school counseling.” To wit: “Policies and practices that affirm and embrace cultural pluralism, promote culture dexterity, and actively advocate for equitable systems and outcomes.”
This makes school counselors sound not like mentors but like proto-lobbyists, sticking their noses into matters of policy that most parents would agree is none of the counselors’ business. Especially not in the left-liberal context in which both the Guidance Plan and the handbook are steeped. The Guidance Plan, for example, explicitly endorses the “social justice” model that includes “understanding of historic and systemic oppression, social justice … multi-cultural counseling [and] anti-racism.” Anyone even mildly familiar with how academia uses those terms today understands them as stressing the need for “white guilt” and the pervasiveness of the victimhood of nonwhites.
Of course, that leftist context also involves explicitly adopting the Left’s ideology regarding “gender,” in which, by very definition, the Guidance Plan distinguishes “gender expression” from “gender identity.” The latter is defined as “one’s personal experience of one’s own gender,” which sometimes means “gender identity and biological sex are not congruent.” The counselor’s absolute “responsibility,” it says, is to “affirm all students and their identity.” (My emphases added.)
But that puts much more than a thumb on the scale in favor of transgender madness. Surely, most parents want counselors who respect the fact that some students, in ways that are often just temporary, feel conflicted in that regard. Most parents, however, surely think a good counselor should help students navigate through those feelings to determine how certain and potentially permanent they are (or aren’t), not to “affirm” the new “identity” as the default option.
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Parents in Baldwin County and nationwide should (figuratively speaking) be up in arms against the soul-sickness that produces such misguidance for guidance counselors. Schools should not demand or even accept “change agent” advocacy or default gender affirmations from school counselors. The idea of counselors as “change agents” is what really needs changing.
