The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Stefanowski lays out conservative plan on school issues
With less two months to go until Election Day, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski is putting parental choice at the forefront of his campaign — proposing a smattering of ideas intended to energize conservative voters from opposing Connecticut's policy for transgender athletes to giving parents control over what their kids are taught in school.
As a crowd of parents stood behind them, Stefanowski and his running mate, state Rep. Laura Devlin of Fairfield released a “parental bill of rights” Tuesday — a plan that addresses some of the cultural issues that have angered parents across the country and turned local board of education races into political battlegrounds.
Stefanowski said the agenda reigns in government overreach and empowers parents to take back control over decisions involving their children's lives from when and how their taught about sexual education to whether they wear masks or get vaccinated to go to school.
Seeking to blunt the anticipated rebuttal from Democrats who have cast him as too extreme for most Connecticut voters, Stefanowski said the proposals are common-sense ideas embraced by many “moms and dads across the state.”
“This is not radical stuff we're talking about here,” Stefanowski said, standing outside the state Capitol.
Stefanowski also promoted the idea of school choice, fortifying school buildings to make them more secure, and raising the minimum age — from 13 to 16 — required for parental consent for children to engage in social media.
He stopped short of calling for a repeal of the state's policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls' sports. But Stefanowski said it was unfair to allow “transgender biological males” to compete against girls in high school sports.
He said he would work with the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to come up with a “compromise” to the existing rules, which allow transgender studentathletes to participate on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with their gender identity.
“Transgender athletes should have the ability to compete,” Stefanowski said. “This is not about telling them they can't. We need to try to find a solution. But safety comes first.”
Both Stefanowski and Devlin claimed the policy was unfair and unsafe to female athletes but offered few reasons why. “Some of these sports, there's a lot of contact and I think there is risk of injury, I really do,” Stefanowski said, when pressed on the safety concerns. Citing girls' hockey as an example, he said “can you imagine checking into the boards, things like that.”
Devlin said she was initially “ambivalent” on the issue before doing more research. “The bottom line is whether or not somebody has taken hormone therapy or not, physiologically, there are differences, biological differences that cannot be
changed,” she said.
Among those who attended Tuesday's news conference was Cheryl Radachowsky, whose daughter is among the plaintiffs who
filed a complaint against CIAC's transgender athlete policy, and Kate Prokop, president of Connecticut Residents Against Medical Mandates, which has protested against school vaccine and mask mandates.
Stefanowski and Devlin said their proposals are guided by science and a concern for public health. Both are inoculated against COVID-19 but that's their personal choice, Stefanowski said. Workers also shouldn't be told to get inoculated, he added. It was not clear whether he was referring just to the COVID-19 shot or all vaccinations.
School curriculums have also been subject to government overreach, he said. “We need to absolutely to promote diversity and acceptance in our schools. No question about that,” he said. “But at the same time, we shouldn't be introducing complex topics like sexual orientation, or gender ID, before
they have the capacity to understand it, and in some cases before kids can even tie their shoes.”
The state Department of Education offers a detailed framework on its website of the sex ed curriculum taught in schools by grade level. By eighth grade, students learn how to differentiate between gender identity, sexual orientation, and the concept of gender roles, according to the document, whereas fourthgraders learn to describe the different ways in which people express their gender.