Olympia parent upset over controversial sex ed teachings

Sex education for 9-year-olds is at the eye of the storm for Olympia School District mom Alesha Perkins.

Perkins has taken on several controversial matters within the school district, including the idea of canceling music lessons for fourth graders and coming out against an appointed school board member who was a previously convicted felon.

This time, it’s about a sex education session for fourth graders by Planned Parenthood — something parents didn’t know was coming.

“The parents thought this was going to be a run-of-the-mill puberty discussion framed for 9-year-olds,” Perkins said on The John Curley & Shari Elliker Show. “Then the person came in and started teaching stuff that was not just necessarily straight biology of sex, but the ideology and the activism of multiple genders and nonbinary everything that we kind of come to know.”

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Perkins claimed they didn’t have the details of what was going to be taught in this class. The principal approved the session by Planned Parenthood, according to Perkins.

“The principal said they went off script and presented curriculum that was clearly from the perspective of a gender fluid ideology,” Perkins explained. “They presented puberty blockers as a basic puberty supply next to deodorant with the puberty blockers medication name. By the way, next to it, they presented a gender wheel as something that could essentially be spun to pick the gender that you want to be.”

Perkins said that the group presented pictures of genitalia, intersex genitalia, and vagina pubic hair cut in the shape of a cat.

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“Most reasonable people would say this is not appropriate,” Perkins told John and Shari. “For most 9-year-olds, most parents would not view this as an innocent puberty discussion.”

She also claimed that when she tried to look up the information about the people giving the presentation and the materials that were being given out, none had any medical credentials that she could find.

John Curley, co-host of The John and Shari Show, asked who did the vetting of the person from Planned Parenthood.

“The principal approved the presenters from Planned Parenthood and the teacher also knew about it,” Perkins responded. “The unfortunate part is that parents were not told this and they should have been told, one, that a separate presenter was going to be doing this and, two, that there was separate material from the approved curriculum.”

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Perkins said that she continues to bring these controversial topics up because she believes that more people have a stake in the education of children than they think there are and should be more involved in what our children are being taught.

“Even if you don’t have children, you have a stake in the way school districts are run and the types of students that they are putting out,” Perkins said. “Are they going to have excellent academics? Are they going to be highly proficient in the subject matter? All these things are really important for people to understand.”

Listen to John Curley and Shari Elliker weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.