Dear School Committee and the general LPS Community,
LPS students and graduates wish to extend our support for the Serious Talks curriculum as it currently exists. This curriculum is not only beneficial to our students and our community, but works toward Lexington’s goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion within our school system.
While a petition to remove Serious Talks suggests that the curriculum is indoctrinating children and exposing them to adult subject matter, in truth, the Serious Talks curriculum introduces concepts like “skin color, culture, religion, disability, and gender identity… in age appropriate ways… designed to meet our students’ social-emotional learning needs.” Children learn about these concepts as they pertain to them and their classmates, not as complex social issues, nor with any explicit content. This curriculum doesn’t seek to sway children to a certain ideology, but rather teaches open-mindedness and respect, values that LPS is proud to foster. As a result, we’ve seen our community become a place for meaningful discussions, open mindedness, and diversity. Additionally, we as students know that we experience better and more well-rounded learning when we learn in environments that give us the tools to think critically, and reflect on the world around us.
Far from being cloaked or concealed, descriptions and goals of the Serious Talks curriculum are available to parents through the bi-weekly Superintendent Reports. Our town openly values diversity and open-mindedness, and these values are explicitly nurtured in our public schools. Parents who wish to teach their kids differing values are aware of what they are taught in public schools and can educate them differently at home. Blocking out important social issues such as queerness and identity doesn’t prevent people from having said identities. Additionally, queer students can find comfort in the representation and acknowledgement of stories like theirs, and can gain a beneficial understanding of their own identities. For these reasons, we believe that reducing the Serious Talks curriculum would be a disservice to our community.
We see this attack on the Serious Talks curriculum as not only an attack on the curriculum itself, but as an attack on the idea of teaching diversity and kindness in our schools. As community members that value compassion and inclusivity, we won’t stand for this.
We are proud to stand with Dr. Hackett, the school committee, and the LEA in affirming the Serious Talks curriculum.
Written by Anjali Agarwal, Gabriel Savir, and Nathaniel Dvorkin
Signed by over 150+ LPS students and former students
Are you a LPS student or former student looking to sign onto this letter? Here’s the link to do so: https://forms.gle/THm89vv5wfdSmoer8
Well said! Having students who can articulate their values and self-advocate like this is the most valuable lesson learned at LPS. We are grateful for these students who set the bar for us all!
So well said! The Serious Talks curriculum is such a benefit to our students and our schools, and you explain why very well. Lexington is not a town that should be objecting to this, and I absolutely believe that attacking this curriculum is “an attack on the idea of teaching diversity and kindness in our schools”. We cannot stand for this, and I am so glad that people are speaking out.
No one can possibly know better the importance of the Serious Talks curriculum and the good that it does for our students than the students themselves. Thank you to the 150+ current and former LPS students for this compelling testimonial, and for demanding that your education include critical thinking, diversity, and kindness. I’m old, but I’m with you!
Thank you for voicing this so clearly and from such a perfect perspective! I’m proud to be part of a community that has been a part in fostering the leadership, empathy, understanding and acceptance in the three of you. Thank you for your advocacy and support for folks who may otherwise be marginalized.
Hopefully this sheds some light on the viewpoint of students and our unwavering support for empathy, diversity, and kindness in our school district 🙂
Thank you to these writers for articulating on behalf of the many students who benefit from this curriculum. We are grateful to have student leaders like you in our community.
As a parent of Lexington, I am so happy to see that our future is in good hands! To those amazing kids who wrote this letter: thank you!!! To my fellow parents in town: teaching your children to be open minded and to embrace differences of human beings will only make each one of them a better and happier person. If you don’t trust the educators in Lexington to be able to handle such a serious topic properly, it is truly an insult to our educators.
So pleased to see current and former students supporting continued efforts to build a welcoming community in Lexington. As a parent of a trans kid I am overjoyed to