Lake County Gazette

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed Senate Bill 818 into law in August 2021, requiring all K-12 schools that teach sexual education to align their curriculum with national standards, but Rep. Martin McLaughlin (R-Lake Barrington) is opposing this alignment.

"When I drop my child off at the front door of her school, my parental rights don’t end there, it’s where they just begin," McLaughlin wrote on Facebook. "School boards need to exert control and local authority representing their communities and the local property taxpayers who they serve, not capitulating to national 'standards.'"

He shared a link to a Chicago Tribune story about how some Illinois school districts are choosing not to adopt the new sex education standards.

District 220 Superintendent Robert Hunt announced at a summer school board meeting that administrators were planning to opt out of the new curriculum, stating, "There’s a significant amount of content ... that we frankly cannot absorb based on the number of standards that we teach and the level of appropriateness of age in that content."

The national standards were developed by SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, a nonprofit working to use sex ed as a way to create a “long-term culture shift that will positively impact all levels of society, particularly issues of gender and racial equity, sexuality, sexual and reproductive health, consent, personal safety, and autonomy,” according to its website.

According to WTTW, Sen. Ram Villivalam (D-Chicago) said that the standards are “age appropriate.”

“There’s been a rise in child sex abuse scandals, sexual harassment in the workplace, sexual assault on college campuses, and bullying of LGBT-plus students and people of color,” Villivalam said. “Our youth … need medically and factually accurate information, as well as a safe environment to develop the skills they need to navigate our modern world.

“Modernizing our sex education standards will help keep our children safe and ensure important lessons like consent and internet safety are taught in classrooms,” Pritzker said.

According to Breakthrough Ideas, the new sex education curriculum includes teaching children in kindergarten through 2nd grade to define gender and gender identity, as well as gender-role stereotypes, and teaching the students the medically accurate names for body parts, including genitals.

Children in grades 3 through 5 will be taught about masturbation; hormonal development and the role of hormone blockers; the differences between cisgender, transgender, and gender nonbinary; and the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity.

Children in grades 6 through 8 will be taught to define oral sex, anal sex, and vaginal sex, and instructed to identify at least 4 methods of contraception that are available without a prescription, such as condoms and emergency contraception.

High school students will be taught about “reproductive justice,” as well as how to differentiate between sex assigned at birth, gender identity, and gender expression.