A panel convened to review the county school system’s sex education curriculum has canceled its past three meetings because it didn’t have any material to review.
The 15-member Citizen Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development has not met since April 5, and there are no meetings scheduled for the summer, said Brian J. Porter, the superintendent’s chief of staff and the school system’s liaison to the panel.
The committee is waiting for school administrators to present materials for their review, Porter said at Tuesday’s county school board meeting in Rockville.
School administrators have not brought the new curriculum before the panel because it is still under review by school system lawyers.
‘‘The issues have risen around making sure we have the curriculum, the teacher resource materials and the teacher preparation materials aligned and consistent,” Porter said.
Committee members have expressed frustration about the pace of the review, but said the group’s meetings have been productive. At the April 5 meeting, the committee approved framework that will guide the new curriculum.
Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said his office is doing a careful review of the lessons in the wake of a federal lawsuit last year that challenged revisions to the curriculum. The revisions included a discussion of sexual orientation and a video demonstrating condom use.
A federal judge stopped the school system from teaching a pilot curriculum discussing homosexuality in eighth- and 10th-grade health classes last spring, citing teacher resource material that the judge said unfairly singled out religious denominations for their views on homosexuality.
The school board dissolved the committee that developed the controversial curriculum. The two groups that brought the lawsuit, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays and Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, were guaranteed seats on a new advisory panel as part of an agreement to settle the lawsuit.
A Feb. 17 memo from Weast to the board said recommendations would be brought to the board for a vote this month. Weast backed away from that schedule on Tuesday.
‘‘Last time my office didn’t thoroughly do its due diligence in its review, nor did our attorneys do it, and we’re not going to go there again,” he said.
Porter said he was not sure what the delays would mean for the condom demonstration video, which was scheduled for field tests this fall.
On Tuesday, Sarah Hund, an organizer with NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland, told the board that the delay is harming students.
‘‘We are particularly concerned that [the school system] has still not released to classrooms the condom-use demonstration video, which was created at the request of students several years ago, who asked for help in learning the proper use of condoms ...,” said Hund, who is not on the panel. ‘‘This video was not even considered in the last lawsuit, which is all the more reason it should not have been withheld from another class of students.”
Four pediatricians who are consulting on the new curriculum suggested replacing the controversial video, which was designed to appeal to young people and was shown in some schools last year, with a more clinical demonstration video.
The planned field test of the curriculum on sexual orientation, scheduled for spring 2007, and the full rollout of the new curriculum, scheduled for the 2007-2008 school year, are still on track, Weast said.
‘‘I’m committed to moving forward with the curriculum,” said board member Patricia B. O’Neill (Dist. 3) of Bethesda. ‘‘But there was a very costly piece of litigation against us last year, and I want to be careful we don’t incur legal expenses that are astronomical.”
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