MONICA WILBUR — MAY 6, 2022
USBE Law and Licensing Committee
Automatic captions: Wilbur’s comment only, approximately 13:41–16:40.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOYvNw1IMUg&t=820s

Extracted from the saved meeting captions. Repeated rolling-caption text and timing tags removed. Automatic spellings retained.

okay thank you um the first thing i would uh like to say is that a model policy should be
the board's best foot forward and looking over all the drafts it's clear that members
member klein's draft is that best foot forward there's something that's unique about her
draft and what it does is it ensures a child's equal protection under the laws and these
are not just any laws we're talking about but we're talking about criminal laws and uh
it's really important to understand that if we let the leas make up their own model
policies on instructional materials that are widely varying the protection that a child
gets from harmful materials will essentially depend on the school or district that he or
she goes to and that's unacceptable another thing i'd like to point out is that the
handling of sensitive materials in schools deals directly with pornography and that
requires a higher standard of involvement of the state board article 10 section 3 in the
state constitution authorizes the usbe with the general control and supervision of the
public education system there's nowhere in any of these other versions where the state
board even exercises properly and fully the supervision portion of that responsibility and
that's unacceptable on such a high profile student safety issue hb 374 makes the state
board accountable to the legislature for the proper enforcement of this law and the
supervision of these materials needs to be done properly to fulfill your constitutional
duty legally something else i'd like to point out is that the continued accessibility
excuse me [one-minute time warning] thank you the continued accessibility of these
questionable books to children um can really creates a hostile and unsafe learning
environment uh in a workplace this would be considered sexual harassment this is really
important you if a dispute comes up about a book that book does need to be removed from
circulation until it can be properly reviewed because of the legal ramifications
[30-second time warning] and you want to make sure that we don't have books in there that
are in the meantime destroying a kid's social and emotional development nobody like uh
like joel mentioned nobody ever says that the real problem with our schools today is that
kids don't have enough access to porn so i'd like to encourage all the members of the
committee to vote for member klein's version of this model policy as it would be your
board's best foot forward thank you