Petition Regarding NJSLS-CHPE Mandate

In 2020, after years of study and with input from education and health professionals, the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) issued a “mandate” to updated Student Learning Standards for Comprehensive Health and Physical Fitness (2020 NJSLS-CHPE). All local School districts were given until the 2022-2023 school year to create curriculum and implement the mandate.

The new standards were designed to ensure the “successful preparation of students for the opportunities, rigors and advances of the 21st Century.”

The standards were designed to protect students by helping them to recognize and report sexual abuse, avoid and reduce risky sexual behavior that could result in contracting STD/STIs and from unanticipated pregnancies. Other elements were designed to dispel gender stereotypes and prepare students for a world where people have different gender identities and have made different gender choices.

The 2020 NJSLS-CHPE is mandatory but an “opt out” mechanism was provided for parents who might want their child excused from lessons or discussions the parents considered “objectionable.”

Rather than adopting and implementing a curriculum that meets the mandated standards, some local school districts are attempting to avoid doing so by 1) removing certain mandated standards from their curriculum; 2) relegating topics to be taught by parents at home; 3) making elements of the mandate a homework assignment rather than taught by professionals in the classroom; 4) making it the subject of an in-school assembly; 5) teaching it on the last day of the school year and/or 6) require students to be “opted-in” to the curriculum as opposed to “opted-out” in violation of N.J.S.A.18A:35-4.7.

As signors of this petition, we consider the aforementioned actions and any scheme designed to prevent implementation of the 2020 NJSLS-CHPE in its entirety to be violations of the “spirit, intent and vision” of the mandate. This includes attempts to teach the curriculum out of context and/or to convert it to “opt-in.”

We demand that the Commissioner of Education, the Department of Education, State Board of Education and the Governor’s office issue guidance and/or a decision designating the aforementioned activities and any other process by which a local school board may attempt to not fully implement the entire mandate to be violations of New Jersey law and an ethics violation by any Board member who votes in the affirmative to adopt any avoidance scheme or mechanism. Further, we demand that the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General start prosecuting violations of the mandate by individual Board of Education members.