Beware Of Calls For Elmhurst D-205 Openness: Resident

ELMHURST, IL – Tuesday's Elmhurst school board meeting may have been a brief respite from the heated public comments over issues such as critical race theory.

The comment period attracted only two speakers, Elizabeth Collins and Paul Guerino. That's fewer than previous meetings.

Guerino spoke about the half-century-old merger of local school districts.

Meanwhile, Collins told the board that Elmhurst School District 205 was subject to attacks on anti-racism, analytical thinking and LGBTQ inclusion.

"Since overt supremacist assertions and LGBTQ hate won’t be effective in the public institutions of Elmhurst, attempts to censor topics and people will come under the guise of transparency," Collins said.

That so-called transparency, she said, is actually the selective targeting of teachers who cover challenging topics or have minority identities. That's how power and protection of the status quo works, she said.

"What is easy to predict is that the demands for teachers to be laboriously transparent and defend their curriculum choices via adversarial processes will be selective," Collins said. "Who will need to be excruciatingly transparent and defend the minutiae of their content choices? It will be the teachers who are introducing challenging topics, who are most helping their students build analytical thinking, and who are presenting content that is most engaging for students with minority identities."

Collins said students need to learn analytical thinking and grapple with the country's history.

"As they learn about the world, conversations about LGBTQ families, teachers, and students should be just as normalized as conversations about cis and hetero identities and relationships already are," she said.

She asked the district to stand up against "intrusive calls for unnecessary transparency."

The school board does not respond to public comments.

Earlier this year, a group of residents formed Elmhurst Parents for Integrity in Curriculum.

Members said they wanted to promote a "diverse marketplace of ideas." But they said the district was indoctrinating students with ideas such as critical race theory, which the district denies.