Central Bucks Superintendent: "Help Restore What Has Been Eroded"

DOYLESTOWN, PA — Central Bucks Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh on Wednesday asked for the community's support "to restore what has been eroded" by a year marked by "chaos," including allegations of LGBTQ bias and controversy over newly-adopted school policies.

Over the past year, Lucabaugh said the district has become "ground zero" for the culture wars playing out across the nation. Media coverage of friction-filled board meetings and the filing of an ACLU complaint alleging a toxic and hostile environment for members of the LGBTQ community "have left many of us wondering how we will ever return our focus to educating 18,000 students," he writes in a letter to the community.

“To return our district to excellence, we need to marshal our collective wisdom and creativity and commit to setting the example by treating each other with the dignity we all deserve, regardless of our views,” the superintendent writes. “We need to replace condemnation and accusation with openness and inquiry. We need to abandon all the political and social ideology in favor of a rigorous and robust high quality education that gives every child in our district a solid foundation for life.”

Adding to the chaos of the past year has been a backlash over updated and revised district policies.

Those policies, implemented by the school district’s newly-elected Republican majority over the past year, included an updated materials review policy aimed at preventing sexually explicit books from being added to the school libraries and a policy requiring classrooms to be non-partisan and neutral with respect to political and sociopolitical topics.

Opponents have equated the new materials policy to a “book ban" and the non-partisan policy as "marginalizing" the LGBTQ community by barring pride flags and an open discussion on LGBTQ issues. They have packed recent board meetings to voice their objections to the changes, accusing the district of creating a hostile environment for the LGBTQ students.

“It’s hard to experience what’s happening and not be affected by such characterizations of our outstanding school district,” Lucabaugh writes. “This community is special because of its people, so the rhetoric that we are anti-LGBTQ, that we create hostile environments for marginalized
students, and that we don’t value and support all kids is incredibly discouraging to the thousands of employees in this district, and even more so for the 18,000 students they serve.”

Lucabaugh says in his letter that he has fielded emails, letters, and messages from community members, parents, students, and alumni asking him to call out the injustice within the system. “Anything short of that, I’ve been chastised and forewarned, will constitute my failure to stand on the ‘right side of history.’

“As someone who supports fundamental human rights, I respectfully disagree. Doing that only furthers the rhetoric that CBSD is a breeding ground for injustice, intolerance, and fear, which we are not. “There is a better way,” he said.

Change, he noted, is not going to come with the superintendent "proclaiming organizational positions" on current social and political issues or events. Nor will it come in the form of exclusion or condemnation of members of the community simply because they hold views on social and
political issues that some, or even many, disagree with, he said.

“The change we need must come in the form of adults encouraging students to connect with and see one another as fellow human beings who can respectfully coexist regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation and political affiliation, and then modeling those behaviors, as the adults, for our students.”

Each person, he said has the right to "embrace who we are, who we love and what we believe and no one reserves the right to weigh in on others' lives. At issue is the conflation of divergent thinking and hated. Disagreeing shouldn’t equate to disdain for those who think or live differently," writes Lucabaugh. "Rather than fighting to normalize our own perspectives, we need a hard reset and focus on providing all students with the knowledge and competencies they will need to solve the mounting issues plaguing society."

“So what does that change look like and mean?” Lucabaugh asks.

“It means not pushing one specific worldview and instead encouraging students to engage in thoughtful conversation about all manner of topics through the delivery of a curriculum that teaches students how to read critically, assess the validity of content resources, assemble evidence that supports their point of view and then formulate oral and written arguments to convey it.

“It means teaching young people how to confront injustice or views they don’t agree with, and how to respond in a thoughtful, logical, and evidence-based manner that forces them to examine their own assumptions and potential biases while simultaneously respecting others’ viewpoints," the superintendent writes. "This prepares students to contribute with actual impact in a society that has always and will always disagree about many important issues, and it teaches young people that variance in opinion doesn’t have to result in cancellation.

“It means halting the vicious cycle of discourse by no longer insisting those we disagree with must first think and act and believe the way we want before progress can happen. It means not using public comment at board meetings as a form of theater to force one side or the other into submission through shame and accusation," he writes.

"I am asking for your support to restore what has been eroded," writes the superintendent. "I remain committed to that outcome."