Immigrant parents who come from dysfunctional public-school systems in socialist countries have no concept of regular parental involvement in their children’s schools. Such lack of awareness is compounded with their general aversion and shyness to get involved in an unfamiliar culture. The need for both parents to be working a lot of hours to have enough to sustain their low-income families almost completely shuts them out from involving in the school.

Considering all these, I am certain that we must do more to help enable parents to be more involved in their child’s education. We must encourage them to work hand in hand in with the teachers and the system. As a school board member, I am determined to advocate for more parental involvement. I intend to use various messaging platforms and access to PTAs to pursue that goal. I am sure such proactive parental involvement will do a lot to address the achievement gap for children coming from disadvantaged communities.

Efforts in strengthening mental health support systems should have a holistic and root cause inquisitive approach. In doubtful behavioral situations, teachers looking for signs of trouble in a child’s life and involving parents from early on would help reveal fault lines before it is too late.

Students must also be equipped with skills that calm the mind, relax the body and with techniques to quell negative, harmful emotions. Innovative ideas for mental health training that allow students greater autonomy through self-regulation should be explored. Engaging young minds in training exercises that help them gain self-restraint and personal responsibility resulting in higher academic achievement and boosted self-confidence will be a good place to start.

I believe schools are there to teach English, Math, History and Science to our children, not the intimate intricacies of sexual orientation and preferences. We will need basic “sex education”, I agree. However, whatever FCPS’s Family Life Education (FLE) is “sex education” gone haywire. I believe such teaching, especially to the very young minds encourages unwanted curiosity and experimentation that has the potential to inflict irreparable damage to their personalities, and thereby to the future of humanity as we know it.

As statistics clearly elucidate, strong and fully functioning families has a direct correlation to student achievement in schools. However, I don’t see any encouragement of such family values or celebration of traditional families in the FLE curriculum. I think it is total injustice to the concept of “Family” to call it ‘Family Life Education (FLE)’. I also believe that whatever sex education we do, we must ensure that it uses biology as its foundation, not any ideology or politics.

When it comes to immigrant families vis-à-vis FLE, there are additional concerns that I have. Most immigrant parents who come from failed and/or repressive systems around the world tend to look at everything they see and hear in USA as great and are ready to adopt it without critical thinking. They mostly assume that whatever happens in USA is very well researched and systematically planned and designed, and nothing can go wrong with it. With such a thought process, even if we immigrants review the FLE, we tend to think it is okay and the disagreements we feel from within is somehow our deficiency, since American systems can never go wrong. That pushes us to approve everything that is headed our way from schools without much thought or analysis.