The Collier County School Board voted 3-2 on Monday to adopt a new batch of science textbooks after residents filed objections to more than a dozen of them.
Four Collier residents opposed some of the textbooks, making arguments ranging from unbalanced views of evolution and climate change to inaccurate racial depictions of science experts.
Board Chairman Roy Terry and members Stephanie Lucarelli and Erick Carter voted in favor of adopting the disputed textbooks. Erika Donalds and Kelly Lichter voted against them.
The slate of instructional materials was unanimously approved for adoption at the May 8 board meeting. Since then, four people submitted 220 objections to content in 18 textbooks. The overall theme of the objections was a lack of balance and context in references to evolution and climate change and the treatment of those topics as fact rather than theory.
Evolution and natural selection are “a total indoctrination of liberal ideas,” wrote Collier parent Melissa Pind in her complaint. “Very disgusting and disappointing that this is included and no other viewpoint is even mentioned! What a shame that kids’ minds aren’t opened up to other possibilities.”
Keith Flaugh, co-director of the Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative group that is suing the school district over social studies textbooks adopted last year, wrote in his objection that there are “many very credible scientists” who have proved the impossibility of evolution.
Flaugh cited the following websites as sources for his pro-creationism stance: Godandscience.org; Creation.com; Christiananswers.net; and Conservapedia.com.
Michael Mogil, a meteorologist, objected to images of polar bears, which he wrote were “the ‘poster child’ of human-caused climate change proponents.” Repeated references to climate change, he said, “brainwashes” students.
Several of Mogil’s complaints were aimed at images of science experts in the textbooks, which he said inaccurately represented the racial makeup of society’s expertise in science.
“Why would I wind up with four black males and no white males,” he asked board members Monday. “It just doesn’t look right.”
Mogil also cited one instance in which there was a lack of Hispanics.
Naples resident Joseph Doyle took aim at passages that addressed overpopulation, which he said is “an exaggerated, unproven concern.”
“This is a slippery slope implying the need to kill humans— i.e. abortion, euthanasia,” he wrote.
Doyle and other objectors did not recommend alternative textbooks but said the district ought to pressure the textbooks’ publishers to make the appropriate fixes.
Read the full story at Naples Daily News
