An Indiana teacher was allowed to return to work this week after being placed on administrative leave for hosting a pro-life speaker in class.
ABC 57 News reports the South Bend Community School Corporation confirmed Monday that the teacher at Clay High School in South Bend is back in the classroom. A school district official said the issue has been resolved.
Last week, district leaders placed the teacher on administrative leave after the teacher invited Right to Life Michiana to give a presentation to a health class, the South Bend Tribune reported. District officials said the teacher violated school policy by not seeking approval for the guest speaker.
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Pro-life leaders quickly spoke out in support of the teacher, noting that the presentation was not controversial. Jackie Appleman of Right to Life Michiana told One News Now that they give the presentation to many student groups, and it is not religious or political.
“This was a typical presentation that we give,” Appleman said. “Since we were presenting in a public school, we did not pray, we did not talk about religion [or] the political nature of abortion. We stuck very specifically to the facts about fetal development and abortion procedures and then shared those resources available to families and students and women in the community.”
U.S. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana also defended the teacher after news broke about the controversy, according to ABC 57.
“The classroom should be a place that holds a diversity of thought, and students should be given all possible resources to make their own informed decisions,” Braun told the Associated Press. “Teachers must not be unfairly targeted because of politics, and I am calling for this teacher’s immediate reinstatement.”
Appleman said their pro-life organization has given presentations to students in the school district in the past, and they never received a complaint.
It appears that school leaders learned about the presentation after Right to Life Michiana posted about it on Facebook; abortion activists saw the post and got upset.
The problems that school officials raised was with authorization, not the actual presentation.
“We want to reassure our students, families, and community that we are taking this matter seriously and are grateful it was brought to our attention,” Superintendent Todd Cummings said in a statement last week. “While we are committed to addressing the health and safety needs of all of our students, policies, protocols, multiple perspectives, and parent notifications need to be followed to ensure the continued trust of our families.”
Both pro-life and pro-abortion groups give presentations in public and private schools across the country. Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in the U.S., brags that it is “the single largest provider of sex education in the United States.”
Numerous news reports in recent years have aired parents’ complaints about not being informed that Planned Parenthood would be giving presentations to their students. Concerned parents in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, Washington state, New York, North Carolina and other parts of the country have protested Planned Parenthood’s involvement in their students’ education in the past several years.
In one recent case, parents at a Pennsylvania school said a Planned Parenthood partner group taught seventh-grade students graphic details about oral sex during a science class.
Among its worst teaching points, Planned Parenthood tells children that promiscuity is ok. “There’s nothing bad or unhealthy about having a big number of sexual partners,” it tells students on its Tumbler page.
Planned Parenthood’s booklet for HIV-positive youth, “Healthy, Happy and Hot,” tells young people that it is their “human right” to not tell their sexual partner that they have HIV. And its middle school sex education curriculum teaches children as young as 12 “how to perform oral and anal sex.”
