After outrage was expressed by some parents, Seminole County Public Schools is now offering to reprint this year’s Lyman High School yearbooks without LGBTQ+ content.
The pages that sparked controversy feature the school’s LGBTQ+ community and provide definitions for LGBTQ+ and sexuality-related terms across a two-page spread.
Some parents and students deemed the pages “inappropriate,” according to a memo sent to parents Wednesday by Superintendent Serita Beamon. Now the district is offering refunds for the books or to reprint them altogether, sans LGBTQ+ pages, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
The yearbook is also now under further review from the district, Beamon wrote.
“It’s really not relevant to school activities, academics, clubs, and sports,” Sharman Craft, one Lyman High School parent, said to Fox 35 Orlando. “Anything that has to do with a high school experience, these terms and definitions are not appropriate.”
The LGBTQ+ section of the yearbook includes definitions of key terms, writing on the evolution of pronouns, a photo of the student Gay-Straight Alliance and a profile of a student LGBTQ+ advocate.
Some of the terms defined are: genderfluid, “a gender identity that changes with time and/or a given situation,” and aromantic, “Commonly used to describe someone who experiences little to no romantic attractions. Many aromantics still feel sexual attraction.”
The definitions were taken from The Trevor Project and GLAAD, OS reports.
Danielle Pomeranz, the school’s faculty yearbook advisor, told the Orlando Sentinel she disagrees with the district’s move to reprint the books. Throughout the yearbooks’ 256 pages, various student groups and diversity organizations are highlighted, like Latinos in Action and the Dungeons and Dragons Club, she said.
“It is unbelievably unacceptable,” she told the Sentinel. “The county is giving in to the bigotry and being very cowardly by offering this as an option.”
No reprinted yearbooks have been requested as of Thursday afternoon, school system spokeswoman Katherine Crnkovich wrote in an email.
The Lyman High School yearbook team won the Student Press Freedom Award in December from Student Press Law Center after it fought the district’s request to censor photos of a student protest.
Students staged a walkout in protest of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education measure signed into law last year. That law, also dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, harshly limits instruction and school discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.
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