UPDATE: HB 1107

19. February 2008 by Seth.

The “cultural competency” bill has been amended!

Discussions among Sen. Teresa Lubbers, Sen. Greg Walker (a name several of you may recognize), AFA of Indiana Executive Director Micah Clark, and others have produced some favorable amendments to the bill detailed in our previous post.

 1. The amendment no longer reads “any licensed teacher.”  Rather, it pertains only to public schools.  Furthermore, references to “diversity training” have been removed.

2. A very positive amendment: language was added which would require public high schools to teach about fetal development as part of their health classes.

As you might guess, Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocates are not thrilled by the potential ramifications of Amendment #2.  The next step for the bill is to pass through the conference committee, where it will either continue onward or die due to disagreement by the committee over the amendments.

According to the official Indiana Legislative website, Amendment #2 was accepted by the committee.

The Senate could vote on the bill as early as today.

It appears, therefore, that this bill could possibly have a silver lining for advocates of the sanctity of human life. 

There are still many questions surrounding HB 1107.  For example, what does it mean to be “culturally competent?”   There certainly are combating views on this point, and therefore it remains to be seen what impact this might have on Hoosier public school systems.  However, it appears from the bill’s current language that each school corporation would be able to define “cultural competency” for themselves, which seems appropriate.  Nevertheless, it would not be surprising if the Indiana Department of Education would write their own interpretation of the bill (assuming it passes the Senate vote and Governor Daniels would sign it) to become the standard for schools to follow. 

This remains a story to watch carefully.

The bill in its current language can be found below:

HB 1107: Cultural competency. Requires the department of education to develop standards for cultural competency teacher training. Requires school corporations to develop policies concerning cultural competency training for school staff as a part of school improvement plans. Requires each school corporation to include instruction regarding human fetal development in the school corporation’s high school health education curriculum.

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