Published July 10, 2019
By KATIE LANNAN
State House News Service
BOSTON — From the science of climate change to trauma response to mental illness, lawmakers and advocates on July 9 made their case for updating the Massachusetts public school curriculum to equip young people for modern realities.
The Education Committee held a hearing on a series of bills that propose instruction on topics supporters said deserve more attention in the classroom.
Much of the testimony focused on bills dealing with mental health education.
Rep. Natalie Higgins and Sen. Nick Collins offered bills (H 482, S 244) that would make mental health education a required subject, while a Sen. Dean Tran bill (S 731) would establish mental health promotion as an optional component of high school health education curriculum.
Angela Wallace, a graduate of Sharon Public Schools, said she attended a school district that “fosters a high-achieving environment” that created “an unspoken pressure for us to succeed in a rigorous academic space.”
“While sex education has been at the forefront of my health education for many years, there is also a dire need to allot time for curriculum regarding the symptoms and underlying factors that contribute to one’s mental health,” she said. “Numerous friends of mine have expressed to me their struggles with mental disorders that have lead to suicidal thoughts.”
Rep. Alice Peisch, the House chair of the Education Committee, repeatedly reminded speakers that most curriculum is determined through the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s regulations and frameworks, rather than mandated by lawmakers.
“There are very, very few subjects that we mandate be taught by legislation,” Pesich told supporters of the mental health bills, asking if they had statistics indicating how many schools offer such education now. “So it would be helpful to know whether we really need to have legislation that mandates this or if most schools are, in fact, incorporating it into their physical education or health curriculum.”
Danna Mauch of the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health told Peisch they would provide her with data. Mauch said current health education frameworks do mention mental health, but those frameworks are voluntary.
“Schools do different things across the commonwealth,” she said. “Some schools are very dedicated to addressing this routinely, and others are not and they perhaps are not aware of the importance of it or the value of it, (or) have many other things, we understand, on their plate.”
Peisch asked Dr. Eric Goralnick, the medical director of emergency preparedness at Brigham Health — who spoke in support of Rep. Kate Hogan’s bill (H 490) that calls for bleeding control training to be included in health education — if he’s considered other ongoing methods to train the public in the life-saving skill of bleeding control.
“There’s only so much time in the day,” Peisch said. “There are, as you’re hearing today, many things that people would like to see us add to the curriculum in schools.”
Goralnick said there have been many outreach efforts focusing on the health care system and “mass gathering sites” like Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park and TD Garden, but that schools are “one of the pillars” in educating people on trauma response.
He said people who learn how to control bleeding when they’re younger are more likely to retain that information.
“If we’re thinking about a lifetime of skills, it would be optimal to think about empowering and training youth,” he said.
Rep. Ken Gordon of Bedford offered a bill addressing curriculum standards around science. Gordon’s bill (H 471) would require that the science standards “include only peer-reviewed and age-appropriate subject matter.”
Gordon said such a requirement would mean, for instance, that an environmental science course “would not teach that the other side of climate change is to deny climate change when scientific evidence supports the existence of climate change.”
Alan MacRobert, Gordon’s constituent, said he has been informing people about science through his work at the Cambridge-based publication “Sky and Telescope” and in other capacities.
“In my 37 years at ‘Sky and Telescope,’ I’ve never seen science denialism at the level it is today,” he said. “The fact that there are many people who believe and insist the earth is flat — enough to fill a whole cruise ship, it turns out — or that vaccines are deadly or who believe evolution is not real and that climate change is not taking place and that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doesn’t matter is all evidence that science education needs to be strengthened and kept understandable against those who would deliberately sew confusion.”
Supporters of media literacy legislation also pointed to climate change denial and scientific misinformation as examples of narratives they’re trying to combat.
“Leading science organizations are deeply concerned that members of the public learn how to sort scientific facts from fictions,” said Andy Zucker, a board member of the group Media Literacy Now. “Students should be taught how to think critically for themselves about allegedly scientific facts they find in media. Fortunately, research shows it is possible to inoculate people against misinformation.”
The July 9 agenda included two media literacy bills. A Rep. David Rogers proposal (H 561) would create a working group to “assess and recommend revisions to policies and procedures on media literacy, including digital citizenship and internet safety,” while a Sen. Cindy Creem bill (S 259) adds media literacy language to the section of state law establishing a safe and supportive schools framework.
A civics education law passed last year also included a media literacy component.
