Carmel Excellence claims values should only be taught at home and kept out of our schools. But also, Dina Ferchmin wrote an anti-abortion curriculum entitled “Defending Life… Educating the Next Generation”. Here’s a portion of a video that she produced describing how she developed the curriculum for a club at Carmel High School.
It's worth pointing out for those who haven’t visited the page on Carmel Excellence’s candidates’ grievances with the school, Dina Ferchmin and her anti-abortion group were involved in a threat to sue CCS. You can read about that here.
Carmel Excellence is effectively running on a platform that, while at school, kids shouldn’t encounter things that challenge or contradict their families’ personal values and beliefs. Entirely contrary to this, Carmel Excellence candidate Dina Ferchmin has put extensive work into pushing her personal values into Carmel schools.
Now, this is a pro-CCS, pro-public education page with no interest in swaying pro-abortion people to be anti-abortion or vice versa. But the fact checker in me has to point out two pieces of blatant misinformation in Dina Ferchmin’s video.
First, abortion is not the leading cause of death. Arguing that it is requires defining each conception as a human being, in which case miscarriages would be the leading cause of death, accounting for somewhere between 30% and 50% of all deaths. If you’re wondering about the variance, it’s because researchers know a tremendous number of women miscarry without ever knowing they’re pregnant, but there have been different methodologies used to estimate how frequently that happens.
Second, abortions do not increase the risk of breast cancer. This has been known for decades. The studies that were initially thought to suggest such a link were later found to have only demonstrated that women fighting breast cancer were more willing to be open about having had an abortion than women who were just living their lives and didn’t want to admit to having had a stigmatized medical procedure.
But beyond her giving false information to middle and high school students and being involved in threatening to sue CCS, I generally don't have a problem with Dina Ferchmin’s activities.
Especially when it comes to high school clubs, there should be separate clubs that represent different viewpoints among the student body. And it’s perfectly fine for parents to take an active role in supporting their kids’ activities. Both in class and out, our kids need to be exposed to a wide range of opinions and beliefs to be adequately prepared for the next steps in their lives. That’s true whether the next step is college, entering the workforce or joining the military. Carmel Excellence's stated stance goes in the complete opposite direction.
When Carmel Excellence talks about educating high schoolers, they say ‘Let them be kids.’ They claim that because our community houses diverse viewpoints, anything that could conflict with a families’ values should be kept out of school. If this were sincere, it would basically be embracing the most cartoonish version of political correctness. But given Dina Ferchmin’s past activism, it seems fairly obvious that they’re not talking about all families, and instead simply want the schools to reinforce and promote their worldview.
If not Carmel Excellence, then who?
If you're proud to live in one of the top school districts in the state...
If you appreciate and support our teachers...
If your kids have benefited or are benefiting from a world-class CCS education...
If you want our schools to stay welcoming to all students and their families...
I hope you'll join me in opposing Carmel Excellence and voting for Jon Shapiro and Kris Wheeler.
Disclaimer:
As mentioned on the homepage, this site contains both facts and my opinions on those facts. I believe the difference is quite obvious, but if you question which category any particular statement falls into, please reach out via the Contact page and I will be glad to clarify.
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