Elliot Cardinal ‘26 was digging through old posters promoting the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club when they found something upsetting. The new student leader of the GSA said they found “multiple homophobic slurs” written across one of the posters.
“And so you know, that really doesn’t make you feel very welcomed,” Cardinal said.
Now, Cardinal and fellow transgender student Klara Bronz-Russo ‘26 are upset by the recent actions of the Trump Administration to change Sex Ed in Vermont.
“I feel like we’re taking multiple steps backwards, you know?” Cardinal said. “We tried so hard to get laws passed to protect gay youth and trans youth. And now that’s being taken away and a lot of kids are really upset about it.”
In a letter to Vermont, the Trump administration said to get rid of references to gender identity, pronouns, affirming content’ – or lose about 670,000 dollars in Sex Education funding.
BHS Sex Ed will not be affected if funding is cut, because the State of Vermont funds local health classes—not the federal government.
Instead, the funding cuts would impact PREP (Personal Responsibility Education Program). PREP’s purpose is to fund local youth organizations and run classes (especially for people aged 10-19) to educate them on pregnancy prevention, contraception and sexually transmitted infections. Eight locations in Vermont aim to serve a minimum of 250 youth annually.
Vermont has recently agreed to pay for the PREP content the Trump administration deems inappropriate, including recognizing identities outside of the binary male/female and using their pronouns.
Michelle Salvador is the Adolescent Health Program Manager at the Vermont Department of Health and is in charge of the PREP program. Salvador is working to make health education around the state better by identifying different locations that may benefit from their curriculum.
“Though we have state and national standards that need to be followed,” Salvador said, “I think that health education in Vermont depends on where you are. So not every young person is getting the same health education.”
At BHS, there is no universal curriculum for Sex Ed. Physical Education and Health teacher Allyson Archacki said that individual teachers look at National and State requirements and then decide what is taught about gender and other issues like mental health, nutrition and substance abuse.
“We just have our course expectation sheets. If you look at mine compared to another health teacher, it could be very similar – or different,” Archacki said.
Bronz-Russo and Cardinal both believe that gender identity could be taught better at BHS. Archacki acknowledged that the curriculum is not perfect, but she said she has “touched upon it [gender] as best as I can” and tries to use inclusive language and cover the basics.
“I haven’t really gotten into teaching or addressing it [gender] in a way that I feel would be appropriate and do it justice for people that are sitting in front of me,” Archaki said. “I don’t feel like I have enough information in my toolbox, if you will, to adequately address that [gender] in this class.”
Archacki said that she is trying to move towards a more uniform, fully proficiency-based curriculum that could change based on student needs in the classroom.
Archacki wants to focus more on teaching students how to make decisions and how to self-advocate and does not think Health class is the right place to debate gender issues..
“I’m not here to decide for students, by any means, how they feel or how they identify – but we can bring awareness to it,” Archaki said.
Archacki said that students sometimes ask if the curriculum covers topics like surgery for transgender people.
“We don’t. That’s not our intent. We don’t do that in any part of our content,” Archaki said. “We’re not going to go into the nitty gritty of why somebody would do it, because I can’t answer that for individuals. We could get into where you need to go for support, if it’s about feelings and whatnot. [But] I’m not going to tell you how to do X, Y, Z, you know, I’m just going to talk about methods of protection.”
