The mayor of a Utah city has gone viral for a speech he gave before a meeting of the local school board in which he calls out the school board for allowing pornographic “filth” to participate in the school’s library system.
Mayor Trent Staggs of Riverton, Utah, took the floor at a meeting this month to criticize the local school board for allowing students to access inappropriate pornographic material at school.
Though the mayor maintained a calm and polite manner throughout his speech, as one might expect from a statesman of the friendly Beehive State, his message was blunt and severe as he called for the immediate removal of porn from school.
[A]t the end of the day, this filth needs to be removed from our schools,” Staggs told the school board. “There’s over a hundred volumes that one parent organization has put together, a hundred volumes still in Jordan school districts, that clearly violate the law, and I see no justifiable reason for these to be in schools: None whatsoever.”
The mayor also contrasted the fervor with which the local school board enforced that children wear masks, ostensibly for their protection, with the perceived indifference of the school board in protecting children from pornography in school, describing pornography as a “public health crisis” in a reference to a 2016 resolution recognizing as much.
It is unclear what precise things Staggs is alluding to in his speech, and the mayor did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but during his speech the Riverton politician noted that he was far from the first individual to raise alarm about the prevalence of such materials,
“I’ve heard from scores of residents about the concerns of inappropriate materials in schools,” Staggs said. “I’ve received emails, phone calls; to a large extent I feel like they’re not being heard,” adding that the Riverton City Council sent out an email about the issue as early as last September.
With his address to the school board, Staggs joins a growing chorus of parents, students and politicians raising alarm over the prevalence of sexually explicit literature in schools. That such materials have apparently surfaced in the heart of a conservative Utah suburb is a testament to how prevalent such items have become, causing concerned citizens to rise up and speak out about the worrisome trend in the educational system.
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