The 3Rs Health Curriculum
What It Actually Is, Why It Matters, and Why the Fight Isn't Over
There is a curriculum being taught in Roaring Fork School District schools right now that tells kids they have rights. That their bodies belong to them. That consent matters, that healthy relationships have specific characteristics you can name and recognize, that there are words for the things happening to their bodies during puberty and those words are the real medical terms, not euphemisms. It tells queer kids they exist. It acknowledges, in age-appropriate ways, that families look different and gender is more complicated than a binary and that all of that is normal.
It is called the 3Rs: Rights, Respect, Responsibility.
And there is a coordinated campaign, led in part by a Basalt pastor with a history of showing up at school board meetings and endorsing political candidates, to tear it out of our schools.
We need to talk about what that campaign actually is, what they are actually opposed to, and why the people who care about kids in this valley need to be paying attention right now.
What the 3Rs Actually Is
The 3Rs curriculum was developed by Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit with decades of experience in youth sexual health education. It is the only K-12 sexuality education curriculum in the country that is fully mapped to the National Sexuality Education Standards, which were developed with input from more than fifty youth development experts including representatives from the American School Health Association, the National Association of State Boards of Education, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is free to download and use. It is evidence-informed, drawing on public health, sociology, biology, psychology, and education research. It has been adopted by school districts from San Diego to Tulsa to right here in the Roaring Fork Valley.
The framework is built around three ideas that are not actually controversial when you say them out loud: young people have rights, including the right to accurate health information. Young people and the adults in their lives deserve respect. And society has a responsibility to give young people the tools they need to take care of themselves.
The curriculum is scaffolded, which is the education term for the way it builds on itself across grade levels. In kindergarten and early elementary, it covers body autonomy, correct anatomical terms, recognizing safe and unsafe touches, and how to identify a trusted adult. This is not sex education in any meaningful sense of the term. It is abuse prevention. Kids who know the correct names for their body parts, and who understand that no one has the right to touch those parts without permission, are harder to groom and more likely to disclose when something has happened to them. This is established in the research. It is not a political opinion.
As kids get older, the curriculum adds complexity. Middle school lessons address puberty, reproductive health, consent, healthy versus unhealthy relationship characteristics, sexual orientation, and gender identity. High school lessons cover STIs, contraception, sexual decision-making, dating violence, and advocacy skills. The 8th grade includes a condom demonstration, and the 9th grade includes a lesson where students participate in one. These lessons exist because research consistently shows that students who learn correct condom use are more likely to use condoms correctly. Withholding that information does not reduce teen sexual activity. It reduces teen ability to protect themselves when they are sexually active.
RFSD did not adopt the 3Rs wholesale. When the district’s health staff selected which lessons to implement, they reviewed the full curriculum and chose approximately 18 lessons out of more than 100 available, specifically calibrating for what was appropriate for this community and these kids. That is worth saying clearly: the version of 3Rs that RFSD implemented is already a more conservative, more locally tailored version of the full curriculum.
How We Got Here
RFSD did not wake up one morning and decide to overhaul its health curriculum on a whim. This came after nearly two years of research, community input, and professional review. In May 2023, the Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the 3Rs as the district’s comprehensive health curriculum. This was the first time RFSD had an approved comprehensive health curriculum at all.
The opposition showed up immediately. A Change.org petition began circulating calling the curriculum “graphic,” “sexually explicit,” and “too much too soon.” Local parents began appearing at school board meetings, some at multiple consecutive meetings, using the word “grooming” to describe a curriculum that teaches kindergartners the correct names for their body parts. The petition’s language was not homegrown. It used the same phrasing, the same talking points, and referenced the same national organizations found in anti-sex-ed campaigns from Minnesota to New Jersey to Texas. This is a coordinated national playbook applied locally, not an organic expression of community concern.
The 3Rs became the central issue in the 2023 RFSD school board elections. Candidates who opposed it went into graphic detail about curriculum content at public forums, in some cases describing content that had not even been selected for implementation, in an apparent attempt to inflame opposition before the vote. The voters of the Roaring Fork Valley responded. Betsy After and Lindsay DeFrates, both supportive of the curriculum, won their races decisively. The board reaffirmed its support for the 3Rs and made clear it was not reassessing the curriculum.
That should have been the end of it. It was not. The opposition regrouped, and by 2025 the curriculum was a central issue in two more board races. The valley voted again. Two elections. Two decisive mandates for this curriculum. The details of who ran, who funded them, and who was behind them are worth examining closely.
Cornerstone Christian Center and the Ongoing Campaign
Jim Tarr is the pastor of Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt. He has appeared before the RFSD Board of Education to speak against the 3Rs curriculum. His argument, delivered at a May 2023 board meeting, was that schools do not have the authority to define children’s rights for them. In 2025, when two more school board seats were up for election, Cornerstone Christian Center endorsed the two candidates who ran explicitly against the curriculum: Jodi Barr and Elizabeth Cockrill Taylor. The IRS changed its rules to allow churches to do this without losing tax-exempt status, and Cornerstone took advantage of that.
Barr and Taylor were also endorsed by the Garfield County Republicans, and both campaigns received out-of-state contributions from donors in Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, in a race for a local school district in a rural Colorado valley. Cockrill Taylor’s X account was called “DOGE the Schools” before she changed it to “DOGE the Ideology.” She proposed arming teachers as a school safety solution. She did not have a student currently enrolled in the district.
Both candidates lost. Kuhlenberg won her race against Taylor with 72% of the vote. Nimmo won the open District A seat against Barr with 70%. The valley voted, again, to keep the 3Rs.
And yet, as of early 2026, parent are still showing up at school board meetings to call the curriculum grooming. The petition is still circulating. The campaign is still running. The word “grooming” is still being deployed to describe anatomical education.
Let’s be precise about what that word means in this context. Grooming is the process by which an abuser builds trust with a child and their family in order to gain access to the child for sexual abuse. It involves secrecy, isolation, and the deliberate suppression of the child’s understanding of appropriate versus inappropriate touch. Teaching a child the correct name for their genitals and telling them that their body belongs to them is the opposite of grooming. Using the word “grooming” to describe it is not a genuine child safety concern. It is a political strategy, borrowed wholesale from the same national networks that have been calling LGBTQ teachers groomers for the past several years. It is designed to make people afraid to defend the curriculum because who wants to be seen defending something a loud person is calling “grooming.”
We should call it what it is.
Where the 3Rs Falls Short
Here is the part that does not get said enough in the debates over this curriculum: the 3Rs is a good curriculum and it does not go far enough.
Not far enough for queer kids in particular. The 3Rs includes content on sexual orientation and gender identity, which is why the opposition hates it. What it does not do is center queer experience as something that has always existed, that has a history, that comes with a community. Queer kids in RFSD are getting curriculum that acknowledges they exist. They are not getting curriculum that tells them where they come from, who fought for them, what the actual history of queer people in places like this valley looks like. They are getting inclusion without context, which is better than erasure but is not enough.
The curriculum also has a serious gap when it comes to queer and trans bodies, intimacy, and relationships specifically. The 3Rs largely teaches sexual health through a cisnormative lens. It uses more inclusive language than older curricula, but the actual content of the lessons assumes a fairly standard relationship between a person’s body and their gender identity, and it assumes a fairly standard set of physical experiences when it comes to sex and intimacy. A transgender girl’s sexual health needs are not the same as a cisgender boy’s even if they currently share the same anatomy. How she understands her body, how she relates to it, what intimacy means for her in the context of a gender identity she may be navigating in real time, what she needs to know about how hormone therapy intersects with sexual health if she pursues it, none of that is in this curriculum. The 3Rs tells her she exists. It does not tell her how to take care of herself as who she actually is.
The same gap exists for relationship structures. The 3Rs addresses healthy versus unhealthy relationships, consent, and communication, which are genuinely valuable lessons. But the relationship model it explores is almost entirely dyadic. Two people. One partnership. That is not the only structure in which people actually live and love. Some of the kids in RFSD classrooms right now are growing up in polyamorous families. Some of them will grow up to build polyamorous relationships of their own. A curriculum that is genuinely comprehensive would give those kids a framework for understanding what healthy non-monogamy looks like, what communication and consent mean when more than two people are involved, how to recognize healthy and unhealthy dynamics in relationship structures that look different from the assumed default. Instead they get silence, which means they will get their framework from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is usually the internet.
The 3Rs also does not explicitly address the specific health disparities that queer youth face. Young people who identify as LGBTQ+ have significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation than their straight and cisgender peers. A significant portion of that disparity is driven not by their identity but by the rejection and hostility they experience from families, institutions, and communities. A curriculum that mentions queer people exist but does not name the specific pressures queer youth face is leaving a gap that youth-serving organizations in this valley are trying to fill outside of school buildings, in GSAs and community spaces, because the schools are not filling it.
The same is true for our Latinx students, who make up a substantial portion of RFSD enrollment. The 3Rs includes diverse representations and is available in Spanish, but the cultural competency around specifically Latinx family structures, community values, and the real pressures undocumented youth and their families are navigating right now is not built into the health curriculum in any meaningful way. What does comprehensive sexual health education mean for a student who is afraid to seek STI testing because any interaction with a medical system feels risky given their family’s immigration status? That question is not in the 3Rs.
Comprehensive means comprehensive. We should be asking for more, even as we fight to keep what we have.
What Is Actually Happening Right Now
The 3Rs is under pressure again. The board has held. The community has voted for the curriculum twice. But the opposition never really stopped, and right now it is louder than it has been since the 2023 adoption fight.
This round was sparked by Tanner Gianinetti, a third-generation Carbondale native whose son is in kindergarten in RFSD. Gianinetti has appeared at consecutive school board meetings calling the curriculum “grooming,” and posted a video about it to the Elevation Lifestyle Network YouTube channel that has been circulating in local and regional conservative networks. The video has done what these videos are designed to do: it has drawn outside attention and amplified the opposition beyond parents who actually have kids in the district.
That outside attention includes Sherronna Bishop, who goes by “America’s Mom” and broadcasts on platforms affiliated with Mike Lindell. Bishop is a former Garfield County resident who has previously intervened in RE-2 school board politics and has a documented history of coordinating with national organizations to manufacture opposition campaigns in local school districts. She has weighed in on the RFSD curriculum fight, which has fed the current wave of public comment against the 3Rs.
This is how it works. A parent with genuine frustration makes a video. The video gets picked up by regional and national networks. Figures with large followings amplify it. The school board suddenly appears to be facing a groundswell of community opposition that is actually, in significant part, manufactured and imported. The parents at the microphone may be local. The campaign they are part of is not.
The same language from 2023 is back: “graphic,” “age-inappropriate,” “grooming,” “too much too soon.” The board has heard it before and held. But board members read the room at public meetings, and right now the room is being packed by people whose goal is to make the room feel hostile. Supporters of the curriculum have been quieter, assuming the fight was won. It was not won. It was paused.
The stakes are real. The kids who need this curriculum most, queer kids, kids without adults at home who will talk to them about their bodies and their health, kids who are going to be sexually active before any adult in their life is ready to acknowledge that, are also the kids who will suffer most if it disappears. “Protect the children” is the rallying cry. The actual children being protected by the 3Rs are invisible in that argument.
What We Can Do
The next RFSD Board of Education meeting is Wednesday, March 18, at the Carbondale District Office. Public comment is open to everyone. If you support the 3Rs, show up and say so. The opposition has been showing up every month. Supporters need to be in that room too, not just when there is a flashpoint, but consistently. School boards respond to who is present. Right now the people who are present are largely the people who want this curriculum gone.
If you can’t make it to the meeting, written public comment can be submitted through the RFSD website. It goes into the record. It matters.
Push the district to go further, not just to hold the line. If you believe queer kids in this valley deserve a curriculum that does more than acknowledge their existence, if you believe trans students deserve health education that speaks to their actual bodies and lives, if you believe Latinx families deserve something genuinely culturally competent, show up and say that too. The floor of what we’re defending is not the ceiling of what we should be demanding.
Know the difference between a concerned parent and a national campaign. Both may show up at the same microphone. They are not the same thing, and they do not deserve the same response.
The people in this valley voted for this curriculum twice. Our kids are safer because of it, and they deserve more. Both of those things are true at the same time. The fight is not over, and neither is the work.