SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Sen. John Johnson, a North Ogden Republican, is aiming to bolster parents’ ability to take action if something seems amiss in their kids’ public school curriculum.

As he puts it, Senate Bill 157, publicly unveiled on Tuesday though its language is being tweaked, aims to put parents in the driver’s seat of their kids’ education. The main thrust is to reinforce the notion “that parents have primacy,” he said Thursday.

More specifically, the measure gives parents legal authority to intervene and prevent instruction of “objectionable” curriculum to their kids. The parental veto power would extend to textbooks, “subject matter” and other activities.

“Objectionable,” one of the key words in the legislation, isn’t defined. Parents, Johnson said, would be left to make the determination. Other language in SB 157 that would give parents the power to sue to block instruction of “objectionable” material will be removed, Johnson said.

Utah lawmakers, at least some, are putting a big focus on education this session, proposing measures seemingly meant to allow for heightened scrutiny of public education. Another proposal is in the works creating a vouchers program that would let parents use public funds to put their kids in private schools, according to media reports.

Johnson said he’s responding to increasing clamoring he’s hearing from parents, dismayed in particular over the sort of instruction their kids have been getting during the COVID-19 pandemic. “They were seeing things they didn’t really like,” he said.

One critic of SB 157, Sara Jones, government relations director with the Utah Education Association, which represents teachers, said parents already have authority to veto the sort of instruction their kids get, particularly in health and sex education matters. Johnson acknowledged as much, but said SB 157 codifies the power into law.

The Weber County lawmaker, a fiscal and social conservative, said another key element of SB 157 aims to assert the primacy of state government over federal government in setting educational policy.

SB 157 has been sent to the Senate Education Committee for deliberation, but the debate about the measure is already underway.

Jones put a particular focus on the provision that would allow parents to sue, before Johnson said that language would be removed. What’s more, she noted that parents have authority to homeschool their children, aside from the power they already have to step in when they’re uncomfortable with the educational material used with their kids.

“I think there are some bills related to curriculum that are trying to resolve a problem that doesn’t exist,” she said.

Johnson said battling teachers is not the aim of his efforts. Even so, Jones said creating friction between parents and teachers may be the effect it has.

“We see this bill pitting parents against teachers, when both parents and teachers enable a student’s success,” Jones said. “This bill is creating needless controversy.”

Separately, Johnson is mulling a measure targeting critical race theory in schools, a theoretical framework centered on the role of race and racism in legal, education and other institutions, as the Brookings Institution puts it. Critics of anti-CRT efforts maintain that concerns about the theoretical framework are overblown, that it isn’t embedded in school curriculum.

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