A student “mental health” bill pushed by prominent left-leaning Alaska Democrats has passed out of the State Legislature on a vote of 27-13. Senate Bill 41, which sailed through the State Senate in a 19-1 vote last month, is now headed to Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s desk, where he can either sign or veto the legislation.

Student mental health initiatives, such as SB 41, have been heavily criticized for fostering explicit support for LGBTQ+ acceptance, affirmation, and related topics as part of addressing youth well-being, equity, and inclusion. This integration appears in counseling services, school-based therapy, state-promoted resources, and proposed curricula. Critics note these efforts blur the lines between neutral mental health support and ideological promotion of gender identity or sexual orientation topics.

Rep. Julie Coulombe successfully added an amendment to the bill, stating that any new health curriculum developed by the state should use “medically and scientifically based content when developing the guidelines for developmentally appropriate instruction in mental health and may not include in the guidelines any political, ideological, or advocacy-oriented content that is unrelated to student mental health.”

That wording was not sufficient for most GOP lawmakers in the House, but they were outnumbered by a combination of Democrats and several other Republicans.

Mental Health programming is already being used to advance ideological agendas in Alaska.

VOA Alaska School-Based Services, for example, embeds mental health clinicians directly into dozens of Alaska schools, while also operating “The Stand Proud Society,” a gender-bending psychotherapy group for LGBTQ+ youth that claims to build hope, coping, and community. They emphasize the need to use LGBTQ gender-identity names and pronouns for sexually confused students.

Whether Coulumbe’s amendment will be sufficient to curtail the use of mental health curriculum to push for widespread social acceptance of controversial topics like gender identity, sexual orientation, systemic racism, DEI and more, remains an open question.

Democrat Senators Elvi Gray-Jackson, Forrest Dunbar, Loki Tobin, Scott Kawasaki, and left-leaning Republican Cathy Giessel have been the driving force behind SB 41, which directs the Alaska Education Board to develop mental health education guidelines for all K-12 public school students.

Introduced last year, the bill has raised concerns from parental rights and family value advocates such as Alaska Family Council. Others have argued that mental health should be addressed by parents, not tacked on to a struggling government educational system in which 70% of Alaska students are failing to master basic, grade-level reading and math skills.

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