Two more school districts have been caught deceiving parents about their children’s requests to be treated as members of another gender at school.
The Daily Caller reports that South Kitsap School District, near Seattle, Washington, has a strict policy of keeping students’ in-school gender and pronoun preferences secret from their parents unless the student specifically authorizes the school to divulge them.
“In a January ‘leadership memo,’” wrote the conservative website, “South Kitsap School District Assistant Principal Tom Edwards provided guidance to teachers that advises them to ask a student, before talking to parents, if their family knows about their gender change, according to an email obtained by the [Daily Caller News Foundation]. The guidance explained a new method to help teachers note in school databases a student’s change in gender and if their identity is to be hidden from their parents.”
If a student wishes to be called by a name associated with another gender and is okay with his parents’ knowing about it, the school can change his primary name in the database to his chosen name.
If, on the other hand, the student does not want his parents to know about his new identity, the school can add a note with his preferred name and set a flag to notify employees not to use the name when communicating with his parents.
“To ensure the safety and well-being of the student, school employees should not disclose a student’s transgender or gender-expansive status to others, including the student’s parents/guardians and/or other school personnel, unless the school is (1) legally required to do so or (2) the student has authorized such disclosure,” reads another district document obtained by the Kitsap chapter of Moms For Liberty.
“The district,” it warns, “will not condone the intentional or persistent refusal to respect a student’s gender identity or gender expression, or inappropriate release of information regarding a student’s transgender or gender-expansive status.”
The document goes on to detail the various ways in which the district will accommodate students’ gender choices. Students are allowed to use the restroom of the gender they choose at school. While student locker-room use is supposedly determined “on a case-by-case basis,” the “goal” is “maximizing transgender or gender-expansive student social integration … and ensuring the student’s safety,” so it is highly unlikely that a male student’s request to use the girls’ locker room would be denied. (Note the lack of concern for other students’ safety.) Students may dress as members of their chosen gender. And in any sex-segregated school activity, including “overnight trips,” students are “permitted to participate in accordance with the gender identity they assert at school.”
“The data, the medical research and the mental health research is on our side — parents — not policymakers,” Moms for Liberty Kitsap chapter chairwoman Joy Gjersvold told the Daily Caller. “Now law supersedes the natural rights of a parent when it comes to raising their child. Public education has become the white van our parents warned us about, with the creepy predator in the front seat asking our children if they’d like a piece of candy.”
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Fort Collins’ Poudre School District (PSD) “started secretly transitioning K-5 students last year by using students’ preferred names & pronouns at school but legal names with parents,” Independent Women’s Forum Senior Fellow Nicole Solas revealed on Twitter.
Solas posted an email from Laurel Elementary School Assistant Principal Amanda Pawelski to PSD Chief Equity and Academic Officer Marlena Gross-Taylor asking whether to use a student’s preferred pronouns despite his parents’ express instructions not to do so.
Gross-Taylor forwarded the email to LGBTQIA+ Coordinator Shayna Seitchik and Darcie Votipka, another employee. Not surprisingly, the two of them responded that “the school should use the student’s affirming name and pronouns at school and use their legal name and corresponding pronouns when talking with the family until they are supportive of the student’s new name and pronouns.”
“Teaching elementary school-aged children to lead double lives and keep secrets from their parents is a destabilizing assault on children that can impact them for the rest of their lives,” Solas told Fox News.
But since public schooling — one of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto — has always been a tool for undermining the family, why should anyone be surprised?
