“It’s extremely weak and pathetic. Thank God my children didn't go to your school.”
That’s what I told Loudoun County, Virginia, Superintendent Aaron Spence when he tried to hide behind legal jargon, erroneous district policies, and a pattern of excuses when confronted about the sexual harassment and administrative misconduct occurring under his watch.
It’s a recurring story from across the country; school officials are turning classrooms into ideological battlegrounds. They are not asking parents for permission or giving them basic notice when discussing controversial materials. They are forcing their radical agendas, hiding the damages, and punishing parents and students who speak up. In some cases, they are allowing and helping children to “transition” genders without parental involvement or knowledge.
It’s not education. It is taxpayer-funded indoctrination.
At a recent House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, I pressed Dr. Spence about reports that male students at his school reported being filmed in a boys’ locker room by a female student who claimed to be a male. Loudoun retaliated and gave the boys a 10-day suspension, a harsher punishment than the student who was filming them.
That should outrage every parent in America. It infuriates me. This case was never about student safety. It was an institution defending itself from the repercussions of its own bad policies. In the world of radical school administrators, the student who questions the agenda becomes the problem. The policy is protected. The child is not.
When Seth Wolfe's son was victimized in the Loudoun locker room incident, he expected school officials to stand up for the students. Instead, Wolfe watched the children, who should have been treated with compassion after being sexually harassed, become the targets. He argued that the boys were effectively forced to choose between staying silent or facing punishment for standing up for their rights. Loudoun parents have been warning about this for years.
Ian Prior, a Loudoun parent and attorney who has spent years fighting the district, argues that one of the school district’s biggest deceptions was convincing parents that controversial policies were somehow required by law. School officials claimed they had no choice but to conceal information from parents, allow biological males into female spaces, and treat objections as discrimination. Prior repeatedly challenged them to point to the law requiring any of it. They couldn't—because what parents were witnessing was not a legal necessity, but a political agenda dressed up as compliance.
Then there’s Elicia Brand, a mother of three and founder of Army of Parents. Elicia says she never intended to become an activist until she started asking questions about the woke ideology in which the school tried to indoctrinate her children. Instead of getting answers, she became a target; activists put her on what she described as a political hit list, anonymous callers made nearly 80 threatening phone calls, and police sat outside her home for weeks. Her offense was not misconduct or extremism—it was demanding transparency from a school system that seemed more interested in protecting controversial policies than answering parents' questions.
The list of parents failed by Loudoun County schools doesn’t end there. Tumay Harding spent 17 months battling Loudoun County after her daughter and three other girls reported sexual harassment and sexual assault by a teacher. School officials refused to open an investigation, repeatedly tried to force parents to drop their inquiries, and forced families into a lengthy appeals process before an outside reviewer finally concluded that misconduct had occurred. While administrators protected the offender, her daughter could not return to school and lost an important childhood experience.
Tragically, Loudoun is not an isolated case. In Montgomery County, Maryland, parents had to go all the way to the Supreme Court after the school system stopped allowing children to opt out of LGBTQ-themed book readings in elementary school.
In Chicago, school officials adopted policies that allow students to be addressed by new names and pronouns without parental consent. They also introduced children to gender identity concepts and discussed puberty blockers by fifth grade.
San Francisco has taken the same path. District policy allows students to use facilities and participate in programs that align with the gender they identify with that day, while restricting disclosure of a student’s gender identity to their parents.
Whether parents agree with those ideas or not is beside the point. The real question is why school administrators believe they should be making these decisions while parents are left in the dark.
This is the Left’s education playbook. Force the ideology early. Keep parents at arm’s length. Call objections bigotry. Punish the people who refuse to play along.
Public schools are not taxpayer-funded laboratories for adults who want to run social experiments on other people’s children. That is not education. It is institutional indoctrination masquerading as progress. House Republicans are not going to shrug while this happens.
We passed the Parents Bill of Rights because families deserve to know what is being taught, see reading materials, review budgets, and speak at school board meetings without being treated like criminals. We also passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act because young women deserve their own spaces in which to compete and change clothes. Most importantly, we passed the Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, which prohibits federal funds from being used to promote gender ideology in schools and requires parental consent before a school can change a child's name, pronouns, or access to sex-specific facilities. All of these pieces of legislation support common-sense concepts with which most parents agree. All of them were ferociously opposed by Democrats.
We will keep passing legislation to drag these policies into the daylight, because secrecy is the oxygen that radical, leftist ideologies need to survive. Schools have one job: to educate children. Not to politicize them. Not to hide them from their parents. Not to turn childhood into an ideological battleground. It’s not complicated. It only seems complicated to administrators who have grown comfortable hiding behind bureaucracy.
This is about who gets to make the most important decisions in a child’s life. House Republicans will keep fighting until every school district in America knows that parents are the ultimate decision-makers. It’s common sense.