In recent years, several school districts have been ousted for keeping parents in the dark about their child’s gender transitions at school. As Townhall has covered, school districts in Virginia, Kansas, and California were exposed for concealing this information from parents. And last year, Republican Sen. Tim Scott (SC) introduced legislation that would prevent schools from hiding information about a student’s gender identity from their parents.
Documents obtained from parental rights organization Parents Defending Education and reviewed by Townhall show that Pueblo School District 60 in Colorado has guidelines to keep students’ “gender identity” secret from their parents.
According to documents obtained by PDE, the school’s “Supporting Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Students and Staff” guidelines say the following:
The school shall accept the gender identity that each student asserts; and there is no medical or mental health diagnosis or treatment threshold that students must meet in order to have their gender identity recognized and respected. Students ready to socially transition may initiate a process at the school to change their name, pronoun, and access to programs, activities, and facilities consistent with their gender identity.
In addition, the school district added in the document that staff “should involve parents or guardians in the implementation of these guidelines and the process of social transition at school to support the student’s well-being at school, but should first discuss the parental involvement with the student to avoid inadvertently putting the student at risk of harm by contacting the student’s parents,” adding that “students who are transgender and gender-nonconforming have the right to discuss and express their gender identity and expression openly and to decide when, with whom, and how much to share private information.”
In the guidance, the school district instructs staff to use students’ chosen names and preferred pronouns if they are beginning the process of socially transitioning.
“This is clear evidence of how pervasive gender ideology has become in our public schools. What we're seeing in Pueblo is the latest example of radical policies that assault parental rights and erode transparency,” Mailyn Salabarria, the director of community engagement at PDE, told Townhall. "For a working-class community that prides itself in local control, it is outrageous to see how parents -- the most local decision-makers of all -- are being obliterated by these policies that also compel the speech of teachers and school staff. To add insult to injury, we are talking about a district that is academically ranked in the bottom half for the entire state, where only 12% of the students are proficient in math and 30% read at grade level. The school district has its priorities terribly wrong, to say the least.”
Last month, poll released by parental rights organization Parents Defending Education found that 74 percent of registered voters believe that schools should not help students change their gender identity without parental consent, which Townhall covered. And, House Republicans introduced H.R. 5, known as the “Parents Bill of Rights” to protect parental involvement in education. The legislation gives parents the right to know what’s being taught in schools and to see school reading materials, the right to be heard, the right to see the school budget and spending, the right to protect their child’s privacy, and the right to be updated on any violent activity at school.
“You have a say in your kids' education, not government and not telling you what to do," McCarthy said in remarks at the Capitol on the day the bill was announced.