On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) asked the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to take a case surrounding a policy at a Wisconsin School District allowing teachers to keep their students’ “gender identities” concealed from their parents.
According to WILL, the Eau Claire School District’s policy prohibits teachers from discussing with parents what is happening with their child at school and mandates staff to actively hide information from parents.
In Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire Area School District, WILL is representing an association of parents, all of whom have children in the district and are subject to this policy.
“Thousands of school districts across our country have these policies. If parents cannot challenge them until after their children are harmed, they have no way to protect their kids other than pulling them from public school,” WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said in a statement.
WILL noted that over over 1,000 school districts, covering nearly 11 million students have adopted policies to facilitate minor students, often of any age, changing their gender identity at school (names, pronouns, and bathroom use) in secret from their parents.
“School is now like Las Vegas: ‘What happens at school stays at school.’ These policies have already generated over two dozen lawsuits (listed below), with many more to come,” the petition states.
“As any parent knows, parental authority includes the right (and the solemn responsibility) to say no to children’s often short-sighted desires when necessary to protect them from themselves. Indeed, even the Biden administration’s recent Title IX rule runs hard away from these policies, emphasizing that “nothing in the final regulations disturbs parental rights,” it continues, adding, “In Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, parents have been forced to withdraw their children from public school and shoulder the expense of private school, or, if they cannot afford it, rearrange their lives to home school, when they discovered, often months after the fact, that their school district had been secretly treating their child as the opposite sex.”
“When a school district has an explicit policy to supersede parental authority over a major and controversial health-related decision and to conceal this from parents when the issue arises, parents are immediately harmed; they have lost their control over this critical decision. Courts can remedy that harm by declaring such policies unconstitutional, enjoining school districts from applying them, and requiring schools to defer to parents, as they do for every other major decision involving a minor child,” it concludes.
Last month, the Biden administration released new rules to protect LGBTQ+ individuals under Title IX. Going forward, the basis of “sex” now encompasses the concept of “gender identity,” which Townhall covered.
“These regulations make it crystal clear that everyone can access schools that are safe, welcoming and that respect their rights,” Miguel Cardona, Biden’s education secretary, said in a call with reporters from The New York Times about the regulations.