School districts throughout Idaho have implemented policies requiring teachers to keep parents in the dark regarding the transgender identity of their children. From the perspective of these districts, parents don’t have the right to know about the health and safety of their own students.
Once thought to be isolated to blue states, such suppression of parental rights has now reached even the reddest states that were once seen as havens from this alarming ideology, such as Idaho.
Numerous school districts throughout Idaho have the same gender policy in place, with the language nearly identical in each district. The policies often state that “school employees should not disclose a student’s transgender status or sexual orientation to other individuals, regardless of setting, including the other school personnel or (in the case of middle school, junior high school, and high school students) the student’s parents/guardians.” Teachers who violate this policy can face “possible termination.”
Parents Defending Education (PDE) submitted 14 public records requests to school districts in Idaho requesting documentation and correspondence regarding the creation of these gender policies. We
discovered
that districts were working closely with the Idaho School Boards Association (ISBA) to implement policies to deliberately withhold information from parents about the gender identity of their own children.
Some of the districts that worked closely with the ISBA were the
Kendrick Joint School District
,
Shelley Joint School District
,
Twin Falls School District
, and
Whitepine Joint School District
, PDE found. The ISBA had frequent email conversations with district staff to implement policies, including on controversial transgender issues. In one instance, we found email correspondence appearing to show that the Kendrick Joint School District paid the ISBA at least $2,000 for the organization’s policy templates.
With this knowledge now public, elected officials in Idaho must act as quickly as possible to ensure that parental rights are protected and that schools cannot bypass parents on important issues regarding their children. School boards must also stand up against the ISBA and resist pressure to adopt gender policies that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.
The role of school boards is not to pander to a school board association and try to replace parents in their children’s lives. Parents have the right to raise their children with their values and beliefs. That responsibility does not and should not belong to schools.
Unfortunately, this growing issue is not just relegated to Idaho. Schools in other rural states are also adopting or incorporating similar gender policies. In Montana, Missoula County Public Schools worked with a group called “IVALUE” to propose including “members of the LGBTQIA+ community” in “all future work around diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Likewise, school counselors at the Tupelo Public School District in Mississippi
shared guidance
with each other that appeared to encourage staff to keep parents in the dark regarding the gender identity of their children. And Baldwin County Public Schools in Alabama has a
guidance plan
posted online for the current school year that requires school counselors to “affirm” and “respect” the gender identity and gender expression of students.
School board members are elected officials who are responsible for representing their constituents. Many of these board members have abused their positions to strip parents of their right to protect their children.
However, parents have the tools to fight back and reclaim the power to raise their children how they see fit. Parents can show up and speak at school board meetings, organize parent groups that hold school boards responsible for their decisions, and, most importantly, vote in school board elections. Whether parents live in a blue state or a red state, they hold the power to make positive change.
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Casey Ryan is a staff writer at Parents Defending Education.
