School staff in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland are prohibited from disclosing students’ transgender identity to their parents if the school deems the students’ parents to be unsupportive of the transition.
According to the Maryland school district’s “Guidelines for Student Gender Identity,” a gender transition plan for a student at school should be designed without the knowledge of the student’s family, if the family does not support the student in the chosen gender identity.
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The guidelines instruct school principals and staff to speak to the student and “ascertain the level of support the student either receives or anticipates receiving from home.”
“Matters of gender identity can be complex and may involve familial conflict,” the document says. “In such cases, staff will support the development of a student-led plan that works toward inclusion of the family, if possible, taking safety concerns into consideration, as well as student privacy, and recognizing that providing support for a student is critical, even when the family is nonsupportive.”
“The fact that students choose to disclose their status to staff members or other students does not authorize school staff members to disclose a student’s status to others, including parents/guardians and other school staff members, unless legally required to do so or unless students have authorized such disclosure,” another section of the guidelines reads.
Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school district in Maryland, is not the first to detail policies directing school officials to keep a transgender student’s parents in the dark. Similar policies are in place in numerous other districts, including Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia and Eau Claire School District in Wisconsin.
Such policies have also led to several lawsuits in California and Florida.
The district’s policy, first reported by the Daily Caller, was highlighted by the parent activist organization Parents Defending Education. Erika Sanzi, the organization’s director of outreach, said that the policy was compounding a situation in which parents were already feeling “unsettled and betrayed.”
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“Parents already feel unsettled and betrayed that the school district is committed to withholding information and deliberately deceiving them,” Sanzi said. “The added policy to instruct staff to contact the student welfare and compliance office if parents aren’t on board with their child’s gender transition is another egregious slap in the face to parents. School staff are already mandatory reporters if they suspect that a child is in danger — this is nothing more than the weaponization of gender ideology under the guise of concern for students’ well being.”
A spokesman for Montgomery County Public Schools denied that the district’s guidelines barred officials from informing unsupportive parents about a student’s gender transition, saying the guidelines and the district’s policy on nondiscrimination “speak to respect and support of a person’s identity.”
