By Jon Michael Raasch – Dailymail.Com
A conservative law firm is highlighting gender ideology in schools around the U.S. by taking action against many districts they claim are overstepping their boundaries with parents.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, held a press call Thursday with clients they represent from around the country who are embroiled in legal action against their local school districts.
They are backing a Colorado couple whose 11-year-old daughter was assigned to room with a boy who identified as a girl on a school trip to Washington, D.C.
They represent Michigan parents who sued their local school district for using male pronouns for their eighth-grader without their knowledge.
And they are representing a Virginia teacher who claims her district instructed her to hide student’s gender identity information from their parents, among others.
‘The government is taking decision making authority from parents,’ Kate Anderson, an attorney on the aforementioned cases warned on the call.
‘They’re shifting decisions that should be in the hands of parents to themselves, and then they’re hiding that information from parents, so they don’t know that the school is making decisions behind their back, and that’s dangerous.’
‘You’re hearing from each of these clients that they’re experiencing really dangerous policies that are hurting kids in their districts,’ she continued.
Serena Wailes, the mother who is suing Colorado’s Jefferson County Public Schools for putting a biological male in the same sleeping arrangements as her 11-year-old daughter, stressed how she felt betrayed by her school district.
‘We trusted these people,’ Serena Wailes told reporters on a call.
‘They told us throughout the whole process that boys were going to be on one floor and girls were going to be on another, and at no point during this process did they ever say that that was going to be based on gender identity, and so we trusted that.’
‘We trust our school district with our kids, and they have, they have failed us.’
She described her surprise after learning about her daughter’s situation.
‘It was really shocking, because I’m downstairs in the lobby with the other moms, and I get this call from our daughter, who’s upstairs and she’s hiding in the bathroom.’
‘Her voice is quivering, and she doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of all the other kids in her room, but she’s like, ‘Mom, I don’t feel good about this.”
‘So I had her come down and we went, we talked through it and had the chaperone come over, talk through it, and then found out it was true. And honestly, what I have to say is I feel deceived.’
Then Michigan parents Dan and Jennifer Mead spoke up.
They filed a lawsuit against the Rockford Public School District after discovering the school had been referring to their child using ‘he/him’ pronouns last year.
Jennifer described how they sought academic help for their daughter through her school counselor, and they began sharing intimate details about he student and her academic and personal life.
‘And all this time, they were lying to us, changing records. They were calling her by a male name, a masculine pronoun at school, and then when they would talk to us or send anything home, it was always her, you know, are given her given name.’
‘It was shocking because we felt like we were deceived as well,’ the mother said.
They claim the school secretly ‘socially transitioned’ her before the parents caught on.
The parents found out in October 2022 when a school psychologist inadvertently included the child’s masculine name in one section of a report that was sent home.
The eight-grader’s name had been changed back to the birth name in the rest of the document, according to the lawsuit.
Finally a teacher spoke up to address how she is taking action against Harrisonburg City Public School Board in Virginia for allegedly muzzling her ability to talk to parents about their kids’ gender identities.
She resonated with the parents’ stories, and said she is victim to similar policies as an educator.
‘This policy that I’m working under deceives parents and it hurts kids,’ middle school teacher Deb Figliola said. ‘It also requires me to lie.’
The Virginian described the inner turmoil she felt as she was mandated to keep these crucial developments from student’s parents.
‘That policy was that we were to always affirm a student if they came into the building and said they wanted to be identified with a different name and a different pronoun, we were to always use those with them,’ Figliola said. ‘And we were to not ever tell the parents.’
‘We’re there for a snapshot. We bring a lot of expertise as teachers, but it’s not enough to make those kind of lifelong decisions,’ she said.
‘Parents are the ones who are there after we’re long gone from the picture, and parents are the ones who were there long time before any teacher was involved,’ the teacher added.