Two religious parents filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the Anne Arundel County Public School District of Maryland for allegedly “socially transitioning” their child with a masculine name and pronouns without notifying them.
The parents, identified in court documents only as John and Jane Doe, are being represented by America First Legal (AFL), an anti-LGBTQ+ conservative legal organization. The parents want school officials to start misgendering their child and for the judge to declare the school district’s trans-inclusive name and pronoun policies as illegal. The school district has declined to comment on the case.
The lawsuit, filed in Maryland’s U.S. District Court, says the school began referring to the child with a masculine name and pronouns at the beginning of the school year at the student’s request. The parents only became aware of this last December 10 when the school emailed the parents about a lab experiment happening in class the next day. The email used a male name to refer to their child, The Baltimore Banner reported.
The staff member who sent the email reportedly tried to unsend it and then sent the parents a message saying that the email wasn’t intended to go to them, the lawsuit said. The following day, the parents allegedly spoke to the staff member who “admitted to lying in the emails” and informed the parents that their child had requested the masculine name and pronouns, the lawsuit adds.
I believe they should only be required to tell if they child is a danger to themselves or others. Just like mental health professionals. As long as they aren’t a danger, I see no reason for a school to tell the parents anything but grades and classroom behavior.
I think I would agree for, like, a school counselor for instance. That’s much more analogous to something like a therapist. Teachers aren’t mental health professionals though. They’re there to teach.
But I think we need to have a more meta conversation about the idealized roles of parents and schools.
In my mind, the parent has the ultimate responsibility for the raising of their child. It is their job to teach their child how to be a good and responsible member of society.
School is there as an institution of formalized learning to help build an educated society.
School is not a day care. School is not there to teach your child how to be a good person. School does not obviate your responsibility as a parent to raise your child right.
Obviously teachers should model good behavior to the children in their care, as should every adult in their life, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on the parents.
When the school actively lies to the parents about their child, they are taking away the parents ability to fulfill that responsibility.
Now, the school may be doing it for good reason. Many parents are bad parents, and are doing a poor job of raising their children. Most even. People suck.
But the state saying, “you’re not raising your children poorly enough that we are going to take them away from you, but we disagree with how you’re doing it enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you,” feels like a weird middle ground to live in that doesn’t feel great to me.
Legally, the school is acting in loco parentis, granting it the necessary discretion to decide what is best for the students’ well being while school is in session. As long as the students’ civil rights are respected by the school, the school is well within their rights to perform parental functions. Also, social and emotional learning are part of the curriculum everywhere. Education has functions beyond rote learning, which is what makes us a society and not just a chaotic mass of tribes and individuals.
This is a very basic tenet of the social contract with regard to public schooling. The education system houses all the necessary expertise and pedagogical know-how to educate at scale. (Most parents are not experts in pedagogy, social/emotional learning, etc.) They are making this expertise available, FOR FREE (through taxes), to all children inside the borders of this country. In return, individual educators, departments, and schools reserve the right to decide how best to apply that expertise.
If parents disagree with that, if they are uncomfortable with that and they want more control, etc… that’s fine! What you don’t get to do, is fundamentally break the public system - for my kids and everyone else - just because you as a parent don’t like the fact that public school teachers are honoring your child’s humanity, civil rights, and teaching them to treat others the same. That’s anti-social behavior.
You are free to opt out of the public system entirely, forfeit its benefits, and either send your kids to a private school of your choosing, start your own private school, or homeschool your children. At your own expense. We all collectively pay taxes to subsidize real education in public schools, not the ideological whims and misadventures of rogue individuals, who have their own ideas about education. We know better.