Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, in one of her first moves after coming out on top of a highly contested race, was to introduce a budget proposal that “included the dissolution of the state’s new program allowing parents to spend some tax dollars tied to their child’s public school education on a school of their choice.”

That’s right. Hobbs — after several years of public school shutdowns driven in large part by teacher unions long after the threat of COVID had curbed; and following heated school board meetings where parents confronted members over politicized curricula like critical race theory — wants to make sure that parents are limited in their ability to choose where to send their kids to school.

But Hobbs, despite having an uphill climb to actually eliminate school choice from her state (per the Center Square link above), should also spend some time reading the news because she can rest assured that parents across the country — and her state of Arizona — are doing just that. And what they’re seeing are stories like this one, out of Minnesota, where “[t]he Minnesota Legislature is considering a bill that would require all public and charter schools to make menstrual products available in school bathrooms, including boys’ bathrooms.”

“There are a lot of schools that are moving towards gender-neutral bathrooms, and if we add ‘female,’ we might become obsolete very quickly,” she explained.

“Second, not all students who menstruate are female,” Feist continued. “We need to make sure all students have access to these products. There are obviously less non-female menstruating students and therefore their usage will be much lower. That was actually calculated into the cost of this.”

According to Feist, non-female menstruators “face a greater stigma and barrier to asking for these products.”

"Not all students who menstruate are female," said DFL Rep. Sandra Feist during a hearing to consider a bill that would provide menstrual products in all school bathrooms, including boys' bathrooms. Read more: https://t.co/X5AG5JFdGz pic.twitter.com/kbVLb89ojz

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) January 17, 2023

Regardless of how one feels about biological boys and girls sharing bathrooms, is crucial public school funding going toward making sure boys bathrooms have period products really going to convince people that their schools are behaving fiscally responsibly?

There is also the little matter of schools adopting policies that shut parents out of what’s going on with their kids, like the new policy being debated in a Pennsylvania district related to “transgender and gender diverse students.”

At its January 17th, 2023 board meeting, the Upper Moreland School District discussed a new policy related to “Transgender and Gender Diverse Students.” The policy covers many topics including the use of pronouns, preferred bathrooms, diversity training for staff, and more. The policy starts off by listing various definitions for phrases such as “Biological Sex”, “Gender Diverse”, and various other gender identity terms…

The guidelines advise teachers and staff to avoid telling parents their children’s gender identity or pronoun usage unless required to by law and when talking to parents “school personnel’s focus should be specifically school related and not on the student’s gender identity or expression.”

Parents Defending Education, a group that allows parents and educators an anonymous portal for reporting what’s going on in their schools, featured the Pennsylvania policy on their site; their Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi responded in a statement:

Schools only have authority over children because their parents delegate that authority. Parents give permission for the school to administer Tylenol or use their child’s photo on a flyer. It is a complete betrayal of trust for a school to withhold information and deliberately deceive parents about their child’s gender identity at school, a much more consequential issue than taking Tylenol.

Arizona’s new governor apparently disagrees. In fact, she’s working hard to go on record as dedicated to preventing her state’s parents the choice of using their child’s educational dollars in the manner they think best.