When it comes to any enterprise that delivers a good or service, there are vendors, and there are customers. This even applies to the government in many of its aspects; the Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, provides a service (vehicle registrations, driver's licenses) to customers, who are drivers. This applies as well to education. The vendors are the schools, colleges, and universities, and the customers are those who are paying the tab and receiving the services. In the case of K-12 education, that is the parents. Not the children; they are minors, and they are not capable of entering into agreements; the parents are the ones whose tax dollars support the schools; they are the ones who rely (in some cases, unwisely) on the schools to educate their children.
So when a school introduces an item into the curricula that has nothing to do with the main purpose of education, namely, producing young adults with marketable skills, the parents have a right to say something about it, especially when that item is controversial.
Like, say, "transgender awareness" classes. Now, a federal judge in Pennsylvania has laid down the law on the Mt. Lebanon School District for not informing parents of an upcoming "transgender awareness" class, nor allowing the parents to opt their kids out of these classes.
Oh, yes, the classes are meant to be taught to first-graders.
⏰NEW:
— Sarah Parshall Perry (@SarahPPerry) October 8, 2024
A federal court in Pennsylvania has just granted a major summary judgment win to parents of 1st grade children (6 & 7 year olds) against Mt. Lebanon School District for failing to provide the parents advance notice of gender identity instruction or an opportunity to opt… pic.twitter.com/NKLncvYaLq
It's inconceivable that these classes should be taught to kids this age in any case; it's an utter and total waste of the taxpayer's dollars and the school faculty's time. K-12 education simply has no business dragging people's 6 and 7-year-olds into this hooraw, much less not even informing the parents or allowing them to pull their kids from these classes. No longer.
A federal court in Pennsylvania has just granted a major summary judgment win to parents of 1st grade children (6 & 7 year olds) against Mt. Lebanon School District for failing to provide the parents advance notice of gender identity instruction or an opportunity to opt their small children out.
The "noncurricular" materials (presented during "Transgender Awareness Day") included discussion of "transitioning," & a jaw-dropping statement from the teacher that:
"...when children are born, parents make a guess whether they're a boy or a girl. Sometimes parents are wrong."
Note that the last sentence is utter corral litter. The parents are not guessing anything, barring some extremely rare genetic abnormality that can present with sexual ambiguities. That's not what they mean; what they mean is utter hogwash. The parents aren't making a guess; sex is determined genetically, at conception, and at birth, the attending physician (or whoever stands in that place) merely makes an observation as to the baby's sex, and they are never — or only extremely rarely, in the case of those rare genetic conditions — wrong.
These are facts.
In the decision, the presiding judge wrote:
“In elementary school, it is constitutionally impermissible for a school to provide teachers with the unbridled discretion to determine to teach about a noncurricular topic—transgender identity—and not to provide notice and opt out rights based on parents’ moral and religious beliefs about transgender instruction, while providing notice and opt out rights for other sensitive secular and religious topics.”
This is correct. And it applies not just to this unimaginably stupid idea of teaching "transgender awareness" to little kids but to a broad range of stupidity on this issue. We aren't talking about adults, after all, deciding for themselves; we aren't even talking about parents deciding to teach transgender dogma to their own kids. We are talking about a school system deciding to teach this controversial topic to little kids without informing their parents, and that cannot be borne.
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Coach Blames 'Politics'
According to the filing, it was one teacher who unilaterally made the decision to present this material to little kids. Baloney. The school had to have been involved, even if it was just in the process of approving this teacher's lesson plans, as I'm given to understand is the usual practice.
No longer, at least not in Pennsylvania. Parents' rights have won the day, and that's the best outcome we can hope for in this ever-more-absurd battle over biology over ideology.
