Anchorage Moms for Liberty tells school board to stop hiding kids’ gender ID from parents
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mid a relatively short Aug. 6 meeting, the Anchorage School Board was given a strongly-worded admonishment to end the practice of hiding students’ sexual identity issues from their parents.
Gabby Ide, who heads up the Anchorage chapter of Moms For Liberty gave an impassioned address to the leftist-controlled school board, imploring them to adopt a proposed policy that would eradicate administrative guidelines that instruct teachers to keep parents in the dark when teachers and school staff agree to promote a sexually confused student’s notion that they may be trapped in the wrong body, with the wrong sex.
While the school board has never actually voted on such a policy, it has allowed district administrators to create and enforce rules that limit parental notification and involvement, whenever bureaucrats think parents might not be on board with so-called “gender transitioning.”
“The very existence of these guidelines – inviting students to keep secrets from their parents – harms the parent-child relationship, which the U.S. Supreme Court has held is constitutionally protected,” Ide told board members. “Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children. Parents are a child’s first and most impactful educators.”
She pointed out that parents are the greatest advocates for their kids.
“We are the experts on our children,” Ide continued. “Hiding critical information about kids from their parents is outside the district’s authority.”
She urged the board to adopt a proposal by the body’s lone conservative member, Dave Donley, which would require that school officials to meet with parents regarding any gender, legal name, or pronoun changes that a child requests during the school year. It also mandates that written permission from parents is needed “before the name or pronoun used by the school to address or refer to the parent’s child in person, on school identification, or in school records is changed.”
To date, the school board has declined to vote on the proposal by letting it languish in a sub-committee for extended “review.”
By declining to act, the board has allowed the administration to instruct teachers in how to connive with students to keep parents out of the loop. In particular, teachers are told to not use a student’s new names or pronouns when speaking to parents, unless the child says it’s okay.
The rationale is that parents may not be as supportive as educators are when it comes to controversial gender transitioning and radical LGBTQ ideology.
Ide dismantled the idea that schools should leverage teachers against parents, calling it “egregious” and “unethical.”
“Political agendas, like gender ideology, do not belong in our educational institutions,” she said, adding that schools should focus on the basics, especially when two-thirds of Anchorage students cannot even read at grade level.
“There are two sexes, zero genders and infinite personalities,” Ide emphasized. “How are teachers expected to educate if administrators refuse to adhere to biological facts and basic grammar definitions? It requires a special kind of cognitive dissonance to insist that education is your role, while education outcomes remain dismal, and children are encouraged to abandon their primary support system.”
She ended by calling on schools to partner with parents rather than “conniving behind our backs.”
“We do not co-parent with the district,” Ide concluded.
Towards the end of the meeting, Donley told his fellow board members that he introduced his parental rights proposal last year in order to direct school administrators on this important matter, something the board was elected to oversee.
“I believe it’s time for us to step up and vote on our own guidelines,” he said. “It’s not something that should be just left to an administrative guideline.”
Guidelines, he noted, are supposed to follow board policies.
“Policies are adopted only by the board,” Donley emphasized. “This parental notification matter is so significant, and so important to families, that I believe it deserves a vote of the board and not just included in an administrative guideline.”
School Board President Andy Holleman responded by suggesting there was nothing wrong with the current status quo.
He claimed that in his 12 years working in Anchorage schools he never once felt pressure to be dishonest with a parent.
“I would hope that no teacher in this district does, and if they ever do, that they should come to the board and register how that came to pass,” he said. “There are some difficult conversations, to be sure. Unfortunately, we’ve become embroiled in issues we never want to be.”
He then suggested that creating a board policy might make things more difficult for schools.
“The question that I always have is, does board policy help or does board policy make it even more complicated than it already is?” Holleman said.