School board officials work hard, and the work is not easy. But let’s be honest: their responsibilities are clear. They are elected to 1) meet children’s educational needs; 2) partner with parents to that end; and 3) help teachers navigate the challenges of today’s classrooms.
Sadly, Jefferson County Public Schools is 0 for 3.
We learned the score firsthand when my wife, Serena, went along on a multi-day school-sponsored trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with our 11-year-old daughter. On the first night, as students settled into their hotel rooms, Serena received a call from our little girl.
With a quiver in her voice, she told Serena that she had discovered that her bedmate was a boy and she didn’t know what to do.
We were shocked. Before the trip, we were assured that boys and girls would be roomed separately. The students were also told that boys were not even allowed on the girls’ floor without permission. No one told us our young daughter might be rooming and sharing a bed with a male student.
As a father, it made me feel helpless. You want to protect your child. To be there. To go get her. And you can’t do that when she’s over a thousand miles away.
Trying to figure out how our daughter was placed in such an uncomfortable position, we discovered that she wasn’t the only one.
Under the Jefferson County, Colorado school district’s (Jeffco) policy, students on school-sponsored trips aren’t roomed based on biological sex, but on “gender identity”—which Jeffco allows students to change at any time. Parents, though, aren’t told that an opposite-sex student might be changing clothes or sharing beds or shower facilities with their child on an overnight trip.
When Serena reported the issue to trip leaders, they asked our daughter to just switch beds in the same hotel room and pretend that she needed to do so to be near the air-conditioner—which was a lie.
When that didn’t work (because one of the other students offered to switch beds so the boy could remain with our daughter), they finally agreed to move the male student to a different room.
The whole situation was harmful and unnecessary, but that’s not all.
The school policy threatens children’s privacy and puts teachers in a difficult position, compelling them to keep some parents in the dark about what’s happening with their children. And it violates parents’ fundamental right to make informed decisions about their child’s upbringing, education, and privacy.
These kinds of things aren’t just happening to our family. We later learned of a sixth-grade boy who participated in one of Jeffco’s multi-day, overnight Outdoor Lab programs (which all 6th-grade students are expected to attend)—no cell phones allowed. The parents were assured their son would be sharing a cabin with other six-grade boys.
But once in the mountains, with no way to contact their parents, the boys learned their assigned counselor was actually a female who identified as nonbinary. She slept in the cabin with the boys and monitored their showers. Needless to say, this made the boys very uncomfortable. The boy refused to shower during the trip. And he and other boys resorted to changing inside their sleeping bags.
For nearly two years now, parents have been expressing their concerns to Jeffco officials. The school board’s response has effectively been to shrug their shoulders—as if they don’t care (or can’t do anything).
Parents—not school officials—have the right to decide whether their child will share a bed or bedroom with the opposite sex. We have a right and a duty to protect our children’s care and privacy, and we can’t do that if we don’t have all the information we need.
That’s why we, along with three other families and the help of our attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the district’s policies—a case that is now before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
We’re simply asking that Jeffco include—not exclude—all parents and not penalize our families because of our religious beliefs. We’re asking that they protect the privacy of all students, not just some.
Together, we’re standing up for our parental rights and our children’s privacy. And we hope and pray for a decision that will help a lot of other families in the future. That decision can’t come soon enough.
Jeffco is failing to fulfill its responsibilities to families, parents, and teachers—and unfortunately, it’s our children who are paying the biggest price.
