Parents’ rights groups and their Republican allies have won some key education battles recently over leftist lessons in U.S. classrooms, but with the start of a new school year, defenders of transgender rights, critical race theory and LGBTQ curricula are regrouping for Round 2.
Across the county, high-profile Democrats are racing to reinforce woke activists, left-leaning school district administrators and liberal teachers in what is shaping up as another academic year of skirmishes with conservative students and their parents.
That includes New Jersey, where Democratic Attorney General Matthew Platkin won last week a temporary injunction against newly passed parental notification rules in three districts, a decision he called “a major victory for civil rights — especially for the civil rights of our State’s LGBTQIA+ students.”
Michele Exner, senior adviser for Parents Defending Education, warned that left-of-center elected officials like Mr. Platkin are “really underestimating the parental-rights movement.”
“If these officials think they’re going to kick off the school year by excluding parents, keeping them in the dark, and keeping up these same political fights that do nothing to help the students in the long run as far as academics go, I think they’re completely miscalculating the moment,” Ms. Exner told The Washington Times.
School hasn’t even started in New Jersey, and yet parents held a protest last week outside the courthouse where the judge slapped the injunction on parental notification rules passed in June by the Middletown, Marlboro and Manalapan-Englishtown school boards.
Mr. Platkin insisted that “the State has never sought and never will seek a ‘ban’ on parental notification,” a declaration challenged by Frank Capone, president of the Middletown Township Board of Education.
“Notifying parents about issues affecting their children is not discrimination,” said Mr. Capone in a statement. “Contrary to the Attorney General’s false statement that he has never sought to ban parental notification, that is precisely what he did here.”
He said the policy provides for parental notification when students change their official record; when they want to participate in a club or sport of a different gender; when they want to use the opposite-sex bathroom, and when receiving referrals for mental-health counseling.
“The Attorney General is taking a premature victory lap before this case was actually decided,” said Jacqueline Tobacco, board vice president. “The State’s position is preventing some of the most vulnerable students from receiving the support they need from parents and mental health counselors and eroding trust between parents and our district.”
Mr. Capone and Ms. Tobacco were political newcomers who ousted incumbents in November 2020, the beginning of a wave that swept in hundreds of candidates backed by groups such as 1776 Project, Moms for Liberty and Back to School PAC, driven by frustration over pandemic shutdowns and racially charged curriculum.
In the last year, however, alarm over gender ideology has risen to the forefront. An estimated 1,040 school districts have policies allowing staff to conceal students’ transgender or gender-nonconforming status, including new names and pronouns, from families, as shown on the Parents Defending Education tracker.
Democrats have embraced such policies, saying they enable schools to protect transgender students from unsupportive parents, while requiring parental notification amounts to forcing the “outing of LGBT people before they are ready,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, put it.
On the other side are voters. A CRC Research poll conducted in March for Parents Defending Education showed 74% of registered voters “believe schools should not help students change their gender identity without parental consent.”
In addition, 71% of those surveyed “oppose letting schools withhold information about a child’s gender identity from their parents,” the poll found.
Post-pandemic polls show that Democrats’ double-digit lead on education has evaporated. A Democrats for Education Reform survey released last month found Democrats trailing Republicans by 3 percentage points on trust in education in four battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
The education issue was credited with pushing Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin over the top in his 2021 gubernatorial race. Earlier this year, the Virginia Department of Education approved a state policy prohibiting schools from concealing “material information” about students from parents, including gender status.
The result has been a clash with Northern Virginia school boards refusing to change their policies. Mr. Youngkin’s office issued a statement last week saying the Fairfax County School Board is expected to “follow the law.”
In Los Angeles, hundreds of protesters marched Tuesday to the Los Angeles Unified School District building in a demonstration organized by Leave Our Kids Alone. Three people were reportedly detained by police in a skirmish with LGBTQ counter-protesters.
The clash comes with four school districts, including the Chino Valley Unified, passing rules requiring school staff to notify parents if their children begin identifying as transgender, defying Democrats pushing pro-transgender bills in the state legislature.
Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta announced earlier this month that he would investigate the district’s “policy of forced gender status disclosure.”
“Chino Valley Unified’s forced outing policy threatens the safety and well-being of LGBTQ+ students vulnerable to harassment and potential abuse from peers and family members unaccepting of their gender identity,” said Mr. Bonta in an Aug. 4 statement.
Even so, California school districts are continuing to defy state Democrats. Both the Anderson Union and Temecula Valley Unified school board passed parental-notification policies this week on transgender status, which Ms. Exner described as an encouraging sign.
“The Anderson school district was the first to pass parental notification in Northern California,” she said. “The fact that you’re seeing this reaction from school districts in California is a good indicator of where we might go in the future as parents get fed up.”
Democratic legislators are fighting back with Assembly Bill 1078, which would raise the threshold for banning books from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority; and Senate Bill 596, which would fine those who create a “substantial disruption” at board meetings.
Drawing the lion’s share of attention is AB 665, which would allow children ages 12 and up to agree to mental-health treatment and “residential shelter services” without parental consent if a “professional person” deems the child mature enough to consent.
A “professional person” may include a “credentialed school psychologist.” The bill has already passed the Assembly.
Democratic Assemblywoman Wendy Carillo said the bill is needed for “removing barriers to mental health access,” while Our Duty attorney Erin Friday called it “the worst bill I have ever read.”
“This is the ultimate goal: Pull that child from parents like me who believe in biological reality, put them in a residential facility, take a lot of money from those parents, too — fighting, taking classes — bankrupt them to try to get their child back, but in the interim, that child is going to be owned by the state,” Ms. Friday said at a rally last week in Sacramento.
Ms. Friday urged parents’ rights advocates to keep fighting in the face of opposition from the left, saying even moderate Democrats like herself are now saying “enough.”
“Be hopeful, because I’ll tell you, two years ago, there were few people standing up ” she said. “And now we have thousands.”
