Students in a school district in Southern California may have to make a difficult decision: either room with a transgender-identifying student or forgo participating in an overnight field trip.
If parents express concerns about their child rooming with a transgender-identifying student of the opposite biological sex, staff at the Newport-Mesa Unified School District will listen to the parents’ concerns but emphasize that the rooming assignment is not up to them, according to emails from 2021 and 2022 obtained by the Center for American Liberty and shared with The Daily Signal.
The only alternative for students uncomfortable with staying in a room with transgender students is to opt out of the trip, as explained by Sarah Coley, the school district’s administrative director, in an email to school district employees regarding a sixth-grade science trip.
“You would say to the students/parents, ‘If you have questions about the assignment, please feel free to discuss with me,’” Coley wrote in the email. “Then, if a parent says ‘hey, I don’t want my student with [who],’ you could provide an ear to listen and consider whether the student is a good fit, but the eventual response would be, ‘If you / your student is not comfortable with the rooming assignments and process of staying with other students in a room, then they can elect not to participate in this optional trip.’”
Coley’s email continues: “Parents and students do not get to pick, and saying I don’t want to stay with ‘Susie’ because ‘Susie isn’t a real girl,’ is no different than saying, ‘I don’t want to stay with Sara because Sara is [white/older/non-religious, etc.]’”
Coley, a 2018 alumna of California State University Long Beach, declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Signal.
A mother, who requested anonymity for fear of threats to her family, shared with The Daily Signal that parents should be able to trust that their child is safe with school officials.
However, she expressed her lack of confidence in the Newport-Mesa district and decided to homeschool her children and remove them from the district several years ago.
“You just have to assume that my child is not safe, which is really scary,” she said. “The school does not have your child’s best interest at heart. They are more concerned with social justice issues.”
Mark Trammell, executive director of the Center for American Liberty, the group that conducted the public records request, criticized what he called the Newport-Mesa school district’s inconsistency in using privacy rights to hide gender identity from parents while ignoring privacy rights in making rooming assignments.
“It is ironic that school districts cite a student’s right to privacy as justification for schools keeping secrets from parents, but completely disregard student privacy rights when forcing girls to room with a boy pretending to be a girl,” Trammell said in an email to The Daily Signal. “Either the right to privacy exists or it doesn’t; schools cannot selectively apply it when it advances their woke political narratives.”
The Newport-Mesa school district, where a high school promoted an LGBTQ organization assisting minors in obtaining referrals for irreversible transgender surgeries and hormone regimens, is the same district where Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, California, had QR codes in its hallways leading students to an “LGBTQ+ Resources” webpage with links to “LGBTQ Affirming Therapy.”
Following the publication of The Daily Signal’s report on Wednesday, the high school removed its resource page.
Coley also championed “Sexuality and Gender Galaxies” in emails to school district staff members that provide definitions of terms, including “two spirit,” “asexual,” “polysexual,” “clear platonic,” and “androgynous.”
Based on the emails, it is evident that Coley serves as the primary contact for “Gender Support Plans,” which require the form filler to specify the extent of parental support for a student’s gender identity.
Students aged 12 and above are allowed to create gender support plans within the Newport-Mesa school district without their parents’ awareness or approval.
The district stores these plans in a locked drawer in the administrative office, as revealed in the emails.
On Thursday, the Newport-Mesa school district denied using support plans in an email to The Daily Signal.
“We do not refer students for gender-affirming care nor do we have gender support plans without parental involvement,” public relations officer Annette Franco wrote in the email. “The student-driven resources are intended to complement the essential role that parents play in their children’s lives.”
In a follow-up email to district staff, Coley suggested that even children as young as 2 years old could identify as transgender.
Therefore, the school district should adopt preferred pronouns for students of all ages and honor the requests of students to keep their gender identity hidden from their parents.
“The student’s age is not a factor,” Coley wrote in the email. “For example, children as early as age two are expressing a different gender identity.”
“It is strongly suggested that teachers privately ask transgender or gender nonconforming students at the beginning of the school year how they want to be addressed in class, in correspondence to the home, or at conferences with the student’s parents,” Coley wrote.
The administrator said that intentionally using a student’s given name and personal pronouns instead of their preferred ones qualifies as “harassment.”
“If a member of the school community intentionally uses a student’s incorrect name and pronoun, or persistently refuses to respect a student’s chosen name and pronouns, that conduct should be treated as harassment,” Coley said in the email. “That type of harassment can create a hostile learning environment, violate the transgender student’s privacy rights, and increase that student’s risk for harassment by other members of the school community.”
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