A school district in northern Virginia is requiring all teachers to complete a training program that says all students – including preschoolers – can request to be addressed by different names or pronouns without parental permission.
Fairfax County Public Schools – a school district that has made headlines for woke policies and clashes over teaching critical race theory – started the program ‘Supporting Gender Expansive and Transgender Youth’ on July 22.
The training details requests students can make without parental permission, according to materials obtained by the Washington Examiner.
These requests include asking to be called ‘by his chosen name in class,’ requests to use ‘a private bathroom’ and ‘requests to use the locker room that corresponds with her identified gender.’
The slides also inform teachers on how to respond to students who express a desire to be addressed by a new name or pronoun.
The slides, which were shown at the training on July 22, say teachers must ‘create student centered experiences’ and ‘affirm and sustain gender identity, gender expression, and racial, linguistic, ability, and cultural identities.’
Teachers are also instructed to ‘elevate voices of the marginalized’ and ‘recognize and disrupt systems that create inequitable outcomes.’
Nicole Neily, president of the parent activist organization Parents Defending Education told the Washington Examiner that with the training, the school district is encouraging students to lead a double life at school.’
‘By removing parental notification from this process, FCPS is essentially encouraging students to lead a double life at school,’ Neily said.
‘For a district that spends so much money on students’ emotional well-being, it’s hard to see how undermining the relationship between a child and his or her family will be beneficial in the long-run.’
She appeared on The National Desk this week discuss students returning to school, stating that parents are worried about what they’re children will be taught.
‘Rather than being excited — they’re worried,’ she said. ‘Because instead of being treated as partners in their children’s education, parents are still being held at an arm’s-length.’
One slide shown at the teacher training in July shows the student’s options for requesting to identify by another name or gender. The first option is a name change in class, where a teacher is required to address the student by their ‘chosen’ name.
The second option allows students to use the locker room that corresponds with her identified gender, a third option is the student’s request of the use of a private bathroom. The fourth option – none of the above – is checked, meaning parental permission is not needed for any.
The training program was assigned a month after the district’s school board approved an expansion to its student code of conduct to include penalties for students who ‘misgendered’ transgender students.
Fairfax County Schools have been at the peak of some of the nation’s culture wars over education.
Last week, it was revealed that the district was accused of waiting a year to fire a counselor after they found out he’d been arrested for soliciting an underage prostitute.
Darren Lamar Thornton, 50, remained employed by Glasgow Middle School in Lincolnia, Virginia, even after he’d been convicted of a sex crime and a year after they’d been notified of his arrest, according to WUSA9.
Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle C. Reid confirmed he’d been terminated and FCPS was petitioning the state to revoke Thornton’s license.
Thornton was trapped in a sting via an online chat with an undercover officer who said she was 17, and Thornton agreed to meet. He was arrested when he showed up at her apartment, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
Thornton was convicted and sentenced in March 2022 to five years but had his sentence suspended for good behavior.
Police said the school district was notified when he was arrested both in November 2020 and again in June 2022 after his arrest in another sting for solicitation of prostitution and eventually had to register as a sex offender.
It has since emerged that those notifications were not received.
Reid, in a letter to parents last week, claimed they took ‘immediate steps’ to fire Thornton, but records show he remained employed for over a year after his initial arrest.
A spokesperson for the police in Chesterfield, where Thornton was arrested, said their records show they informed Fairfax County Public Schools of Thornton’s 2020 arrest the next day and again when he was arrested in June 2022.
In June, the school board made ‘deadnaming’ – the act of referring to a trans person with the name they used before they transitioned – a suspendable offense for students.
Fairfax County is also notorious for scrapping admission to its prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School on the basis of exam grades.
It deployed other means of determining admission to boost ‘equity,’ but was sued by Asian-American parents, with that lawsuit ongoing.
And last September, a school board member claimed a moment of silence to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks would cause harm to minorities who faced persecution as a result of the terror attack.
* Article from: dailymail.co.uk
(*) www.WhitePrideHomeSchool.com
