Can Parents Really Parent When Public Schools Cut Them Out?

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Is my child going to be OK?

It’s one of the most basic, yet crucial questions a parent can ask—and for good reason. After all, parents have the primary responsibility for their children’s mental and physical health. But what are parents supposed to do when public schools, where kids spend almost seven hours each day, hide important information about their children’s well-being?

Unfortunately, it’s become increasingly common for schools across the country to cut parents out of important conversations and usurp their role. Schools are stonewalling parents who want basic information about what’s happening to their children. In many cases, those schools are pitting students against their own moms and dads.

This is hurting families—and it needs to stop.

None of this is hypothetical. It’s exactly what happened to Maine mom Amber Lavigne, who demanded answers after discovering that Great Salt Bay Community School officials had kept her 13-year-old daughter’s gender transition a secret and encouraged the student not to tell her parents. She says a school social worker even gave the child a chest binder (an undergarment that transgender people use to flatten their breasts) and told the girl that she need not tell her mother and that he wasn’t going to either.

When Lavigne confronted the school about it, she says school officials tried to justify the social worker’s actions. Lavigne, whom I’m representing in her federal lawsuit against the school board, later found out that school personnel had been referring to her daughter by a different name and different pronouns—all without her knowledge.

“It truly is like the epitome of driving a wedge between a child and their parents,” Lavigne said in a recent interview.

Lavigne isn’t alone. Parents in California (pdf), Florida (pdf), Massachusetts, and Wyoming (pdf) have all sued school officials for hiding information about the schools’ use of gender pronouns for their children. Meanwhile, both the St. Paul (pdf) and the Kansas City, Kansas (pdf), public school districts have implemented policies that require school officials to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns and prohibit officials from telling the parents without consent from the student.

Public school secrets aren’t limited to matters of gender identity, either. Plenty of parents have asked simple questions about what their children are learning—only to get slapped with thousands of dollars in excessive public records fees.

Activist educators and public school bureaucrats seem to think they know what children need better than those kids’ own parents.

“I have a master’s degree,” one Arizona teacher proclaimed this year while urging state lawmakers not to support parental rights legislation. “What do the parents have?”

And then there’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who wrote in a tweet, “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.”

Parents may not have the same advanced degrees as teachers and school administrators, and it might be teachers who are with students for a few hours during the day, but educators aren’t parents.

It’s parents who know the things their children love and hate; the foods they will and won’t eat; the nightmares that keep them up. It’s parents who are charged with feeding their kids, clothing them, putting a roof over their heads, taking them to the doctor when they’re sick, and guiding them throughout their lives. Parents—not teachers—carry out these responsibilities because that’s the very essence of who they are.

Yet for many schools, it’s not enough that parents entrust them to educate their children. Schools are replacing parents’ judgment with their own—and they’re doing it in secret. Parents simply can’t make informed decisions if schools are hiding important information about their kids.

Put another way, the U.S. Supreme Court has said for more than a century that parents have a constitutional right to control and direct the education, upbringing, and health care decisions of their children. But how can parents do those things effectively if schools are keeping secrets from them?

That’s why it’s so important to equip parents with the tools they need to raise their kids well, especially knowledge.

It’s time for public schools to respect parents’ role and be open with them about what’s happening to their kids—so that parents can parent, as is their responsibility, their privilege, and their purpose.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.