When former Ludlow, Massachusetts, teacher Bonnie Manchester was told by school administrators to call a female student by “his new gender name” and not to mention that to the child’s parents, that was the last straw.
“I did what any teacher would and should do: I told the parents,” Manchester told The Epoch Times.
The child was just 11 at the time, and as Manchester learned, the school was not only meeting secretly with the girl, but also in private with her 12-year-old brother regarding his purported interest in regendering as a girl.
Manchester, who had been a social studies teacher at the district’s Baird Middle School, was fired for telling the children’s parents about the school’s clandestine activity. Principal Stacy Monette called Manchester’s “conduct unbecoming a teacher,” referring to her “inappropriate communications with the parents of a student.”
“You shared sensitive confidential information about a student’s expressed gender identity against the wishes of the students,” Monette wrote in an April 16, 2021, letter terminating Manchester.
Monette, who was named the state’s Middle School Principal of the Year by the Massachusetts School Administrators Association in 2020, and other school administrators didn’t respond to requests for comment by press time.
It’s one of what appears to be a growing number of similar cases cropping up across the United States.
On Jan. 31, parents in Jacksonville, Florida, filed a federal lawsuit against their 12-year daughter’s school for having secret meetings with her to encourage her to identify as a boy, after she began expressing gender confusion at school. The parents found out only after the child tried to commit suicide by attempting to hang herself in a school bathroom.
Last week, a Salinas, California, parent filed a notice of intent to file a lawsuit against the Buena Vista Middle School for allegedly allowing two teachers “to secretly brainwash her teenage daughter into identifying as bisexual, and later as transgender.”
A week earlier in Texas, an anonymous teacher outed her school to a digital media outlet by releasing documents from the district’s training programs that show that teachers were being told to keep parents in the dark about any disclosures their children make at school about gender identity feelings.
“DO NOT contact their parents and out them to their families,” the documents advise.
Mary McAlister, senior counsel for The Children and Parental Rights Campaign, said her organization also represents a New York family about to file suit on similar grounds.
“Schools are secretly grooming kids to be gay,” McAlister told The Epoch Times, and “they have outside influences teaching them how to do that. Lesson No. 1 is to cut the parents out of the picture.”
According to the Florida lawsuit, which was filed by McAlister’s organization on behalf of the parents, the school withheld the information because they knew the parents were Catholic and wouldn’t agree with the children’s regendering.
The school’s guidance counselor conceded that she had been secretly meeting with the sixth-grader on a weekly basis over a span of four months to discuss gender identity issues, the lawsuit alleges.
In the California case, parent Jessica Konen claims that two teachers “coached” her daughter to change her identity at LGBTQ+ club meetings they held during their lunch hour.
In an exchange of emails, the child asked the teachers what name she should write on her school binders “in light of the fact she was not going by” a boy’s name.
“Write whatever your mother will approve and we’ll fix it when you get to school,” the teacher wrote back.
In another lawsuit filed in November 2021 in Florida, the school district admitted it was deliberately not telling parents if their children were having gender identity issues at school because a guidebook warned it could lead to homelessness for them.
The guidebook, called the LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide, warned that as many as 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, largely because many of them were rejected by their families.
In the Ludlow school case, Manchester said she knew the two kids were being groomed by the school. She had them both in her special education class and knew the family.
“I knew there was no way the kids thought this up on their own,” she told The Epoch Times.
Before she was fired, Manchester was also the subject of a sexual harassment complaint filed by the school librarian against her for objecting to sexually explicit LGBTQ+ books she ordered and placed in the school library.
Manchester and 18 other teachers submitted a letter to the school administration and school board complaining about the books. The librarian, who identified as “non-binary,” has since resigned; school Superintendent Todd Gazda also resigned over what he called an “intolerance of LGBTQ” individuals.
At the time of the superintendent’s resignation, several parents submitted a letter demanding that the school stop promoting transgender and homosexual ideas and to use a student’s given name and “actual pronouns.”
The parents also demanded that the school “stop retribution against teachers who expose these abuses to parents.”
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