A Texas lawmaker has called for an investigation of North Texas school board members who reportedly held an “illicit” meeting strategizing how to delay board action and silence parents regarding transgender policy.
Republican State Rep. Matt Shaheen of Collin County sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) on March 13, requesting them to investigate three Frisco Independent School District trustees who were secretly recorded while apparently discussing ways to obstruct conservatives from meddling with the district’s transgender bathroom policy.
“This is a clear example of parents being silenced,” Shaheen told the Epoch Times in an interview. “They’re trying to silence certain parents and not others.”
In the secret recording of the Frisco coffee house meeting provided to The Epoch Times, a woman identifying herself as Frisco school board president Rene Archambault said she has “mechanisms in place” to delay votes surrounding transgender policies.
“If they ask for anything transgender, it will be on a special meeting in the middle of the day that no one goes to,” Archambault said
“Every time it’s on an agenda, the entire hate crowd now can come and speak,” she added.
“I absolutely can understand how the words that I spoke during the meeting with parents that was secretly recorded could cause concern out of context, but what I shared are ways in which that I’ve tried to bring the focus back to academics and away from politics,” she wrote.
“I will not cave to political pressure and tactics,” she added, “Public education is under attack.”
Her post detailed how she felt local Texas state representatives “put FISD in the crosshairs of this national movement to undermine the good work of public schools for years in an effort to privatize billions of dollars. Don’t buy into it.”
Local Texas lawmakers have presented and support bills on parental rights and school choice.
In the recording, Archambault can be heard saying she was able to delay the vote on transgender bathrooms from July to November.
That delay described in the audio prompted Shaheen to write a the March 13 letter to TEA commissioner Mike Morath saying that trustees Archambault, Dynette Davis, board secretary, and Debbie Gillespie, board vice president, were potentially violating their operating procedures.
The rule in question states that board items requested by two or more trustees must be put on the agenda not to exceed 60 days.
“I am requesting a formal investigation of these Trustees by your office, as these allegations violate rules that are under TEA’s jurisdiction,” he wrote.
Neither Archambault nor the other trustees, Davis and Gillespie, reportedly identified on the recording, immediately responded to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
Gillespie is also president of the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), a left-wing group.
News of the recording came to light in dramatic fashion as Frisco ISD trustees brought a motion to hire an attorney to investigate allegations leveled at conservative trustee Marvin Lowe.
Lowe was accused in a February article published by The Dallas Morning News of making inappropriate comments to a then 16-year-old transgender student from a school district outside of North Texas during a TASB educational convention in the fall.
But the motion was not seconded, and died after Lowe dropped a bombshell, announcing news of a secret recording where three liberal trustees were conspiring to silence parents that was going to be made public by local media.
Lowe denied any wrongdoing at the meeting and added the liberal board members who wanted to vote to investigate him should be prepared to hold themselves up to the same standards.
Lowe told The Epoch Times he did not say anything inappropriate while speaking with the transgender teen back in the fall. The transgender student complained to the Dallas news outlet of feeling “dehumanized, violated, and unsafe” during the discussion with Lowe.
Lowe said he told the transgender student, who spoke on gender issues last September at the convention, that a lot of people don’t understand transgenderism but that people do care and wanted the best for her.
When the trans student’s mother heard him talking to the teen, she came over to join in the conversation thinking Lowe was affirming the transgender teen, he said.
The conversation turned negative when Lowe said he clarified to the mother that he felt boys and girls should only use the bathrooms of their biological sex at birth.
“They figured out I wasn’t for this transgender stuff,” he said, adding that he explained it wasn’t a good idea to have “naked” male and female students sharing the same locker rooms either.
Lowe, who is disabled, said he was not “escorted” out of the room, as a transgender activist alleged in the article. He said he left when he was asked to do so.
Lowe believes the vote to investigate him was politically motivated because no action was taken until recently, just a few months until the May 6 school board election. He believes the plan was to discredit him in hopes of damaging other conservatives who are running for seats held by Davis and Gillespie.
“I do believe it is about the upcoming election,” he said. “It was just going to be a setup.”
In the recording, Archambault referred to a transgender bathroom policy that Lowe and fellow conservative Stephanie Elad brought before the board in November to prohibit transgender students from using a bathroom different from their biological sex.
Trustees passed the policy 7–0 that students would use the restrooms of their sex at birth, but allows transgender students a reasonable accommodation such as using a single unisex bathroom.
While that may have sounded like a victory for Frisco parents who opposed the practice, the district posted on its website that the new policy won’t stop transgender students from using any bathroom if they ask for an accommodation.
Shannon Ayers, education lead for the County Citizens Defending Freedom watchdog group in Collin County, said trustees on the left have shot down three recent proposals that would have made it easier for parents to be heard.
“They said the ‘quiet part’ out loud right there in the coffee shop,” Ayers said. “It’s not really a surprise to find that these board members are actively conspiring against parents.”
The development at Frisco ISD may represent a microcosm of what parents nationwide have suspected all along—that some teachers, administrators, and officials are undermining their rights and teaching radical sexual and racial ideologies to their children.
This month, Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a New York Assistant superintendent in the Meadow School District “covertly” pushing a political agenda through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that included sexual identity.
In the video, the administrator discussed how the district secretly taught DEI to students throughout the community and how they weeded out conservative teachers to weaken the power of conservatives.
While many red states are forging ahead to outlaw transgender medicine and strengthen parental rights, blue states such as Connecticut are trying to solidify the rights of minor children to make potentially life-altering decisions on their own.
Lawmakers in Connecticut introduced House Bill 6192 that would make a student’s communication with a teacher concerning sexual identity private and not available through open records requests.
Ayers said she believes the Frisco recording is indicative of a nationwide assault on parental rights that must be fought on the local level.
Parents in the district who were called “the hate crowd” need to wake up and vote during the May 6 school board race, she said.
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