OPINION:
Seattle Public Schools is under an astonishing misconception: that it owns its students and the rights of those students’ custodial parents constitute a mere inconvenience to be circumvented.
The notion that these minors are, as the U.S. Supreme Court once noted, mere “creatures of the state,” is even more spurious in light of the court’s recent determination in Mahmoud v. Taylor that by preventing religious parents from opting their children out of an LGBTQ-themed curriculum, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland had interfered with the right of those parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
Seattle Public Schools doesn’t care about such judicial trivialities. It is apparently more interested in aggressive sexual politicking and indoctrination that run counter to constitutional and statutory federal law. Its flagging National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 2024 make the point: Since 2019, reading and math scores in Seattle Public Schools have been declining, while absenteeism has increased. Its trans-obsessed policies aren’t just making it worse; they are illegal.
That’s why we have asked the U.S. departments of Education and Justice to investigate.
Among other questionable prohibitions, Seattle Public Schools blocks parents from opting their children out of “LGBTQ Inclusive Instruction” lessons despite the Supreme Court’s ruling to the contrary. Seattle Public Schools seems also to have forgotten the federal privacy law known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, which applies to every state or local educational association that receives federal funding, including Seattle Public Schools.
In addition to the court’s ruling in Mahmoud, the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment provides the right of curricular examination and opt-out for parents of minor children when those children are subjected to class instruction, surveys or evaluations related to any number of intrusive topics. These include political affiliations or beliefs of the student or his or her family, mental or psychological problems of the student or his or her family, and the sexual behavior or attitudes of the student or the student’s parent.
When the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment was enacted in 1974, U.S. Senate debates identified the benefits of administering surveys responsibly while emphasizing the need to involve parents. Yet Seattle Public Schools would prefer not to involve parents. Instead, it prefers to indoctrinate children by employing the kind of normative curriculum the Supreme Court found constitutionally violative of parents’ First Amendment rights in Mahmoud.
What’s more, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Procedure 3211SP instructs teachers to hide a student’s gender transition at school from that student’s parents, making Seattle Public Schools one of the more than 1,200 school districts across the country to require staff to lie to the people who know that student best: his or her parents.
Not only does this violate the long-recognized right to direct the upbringing of one’s own child, a right first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1923’s Meyer v. Nebraska, but it also violates the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This law — often incorrectly cited by schools as the reason they cannot “forcibly out” a gender nonconforming child to his or her parents — dictates that a child’s parent may examine and, where inaccurate, correct a minor’s educational record until that child turns 18.
Seattle Public Schools ignores this federal mandate. It hides the ball by requiring school staff to avoid notations of gender identity in formal educational records and divesting parents of their right to full knowledge of and participation in their child’s educational experience. At least two constitutional challenges are pending at the Supreme Court regarding these types of policies.
Seattle Public Schools school administrators are also soliciting “gender-affirming supplies” such as chest binders, “trans tape,” nipple guards and tucking underwear from Seattle Children’s Hospital for the district’s “Community Health Lockers.” Why? To facilitate minor children’s gender identity transitions, of course.
It’s not enough that Seattle mandates a normative LGBTQ-themed curriculum without the right of parental opt-out or that Seattle Public Schools hides the gender identity information of minors from parents. The school system now appears poised to provide all manner of facilitation for minors to socially transition at school.
American parents are fed up. Their school-age children are academically failing, frequently indoctrinated, alienated from them and socially transitioned behind their backs. Thus far, the quest to vindicate their parental rights has proved largely unsuccessful. The Supreme Court has yet to assess the constitutionality of “gender secrecy” policies in public schools.
The Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment offer no private right of action upon which to sue when schools violate a parent’s right under either. Still, they do offer the possibility of drawing the hoary eye of federal agency investigation and, potentially, the loss of precious federal funding for schools found to be in violation. That’s none too small a consequence for violating federal privacy law, and it’s one the administration has proved keen to exercise.
It’s our request that the administration turn its eye to Seattle Public Schools, and soon.
• Sarah Parshall Perry is vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.