What Did You Say?

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2022

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/29/colorado-school-board-toolkit-educators-student-transitions-parents/

A Colorado school board proposed a “gender expansive” toolkit that directs educators on how to address transgender and non-binary students, including keeping gender transitions a secret from parents, according to the Post Independent.

The Roaring Fork School Board in Carbondale, Colorado, heard public comment on Wednesday with plans to vote on the toolkit on Oct. 11, according to the Post Independent. The “Toolkit for Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive/Nonconforming Students” advises educators to keep a student’s gender identity a secret from their parents if the student wishes and to make changes to school records as they see fit. (RELATED: Parent Group Challenges School District’s Planned ‘Transgender Awareness Week’)

“We previously affirmed students’ rights without yet specifying supporting practices,” Roaring Fork School District Chief Of Student And Family Services Anna Cole wrote in a memo to the board. “We have since learned the importance of providing clear guidance and programmatic support and have heard requests from students and staff for more explicit procedures. The toolkit is our response to these requests.”

The toolkit suggests a “gender tree” to explain gender identity and calls the soil, “societal influence,” which is the way “social, cultural and institutional influence” shape “gendered individuals.” Included is “fluidity and history” as the “rings of the tree” to represent a person’s “deeply-felt sense of gender” that can expand beyond man and woman to “genderqueer and agender,” the toolkit showed.

Under the “toolkit,” educators are advised to allow students to use whichever restroom and locker room corresponds with their gender identity. On overnight trips, students should receive accommodations “on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration.”

“It’s one thing to identify as a gender, but quite another to compel others to use special pronouns, and to open bathrooms and locker rooms to transgender students or allow transgender students onto sports teams of the opposite sex,” a board meeting attendee said to the Post Independent. “The rights of those not identifying as transgendered are being trampled.”

A Civil Union license is signed at a midnight ceremony in the Denver Office of the Clerk and Recorder, at the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building on May 1, 2013 in Denver, Co. Colorado is the eighth state to have civil unions or similar laws implemented, permitting unmarried couples, both gay and heterosexual, the ability to form civil unions and get similar rights to those of married couples. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)

In Florida, a school board implemented a sexual education curriculum that links to Planned Parenthood documents and teaches 12-year-olds “all the ways pregnancy can occur.” An Ohio school is allowing educators to wear LGBTQ badges, despite parental pushback, in an effort to show students they are allies to the community.

The Roaring Fork School Board and Roaring Fork School District did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.