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[UPDATE] Three families have filed a lawsuit against a Colorado school district after the district, in separate incidents, placed a boy identifying as a girl in a hotel room with girls and placed a female chaperone identifying as a man with middle school boys, allowing her to sleep in the same room and supervise their showers.
“Although parents place trust in public schools every day when they drop off their children, parents who send their children on a school-sponsored overnight trip must place special trust in the school and its employees to protect their children,” the suit says.
“Jefferson County Public Schools failed its mandate. For school trips, JeffCo tells parents that ‘girls will be roomed together on one floor and boys will be roomed together on a different floor.’ But what JeffCo fails to mention is that they have redefined the words ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ to mean a student’s asserted gender identity rather than sex.”
The issue began when Joe and Serena Wailes’s daughter, who was a 5th-grade student at the time, went on a trip with the school to Washington, D.C. Their daughter who is referred to as D.W., was in a hotel room with who she thought were three other girls. The student she was sharing a bed with told her that he was actually a boy who believed himself to be a girl.
D.W. was so upset she locked herself in the bathroom and called her parents. The school tried to get D.W. to switch beds, not telling the other female students the student was a male. Eventually the district moved the male student to another room but lied about why.
The Wailes’s later learned that it is district policy to allow students to use the bathroom, locker room and shower, or overnight lodging that matches their chosen gender rather than biological sex. The policy also requires that a transgender student’s biological sex be hidden from other parents and students. Parents are not told that their child will be rooming with another student and are not given the choice to opt out.
When news of D.W.’s experience broke, other parents began speaking out about similar experiences their children had. Bret and Susanne Roller, who joined the suit with their 11-year-old son, say that their son was forced to share overnight accommodations with an 18-year-old female high school student, who also supervised boys’ showers.
Their son, known as B.R. in the complaint, went to a weeklong outdoor camping trip called Outdoor Lab, a required part of 6th-grade curriculum in the district. They were told their son would be placed in a cabin with six to thirty other boys and that there would be three male high school counselors and one male college counselor supervising them.
B.R. learned when he got to the camp that one of his counselors was not a male but a female, and she would not only be sleeping and changing in the same cabin but would be tasked with supervising the boys’ showers.
The female student, who only days before had been identifying as female and reportedly frequently changed how she identified, would stand outside the boys’ shower stalls, which had fabric curtains rather than doors, and make sure the boys weren’t using too much hot water.
B.R. and many of the other boys discussed how scared and embarrassed they were to shower in front of a female student and decided not to shower for the entirety of the camp.
Students weren’t allowed to call their parents from the camp, so B.R.’s parents didn’t know until after he came home what had happened.
Robert and Jade Pearlman also joined the suit to keep their children from having to share overnight accommodations with a student of the opposite sex. They note that their daughter underwent months of sexual harassment from a boy and that the district did nothing to stop it.
The suit says that denying parents the right to know about and opt out of the policy violates the right to bodily privacy and free exercise of religion.
They seek an injunction that requires the district to notify parents of the district’s policy and requires the district to honor parents’ requests that their child not to be forced into overnight or private situations with students of the opposite sex.
{Published December 11, 2023} Three 5th-grade girls from a Colorado elementary school were forced to share a room with a boy on a trip to Washington D.C., even being required to share a bed, without the girls’ or their parents’ knowledge or consent.
That’s what a letter from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) claims. ADF explained that Joe and Serena Wailes’s daughter, referred to as D.W. in the letter, went on a school trip over the summer. The 5th graders were traveling from Colorado to visit Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. When the parents agreed to send their daughter across the country and room with other children it was with the explicit and repeated instruction from the district that boys and girls would stay on separate floors.
D.W. had been assigned a room with two girls from her school and another student, referred to as K.E.M., introduced to them as a “girl” from a different school, who D.W. was to share a bed with. D.W. had intentionally been kind to K.E.M. so the student wouldn’t feel left out. On the first night of the trip, K.E.M. told D.W. that he was actually a biological boy who identified as a girl. D.W. was upset and snuck away to the bathroom to call her mom, who was also on the trip. After meeting her mom in the lobby, the two talked to a school chaperone, who called the principal. When the principal called K.E.M.’s parents, they said K.E.M. was to be in “stealth mode” and no students were to know that he was a boy.
The district officials asked if D.W. could move to another bed rather than move to another room, which she agreed to try for one night. However, they told D.W. to lie to the other girls about why she was moving and not tell the other girl that she would be sleeping in the bed with a boy. They told the girls that D.W. needed to be closer to the air conditioner. One girl asked K.E.M., “Do you still want to sleep in the bed with D.W.?” D.W. was scared to say why she didn’t want to sleep with K.E.M., so she again found her mom, who asked for her daughter to be moved to another room. The school chaperones moved K.E.M. and another girl but lied about why, not telling any of the girls why K.E.M. was being moved. A district employee told the girls they could not tell anyone that K.E.M. was a boy.
The reasoning for the continued deception goes back to JCPS’s school policies on transgender students which, at every point, prioritize the transgender student, “minimizing stigmatization.” School staff are required to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns and chosen name, allow them to use the bathroom or locker room of their choice, allow them to play on the sports team of their gender identity, and sleep in overnight accommodations according to their gender identity. The policy also requires staff to hide a student’s gender transition from their parents unless the student gives permission.
The policy on overnight trips states, “In the planning of sleeping arrangements during overnight activity and athletic trips, the needs of students who are transgender shall be assessed on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration, providing equal opportunity to participate in overnight activity and athletic trips, ensuring the student’s safety and comfort, and minimizing stigmatization of the student. In most cases, students who are transgender should be assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share the student’s gender identity consistently asserted at school.”
It continues, “Any alternative arrangement should be provided in a way that allows the student’s transgender status to be kept confidential. Under no circumstance shall a student who is transgender be required to share a room with students whose gender identity conflicts with their own.”
ADF wrote,
“We are concerned with the unequal application of these policies in practice. The policy is supposed to ‘maintain[] the privacy of all students,’ and allow for ‘[a]ny student who is transgender or not’ to be ‘provided with a reasonable accommodation,’ including a ‘private room.’ But in practice, JCPS does not provide this same opportunity to students like D.W., who do not wish to room with a student of the opposite sex, nor to parents like the Waileses, who would like to know whether JCPS intends to require their daughter to share a room with a boy. While K.E.M.’s parents had all the information and could make informed decisions about where and with whom K.E.M. would room, D.W.’s parents and the parents of the two other girls were intentionally kept in the dark.
Because of JCPS’s policy, eleven-year-old D.W. was placed in a position where her privacy and comfort were not respected or even considered. Her privacy was violated.”
The letter asks for more information on the district’s policy surrounding overnight trips and whether parents will be informed if their child will have to share a room with a child of the opposite sex. It also asks for the option to opt children out of rooming with children whose biological sex is different from theirs.
Joe Wailes said he was home in Colorado when he started receiving texts from his daughter as she locked herself in the bathroom. “It was a bit of a shock. It was a helpless feeling. Here I am… she was calling me and texting me from the bathroom because she didn’t want the other kids to overhear what she was saying. So it’s a pretty helpless feeling when your daughter is hiding in the bathroom, she’s trying to convey a message to you, and you’re 2,000 miles away and can’t do anything.”
He said that before this happened he had thought issues surrounding transgender students were overblown. “I’ve been hearing about all these issues just like everybody else around the country. And I thought it was being a bit sensationalized. I didn’t think it was happening that frequently. And it came to our doorstep. So we want to make sure that we share the story.”
The district provided a statement, saying, “Because the district was only recently informed, and the trip occurred outside of the school year and through a private travel organization, we are still determining facts. However, it appears that the student’s transgender status was not known when room assignments were made and our understanding is that as soon as their transgender identity was known, room assignments were adjusted.”
It is a recurring theme among districts that implement policies adhering to gender ideology, such as hiding gender transitions from parents, that they will always elevate the desires of transgender students over the needs of all of their other students.
No district epitomized this better than Loudoun County, Virginia, in which board members forced a policy of allowing students to use the bathroom and locker room according to their gender identity despite student and parental backlash. The policy led to the rape of one female student and a despicable coverup. That coverup included the threatened arrest of her father the day she was raped. Her father was arrested (and also prosecuted) a few weeks later at a board meeting discussing the supposed safety of such a policy in order to keep him from speaking. At that meeting, the superintendent lied and said there was no record of any assaults in their bathrooms. The same male student then went and sexually assaulted another girl at another school in the district.
Assuming the allegations are true, JCPS may not have known beforehand that K.E.M. was a boy, but once they did know, their priorities were clear: the comfort of K.E.M. above the privacy and safety of female students. Children know that sharing a room, a bed, or undressing in front of a person of the opposite sex is wrong. It is child abuse to put children in these forced arrangements, all to assuage the mistaken beliefs of transgender students.
Parents must interrogate their school districts on these matters. Does your child’s district allow students of the opposite sex to share a shower, a bathroom, or even a bed with a child of the opposite sex? Does your district hide such information? Does it have policies that keep secret the gender transitioning of a child from his or her own parents?
Maybe you’re like Joe and you think this type of thing doesn’t actually happen. Maybe you think all these parents’ rights groups are getting too worked up. If so, think about how you will feel when you get the call from miles away and your daughter is locked in the bathroom, crying and afraid because she has been assigned to sleep in the same bed as a boy. How will you feel when a physically imposing boy is playing volleyball against your little girl and she gets hurt? Or how will you feel when your son or daughter comes home from school crying because a person of the opposite sex exposed themselves and they now have to refrain from going to the bathroom all day at school because they are scared or uncomfortable?
This is actually happening in K-12 schools today, and children are being harmed, physically and emotionally, as a result.
Parents, you cannot turn a blind eye to the dangerous deception and policies that school boards are implementing because you’re afraid of being labeled as transphobic or because you feel sympathy for gender-confused children.
Your children matter too, and if you won’t fight for their safety and well-being, who will? We know from the experience of D.W. and her parents that it won’t be school officials or school chaperones.
As seen in this article, many K-12 schools now embrace the secular woke agenda and are hostile to Christian beliefs and parental rights. Fortunately, parents don’t have to settle for this. Liberty University Online Academy is a K-12 program designed to educate your children in the ways of the Lord while preparing them to stand firm in their faith when they graduate. Our flexible online curriculum ensures that your student is trained at your convenience and keeps YOU the ultimate educator of your children.
